A rare fanzine devoted to the first African-American performer to reach the Top Ten on Billboard’s Country-Western charts. Charley Pride (1934-2020) began his performing career following a tour in the US Army, and a brief stint playing baseball in the Negro Leagues. After a long apprenticeship on the club circuit, he released his first commercial single in 1966. A year later his 1967 Top-Ten hit “Just Between You and Me” launched Pride’s career.
This fanzine was founded around the same time in Pride’s then home states of Montana and North Dakota, and is a testament to immediate grassroots appetite for a Black country star. Pride went on to record more than fifty top-ten hits between 1966 and 1987, well and truly earning his place in the Country Music Hall of Fame.
The Charley Pride Fan Club Journal, which also bears the cover title Pride of Country Music, is a ‘zine in the truest sense of the word, made by and for fans with an authentic enthusiasm and charm. Pride of Country Music is also the name of Charley Pride’s 1967 studio album, and as such, the cover leaf and title is perhaps a celebration of this new release rather than an alternate title for the journal.
The publication opens with a letter of thanks from Pride himself, in which he recounts a recent tour of Germany and England playing to US Servicemen’s Clubs. includes a lengthy update on show reviews, fan poetry, and is complete with the original pinback button, once fastened between the pages. His fanbase identify with an extended bee metaphor, and there are bee-themed illustrations throughout the publication. There is here, perhaps, a poetic foreshadowing of Beyoncé’s “Bey-Hive”, the ultra dedicated core of fans supporting another legendary recording artist who’s Cowboy Carter would top the Billboard Country Charts, and see her named the first Black musician to win a Grammy for best Country album.
As is often the way with fanzines, we get a sense of the fans themselves as well as the object of their fandom. In her President’s address Laura Lagge celebrates their recent win of “New Fan Club of the Year for 1966”, then goes on to describe a bone fusion surgery for polio. One east coast fan asking where to buy Pride’s last album suggests “they should make Country Music illegal in New York then maybe you would be able to find any record you like”. Peg Steelman, the Tennessee rep, who includes a photograph of her posing with Pride identifies herself as a fellow polio survivor and “Almost 1/8 Cherokee and Choctaw – my great great great grandmother was a Cherokee Princess. The Cherokee is from my mother’s side of the family and there’s Choctaw on both sides, altho Dad won’t admit to his.” Finally Linda McCormick, who goes by “Kansas Kountry Kid” describes her various collections including over 3000 singles, 800 LP’s, 200 EP’s, plus several 78’s, 80’s and cylinders.
OCLC locates no holdings of any issue of this rare publication, nor have we been able to trace any in commerce, or any copies of the pin. The membership is listed at around 300, suggesting perhaps the maximum size of the journal’s print run.
