Redd Foxx was the same gruff old codger you saw on television.
A black man singing about a blond girl was potential trouble.
It isn't reasonable to expect that everyone in the world is a country music fan. Not yet, anyway.
Any entertainer who tells you that the adoration of fans is not a heady experience probably never had the experience.
Fans are what make a performer and I've always taken them seriously.
It used to be that if you had a pretty good record, you could stop by a station in Little Rock or Atlanta and let the DJ listen to it. No way something like that can happen now.
What qualifies me to tell people how to act or what to think? I'm Charley Pride, country singer. Period.
Once your name becomes well known, politicians come courting.
Until MTV, television had not been a huge influence on music. To compete with MTV, the country music moguls felt they had to appeal to the same young audience and do it the way MTV did.
What we don't need in country music is divisiveness, public criticism of each other, and some arbitrary judgement of what belongs and what doesn't.
The tastes of country music fans are not limited to the narrow range defined by consultants and programmers and record company moguls.
There is an intimacy about the Opry Theater that gives an entertainer a special charge.
Singing as a full-time job was not something I had given a lot of thought to and I had no clear notion of the money to be made in it.
Performing is an experience, for me, that is as humbling as it is energizing.
A fan will grab you and hug you and will not let go. When that happens, you wish it could be that way all over the world.
I learned to tune a guitar by ear. That method has served me pretty well.
There are worse things than being thought a Republican.
I grew up not liking my father very much. I never saw him cry. But he must have. Everybody cries.
I've tried to help a lot of young artists get started.
In 20 years I had sold more records for RCA than any artist except Elvis Presley.
