★★★★★
With a lengthy list of chart-topping hits to his credit, Charley Pride certainly doesn't need to release a new record yet that's exactly what he's doing here with Choices, his first all-new country recording in eight years (2003's Comfort In Her Wings)...
- roughstock.com
2011-03-14
★★★★★
Voicewise, as brilliant as Vernon Dalhart, Ray Price, George Jones. Contentwise, as wan as Red Foley, Ronnie Milsap, Eddie Rabbitt. Only for Pride, wan was perverse. A deeply ambitious sharecropper's son who moved up to Montana to pursue his first love, baseball, and settled for a job smelting zinc, Pride didn't stand out because he could dip from tenor to bass in well-enunciated middle-American smeared with drawl and flanged with vibrato. He stood out because he wasn't white...
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-17
★★★★★
It's no longer so easy to hit consistently in Nashville with such MOR (MOR country, I mean) material, but Pride does it, specializing in happy-marriage songs (which I often find likable) and touching such themes as Jesus, elusive dreams, childhood home, and country-singer-on-the-road (with sex). An achievement, even though he's got a gimmick as well as a voice--which seems to be softening slightly, losing its resonant edge...
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
Says Paul Hemphill: "There might be something to the suspicion that he is Nashville's house nigger . . . if he didn't sing `Kawliga' better than Hank Williams did." Wrong. First you sing real good, and then maybe they let you be a house nigger. Pride's amazing baritone--it hints at twang and melisma simultaneously, and to call it warm is to slight the brightness of its heat--loses focus as he settles exclusively into "heart songs...
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
Years before Freddy Fender scored a number one hit (1975) with "Before the Next Teardrop Falls," and Charley Pride recorded an admirable version of the song for Make Mine Country. Other outstanding tracks include "I Guess Things Happen That Way," and "Lie to Me."
- music.aol.com
2008-08-28
★★★★★
Charley Pride had long since reached his commercial peak when Classics With Pride came out in 1996, but the very enjoyable release demonstrated that at 56, he could still sing with plenty of warmth and charisma. The CD may not be in a class with his best work of the 1960s and '70s, but even so, it was among the most noteworthy country offerings of 1996...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-28
★★★★★
In 1970, Charley Pride was well-enough established that RCA no longer had to put "country" in the title of his albums to reassure buyers that, yes, this black man you see on the cover is in fact singing country music. And sing country music he does on Just Plain Charley, from his second number one hit, "(I'm So) Afraid of Losing You Again," to his usual assortment of heartbroken ballads...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-28
★★★★★
From Me to You, Charley Pride's twelfth album, contains the number one hits "I Can't Believe That You've Stopped Loving Me" and "Wonder Could I Live There Anymore." The latter invokes rustic imagery while adopting an implicitly urban pose, but most of From Me to You is willfully anachronistic. Everything on the album sounds like it could have come from the '60s, particularly "Sweet Promises," which could have been made ten years earlier...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-28
★★★★★
Charley Pride's 1969 album In Person is that rare live album that rates right alongside the artist's studio long-players. Recorded at Panther Hall in Fort Worth, TX, it features impeccable sound and captures Pride at his most genial -- he shows an amazing sense of humor about his unusual status in the country music pecking order -- as well as in excellent voice, as he offers up concert renditions of his own hits ("Just Between You and Me," etc...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-28
Loading...
