Mississippi Cotton Picker: Charlie Pride

Charlie Pride

One of 11 siblings born into a poor, Mississippi-based sharecropping family, Charley Pride was raised on a cotton farm, where he was forced to work for most of his childhood. At an early age he developed a passion for country music, purchasing his first guitar at the age of 14 and teaching himself to play by listening to radio broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry. After turning seventeen he enrolled in a baseball training camp, eventually joining the American Negro League and playing for teams in Detroit, Memphis and Birmingham.

Two years in the army interrupted his baseball ambitions, but after his discharge in 1958 he resumed his involvement with semi-professional leagues, supporting himself during the day through various manual labor jobs. His hopes of moving into the major leauges were ultimately blocked by the racist attitudes pervasive at the time, and by 1962, after being denied a tryout for the New York Mets, he left the sport behind in favor of his music.

Charley Frank Pride was born in Sledge, Mississippi, on March 18, 1938. (population 489, from the 2010 US census)

Throughout his involvement in baseball, Pride had continued to develop his musical skills, performing on the bus between games for his teammates and occasionally joining different bands onstage. At the urging of country performers Red Sovine and Red Foley, he traveled to Nashville in 1963 and, despite initial disinterest from the locals, secured a management contract with Jack Johnson.

"I'm not a black man singing white man music, I am an American singing American music. I worked out those problem years ago, and everybody else will have to work their way out of it too."

A year later a demo was cut with producer Jack Clement, and the two songs -- The Snakes Crawl At Night and Atlantic Coastal Line -- attracted the attention of RCA Nashville chief Chet Atkins, who quickly signed the singer to a recording contract. Snakes was chosen as the first single in 1966, making a strong showing in the charts, as did its two follow-up releases later in the year, Before I Met You and Just Between You And Me. Due to concern about a backlash against a black country singer, Pride's skin color was kept concealed at the beginning of his career -- and live performances did result in some awkward moments when audiences saw him for the first time. In time the subject of his race became irrelevant, and Pride established himself as one of the leading country acts of his time, topping the country charts 36 times between 1969 and 1984.

In 1986 Pride discontinued his long association with RCA, which was now directing most of its resources towards young, up-and-coming performers. A deal was signed with the Opryland label 16th Avenue, with whom he released several reasonably successful records before the label ceased to exist. An arrangement was subsequently made with Honest Entertainment in the 1990s, but by this time Pride's recording career was largely over. Pride continued to be active as a performer, however, as well as pursuing numerous business interests, amongst which are the Charley Pride Theater in Missouri, majority holdings in the First Texas Bank, his publishing company The Pride Group, and a variety of real estate and broadcasting properties. An autobiography was published in 1994 (source: http://www.nndb.com/people/024/000023952/)

Charlie Pride: Cotton Fields


Charlie Pride: Mississippi cotton pickin' Delta town w/Lyrics

Cotton Picker B.B. King from Indianola, Mississippi.

From the USA Today: INDIANOLA, Miss. — B.B. King's fingers were lightning fast, too smooth to be described as machinelike.

His peers, even the most accomplished ones, would watch in amazement. How does he do that? He had no explanation. His fingers, he told them, were simply an extension of his soul.

King, a teenager then, knew he was good. He could pick more than 400 pounds of cotton a day. His personal best was 480.

"I had a cousin, Birkett Davis. Me and him could pick a bale of cotton a day. That was 900 pounds back then," King says. "And, man, we were proud of that. I still am."

King's fingers eventually moved from the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta to the neck of a Gibson electric guitar, affectionately nicknamed Lucille. He has played his signature blues in 90 countries. In 1987, he earned a lifetime achievement Grammy and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2006, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Just shy of 83 (his birthday is Tuesday), he's still making music. He plays about 100 shows a year and released a new album of blues standards, One Kind Favor, in August.

Listen to what the blues master has to say about the $15-million museum bearing his name that's slated to open Saturday in the small Mississippi Delta town where he sweated for a few cents a day picking cotton nearly eight decades ago.(LA Times)

Little is missing from B.B. King's wish list these days.

"Well, maybe a beautiful woman to hold in my arms," he says with a smile. "I love women."

Twice divorced and the father of 15 children, he has battled diabetes in recent years, but his health appears good. King looks slimmer than he has in years, though he has trouble maneuvering stairs or standing for long periods of time.

"Honestly, I feel great," he says, sipping a Diet Coke shortly after the unveiling ceremonies for the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center, which opened Saturday here in his hometown of Indianola after five years in the planning.

"I sure don't feel 82 — or 83. Whatever I am."

