In the mid-1980s, when Charley Pride was in between record contracts, he went into a Dallas studio with an all-star cast of area musicians to record a series of songs by Brook Benton. He intended to turn the project into a tribute album to the R&B mainstay and “Rainy Night in Georgia” singer.
“He loved Brook Benton’s writing and his songs,” Rozene Pride, Charley Pride’s widow, recalls. “He had fun. It was a joy to do this album.”
Ultimately, the project never saw the light of day, winding up on a reel in storage until 2017 — three years before Pride’s death at 86, following a career spanning more than six decades and 40 Number One hits. Last month, the collection, titled Endlessly: A Tribute to Brook Benton, finally received its worldwide release.
The 10-track album draws heavily upon the music Benton released early in his career. Most of the songs topped, or flirted with the top, of the R&B charts. “It’s Just a Matter of Time,” “Thank You Pretty Baby,” and “So Many Ways” were all Number One hits for Benton in 1959, while Pride’s title track, “Endlessly,” was a Top 5 hit.
“Pride loved his music, because he said you could always understand all the words he sang in his songs,” Rozene Pride tells Rolling Stone from her home in Dallas. “The music didn’t try to overwhelm his singing. He could understand the words.”
The record finds Pride pushing his own musical boundaries into 1980s pop and R&B stylings as he honors Benton. Fans should not expect “Kiss an Angel Good Morning,” aside from Pride’s distinctive vocals. Working with producer Bob Pickering, Pride often sings over a string section and a saxophone on Endlessly.
Greg Gosselin, whose Music City Records released the LP, says the Dallas recording location goes hand-in-hand with the range in the sound on this tribute.
“The Benton tribute probably would have turned out quite differently if it had been cranked out by the Nashville studio system that had produced Charley’s RCA recordings in the Seventies and Eighties,” Gosselin says. “Changing the locale and using completely different personnel contributed to a much different sound. With the exception of Chuck Rainey, the other players were all in-demand, journeyman-type musicians operating within the North Texas recording industry. And virtually all of them had played on a ton of station identification and advertising jingles.
“That impacted the recordings because,” Gosselin continues, “along with the orchestral strings, the ability of those musicians to convincingly emulate the classic early Sixties R&B and pop era sound has added a certain intangible timelessness to the project.”
Gosselin says that Pickering’s original masters were lost, and the mixes that made it onto the record began in 2022 after Gosselin sought Pickering’s input. Despite the nearly 40-year gap between recording and mixing, the only modern work done for Endlessly was transferring the songs from tape to a digital audio format. Otherwise, the record mirrors the sound from the studio.
“This album was cut without computers,” Rozene Pride says. “Nowadays, with computers, you can make almost anybody, and their music, sound good. But this was strictly done without all that.”
Rozene asserts that the time that passed between recording and releasing this project will serve as a reminder of her late husband’s versatility and willingness to push himself outside of his comfort zone, all in the name of sharing his influences with the world.
“It shows how much he loved country music,” she says, “and that he was good at it. That’s what he did, you know?”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose latest books, Never Say Never and Red Dirt Unplugged are available via Back Lounge Publishing.
