.His final performance was on Nov. 11, when he received the Country Music Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award at Nashville’s Music City Center.
He brought down the house with his hit “Kiss An Angel Good Mornin’.” One of 11 children born to a sharecropper in Sledge, Mississippi, Pride served in the Army, worked at a Missouri smelting plant, and tried several times to break into big-league baseball — including pitching for the Yankees’ Birmingham farm club and a tryout with the Mets — before moving to Nashville in 1963.
He recorded demo tapes soon afterward, but it was years before Chet Atkins signed him to a contract with RCA.Pride won the CMA’s Entertainer of the Year award in 1971 and its top male vocalist prize in 1971 and 1972.