"When you're running track, they pass you -- I don't know what you call it . . . -- the baton. I just picked up the baton and kept running with it. But guys like Robert Johnson, Jimmy Rogers, Memphis Slim, Roosevelt Sykes, and I could name you many, many more -- they are the ones that were the base," King said last week during a stop in L.A. "They could have picked any one of them to name the museum after." (LA Times)

He's still hungry for knowledge. "My brain is like a sponge. I'm interested in anything out there. I want to learn. Because to be honest, I always feel sort of second-best when I am around people who went to school, who got an education."

Sitting on the stage of a small auditorium where visitors can watch a short documentary about his life before touring the museum, King is in a reflective mood.

He's thinking of his mother, Nora Ella King, who died when he was 9.

"I would pay whatever it would take for a picture of her," says King, a white handkerchief in his left hand alternately dabbing away sweat and tears. "I don't even have a good picture of her in my mind.

Elvis Presley and BB King

"A lot of people back then thought if you let somebody take a picture of you, you were giving them your soul," King explains. "Plus, taking pictures was complicated and expensive. We were country folks who didn't have a lot of money."

And away he went, on a precious ramble down memory lane, about growing up as a hand on a plantation where they ate whole pigs, ears and all. Where they drank crystal-clear water from an artesian well. Where they had no electricity and nothing but work awaiting them at sunrise. Where worries seemed few.

He earned 75 cents a day chopping cotton, 35 cents per hundred pounds picking it.

Map: Indianola, Mississippi

"But don't get me wrong, that was a lot of money in those days," King says. "I loved my work and I loved my life."

Saturday was always his favorite day. He was off work by noon and headed to town as quickly as he could put on a fresh shirt.

King became interested in the guitar at age 6 while watching the Rev. Archie Fair pick and sing at the Sanctified Church of God in Christ in Indianola. King bought his first when he was 12, a red Stella acoustic. It cost $15, about his monthly salary.

"I worked for the Catledge family, and Mr. Catledge agreed to buy it for me, and he would take out half of it one month, and then half the next," King says.

He even wanted to be a preacher.

"But when I would go into Indianola and play there on the corner of Church and Second Street every Saturday, I got different reactions," King recalls. "When I played gospel, people would pat me on the shoulder and tell me I was going to be good one day. But when somebody asked me to play a blues song, they would also give me a tip.

"Sometimes I made more money on Saturday than I made all week driving a tractor."

"I don't live in my home state now, but I bought some land down there and I was going to build me a house on it," he said softly. "After my demise I wanted this to be open as a museum . . . But they said, 'Why wait till you die? We do it now, you could see it!' I like that idea." (LA Times)

He moved to Memphis in 1946 to pursue a music career. The blues were taking hold of him.

At some point in the past 62 years, that turned around. King got hold of the blues and redefined the genre.

In 2003, Rolling Stone named King the third-best guitar player in history, behind only Jimi Hendrix and Duane Allman.

"Like a fool I let 'em come to my house and I said, 'Anything you want, you get it.' And they took damn near everything except the house -- and me," he said, still chuckling. "But I'm glad to do it, because I love to share everything I've had, trying to learn to play blues and trying to do what I've done." (LA Times)

"No question, B.B. King is the most influential blues player of all time," says blues historian Scott Barretta, host of Mississippi Public Broadcasting's Highway 61 radio show. "The way he bent the strings, his phrasing, his technique" changed the blues.

"B.B. grew up around traditional Delta blues, but he wasn't totally defined by it. He also loved big bands like Count Basie and the Kansas City swing sound. He took all that and created his unique sound. And just about anybody who plays blues or rock has been influenced by it." (source: USA Today)

PBS American Roots Episode 3: Chapter 2: B.B. King

Weighing Cotton

When master was first married he lived with old Mrs. Singleton, his wife's mother, and took care of her plantation. In rainy weather the slave women have some cotton weighed out for them to spin, and it is weighed when they return it, to see if they do not keep any part back. One day Mrs. Singleton said to her son William, "What's the reason Lucy's cotton does not hold out, as much as Hannah's and Affa's? I think she steals it and stuffs it into the cracks of her house, or knits it." He said he would go and see. He went and found her in the potato patch, and told her to bring out her broaches for him to see. He weighed them and found they fell short. Then he told her to cross her hands, but she was frightened, and instead of doing it, began to beg him not to whip her. He had a horse whip in his hand at the time, and struck her in the face with the butt-end of it, and knocked her eye out. We always have to cross our hand the first thing, when they call us out to whip us, or they beat us over the head and almost kill us. Lucy screamed that her eye was out, but he did not seem to notice it at all. He kept a beating because she held her hand to her eye, instead of doing as he wanted.--At last when he found her eye was out, he sent her to the house to have something done for it. His mother told her it was her own fault that her eye was out. It would teach her to cross her hands another time.

