On the night of November 11, 2020, Charley Pride stood on the CMA Awards stage in Nashville and sang the song that had followed him for almost fifty years. He was 86. Nobody inside Music City Center knew they were watching his last public performance. Thirty-one days later, on December 12, he died in Dallas of complications from COVID-19.
The award that brought him back to Nashville
The Country Music Association announced on October 22 that Pride would receive its Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award, an honor reserved for an artist at the very top of the genre. The names before him were Willie Nelson, Kenny Rogers, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton and Kris Kristofferson.
It was not a normal year for the show. The 54th CMA Awards moved out of Bridgestone Arena into a smaller setup at Music City Center, with a limited audience, multiple stages that had to be cleaned between performances, and testing for everyone involved. Several acts dropped out on the day itself after positive tests in their camps. Reba McEntire and Darius Rucker hosted. Rucker was only the second Black artist to co-host the CMA Awards. The first was Charley Pride, alongside Glen Campbell, in 1975.
A song he had carried for half a century
“Kiss an Angel Good Mornin'” was written by Ben Peters, one of Nashville’s busiest songwriters at the time. The angel in the title came from home: Peters and his wife had a baby daughter named Angela. Producer Jack Clement brought the demo to Pride, who was eager to cut it, and he recorded it at RCA Studio B in the summer of 1971.
RCA released the single that October, right around the time Pride accepted his first CMA Entertainer of the Year trophy. It reached No. 1 on the Billboard country chart on December 4, 1971, and stayed there for five weeks. It also crossed over to No. 21 on the Hot 100 and into the adult contemporary top ten. It was his eighth country No. 1, and it became the song people asked for first.
It kept coming back to the CMA stage with him. He sang it at the 1975 show he co-hosted with Glen Campbell. He sang it again at the 50th anniversary show in 2016, with Brad Paisley playing lead guitar beside him in the opening medley. A Dallas reporter who spent time with Pride in his later years noticed that even the ringtone on his cellphone was “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’.”
The singer who once spent his last $100 to see him
The man who called Pride to the stage in 2020 was Jimmie Allen, a New Artist of the Year nominee that night. Allen had grown up with Pride’s records because of his father, who sat him down to listen and then made a point of showing him what Pride looked like.
Backstage that night, Allen told reporters that four years earlier, before he had a record deal, he had spent his last $100 to come see Pride perform at the 50th CMA Awards, the night Pride sang “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin'” with Paisley. By 2020 the two had recorded a song together, “Why Things Happen,” with Darius Rucker.
Allen opened with his own hit, “Best Shot,” stopped partway to talk about the man who made his career possible, and brought Pride out. They sang the old song side by side. In the audience, Eric Church and Luke Combs sang along. Then Allen handed him the trophy.
“You can do my talking from now on”
Pride’s acceptance speech was short on polish and long on thanks. He named people who had shaped his life and career, including Cowboy Jack Clement, the producer behind his first thirteen RCA albums. Near the end he thanked his fans, said he figured he was through talking, and simply thanked everybody once more.
In the virtual press room afterward, Pride stood grinning while Allen talked about what the night meant to him. When Allen finished, Pride turned to him.
You can do my talking from now on.
He told reporters he had enjoyed the night, most of all being in the same room with old friends like Mickey Gilley and Johnny Lee, who were there for a tribute marking forty years since Urban Cowboy. Darius Rucker later said the part of the evening that stayed with him was seeing Pride receive that honor while he was still alive to hold it.
Thirty-one days
Pride went home to Texas. According to his family, he was admitted to the hospital in late November with COVID-19 symptoms. He died on Saturday, December 12, 2020, at 86. His family said he would want his fans to take the virus seriously.
Within hours, some fans and fellow artists asked whether he had been infected at the in-person awards show. The CMA and Pride’s representatives issued a joint statement saying he had tested negative before traveling to Nashville, on arrival, on show day, and several more times after returning to Texas. His longtime manager added that Pride and his wife had stayed home almost entirely that year. Where he caught the virus has never been determined.
What is certain is how the last public chapter of his life went. The first Black superstar in country music, the man who had sung “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin'” on that awards show in 1975 and again in 2016, walked out one more time in 2020, sang it with a younger artist who had grown up on his records, and took home the honor the CMA saves for its very biggest names.