(source: http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/runaway/runaway.html)

An ordinary day's work is two hundred pounds. A slave who is accustomed to picking, is punished, if he or she brings in a less quantity than that. There is a great difference among them as regards this kind of labor. Some of them seem to have a natural knack, or quickness, which enables them to pick with great celerity, and with both hands, while others, with whatever practice or industry, are utterly unable to come up to the ordinary standard. Such hands are taken from the cotton field and employed in other business. Patsey, of whom I shall have more to say, was known as the most remarkable cotton picker on Bayou Boeuf. She picked with both hands and with such surprising rapidity, that five hundred pounds a day was not unusual for her.

Each one is tasked, therefore, according to his picking abilities, none, however, to come short of two hundred weight. I, being unskillful always in that business, would have satisfied my master by bringing in the latter quantity, while on the other hand, Patsey would surely have been beaten if she failed to produce twice as much.

(http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/northup/northup.html)

The hands are required to be in the cotton field as soon as it is light in the morning, and, with the exception of ten or fifteen minutes, which is given them at noon to swallow their allowance of cold bacon, they are not permitted to be a moment idle until it is too dark to see, and when the moon is full, they often times labor till the middle of the night. They do not dare to stop even at dinner time, nor return to the quarters, however late it be, until the order to halt is given by the driver.

The day's work over in the field, the baskets are "toted," or in other words, carried to the gin-house, where the cotton is weighed. No matter how fatigued and weary he may be—no matter how much he longs for sleep and rest—a slave never approaches the gin-house with his basket of cotton but with fear. If it falls short in weight—if he has not performed the full task appointed him, he knows that he must suffer. And if he has exceeded it by ten or twenty pounds, in all probability his master will measure the next day's task accordingly. So, whether he has too little or too much, his approach to the gin-house is always with fear and trembling. Most frequently they have too little, and therefore it is they are not anxious to leave the field. After weighing, follow the whippings; and then the baskets are carried to the cotton house, and their contents stored away like hay, all hands being sent in to tramp it down. If the cotton is not dry, instead of taking it to the gin-house at once, it is laid upon platforms, two feet high, and some three times as wide, covered with boards or plank, with narrow walks running between them.

From the Turnage narrative:

Well the overseer began to weigh the cotton, and when he got around to them that didn't have cotton enough he told them to stand back until he got through weighing cotton and he would see what was the reason they could not pick more cotton. So when he got around to me he told me to stand back with the rest of them and he would see why I couldn't pick more cotton. Well when he got through weighing cotton, he took his cowhide and made one of the women lay down, and pulled her clothes over her head and made the other woman hold her and her clothes over her head. He give that woman about two hundred lashes and I thought that was enough except he was going to kill her. I could see the skin fly near about every lick he struck her. Then he made the woman that held the one he had whiped lay down and made the one he had whipped hold her clothes over her head. Then I thought if that was the kind of whipings he gave them I would not stay and take mine. So I saw my chance while he was whiping to make my escape, so I left. . . . I could hear him calling me, but I would not come back. So I was then in the woods with the wild animals and only about fifteen years of age. I suffered very much for some thing to eat.

An hour before day light the horn is blown. Then the slaves arouse, prepare their breakfast, fill a gourd with water, in another deposit their dinner of cold bacon and corn cake, and hurry to the field again. It is an offence invariably followed by a flogging, to be found at the quarters after daybreak. Then the fears and labors of another day begin; and until its close there is no such thing as rest. He fears he will be caught lagging through the day; he fears to approach the gin-house with his basket-load of cotton at night; he fears, when he lies down, that he will oversleep himself in the morning. Such is a true, faithful, unexaggerated picture and description of the slave's daily life, during the time of cotton-picking, on the shores of Bayou Boeuf.

The Cotton scale was a simple device that were hung from a tree limb. The sack was tied to the bottom of the scale and a "P", or weight, usually did the weighing and kept the records for each picker. The weight of the sack was deducted and the cotton was emptied into a wagon or truck with high side boards. (source: penhook.org)

It was rarely that a day passed by without one or more whippings. This occurred at the time the cotton was weighed. The delinquent, whose weight had fallen short, was taken out, stripped, made to lie upon the ground, face downwards, when he received a punishment proportioned to his offence. It is the literal, unvarnished truth, that the crack of the lash, and the shrieking of the slaves, can be heard from dark till bed time, on Epps' plantation, any day almost during the entire period of the cotton-picking season.

The number of lashes is graduated according to the nature of the case. Twenty-five are deemed a mere brush, inflicted, for instance, when a dry leaf or piece of boll is found in the cotton, or when a branch is broken in the field; fifty is the ordinary penalty following all delinquencies of the next higher grade; one hundred is called severe: it is the punishment inflicted for the serious offence of standing idle in the field; from one hundred and fifty to two hundred is bestowed upon him who quarrels with his cabin-mates, and five hundred, well laid on, besides the mangling of the dogs, perhaps, is certain to consign the poor, unpitied runaway to weeks of pain and agony.

Leadbelly - Pick A Bale Of Cotton