Endlessly: A Tribute to Brook Benton will be available on September 19th
The world lost renowned country music artist Charley Pride in December 2020, leaving behind an extraordinary legacy full to bursting with a mass of honors and awards, a 40-count trail of No. 1 hit songs, and tens of millions in record sales. His decades-long career in music is a success story no one saw coming until Pride walked away from his stint as a semi-pro baseball player in the Negro league in the late 50s and walked into a league all his own in the country music world. His smooth, warm baritone vocals immediately endeared him to country music fans worldwide and Pride remains one of the most recognized voices today.
In 2017, that familiar voice was rediscovered when a couple of forgotten reels were found buried deep in a storage room in Pride’s production office in Dallas, Texas. After his death, it was confirmed that the multi-track reels contained the long-lost Brook Benton tribute recordings Pride recorded in the 80s but never released. In 2021, the tapes were carefully transferred to multi-track digital audio files, and Endlessly: A Tribute to Brook Benton will be released on September 19th on Music City Records. This marks the 94th anniversary of Brook Benton’s birth. The album’s first single, “Thank You Pretty Baby,” will be released on Friday, August 29th, on all digital music platforms.
Brimming with vintage country, rhythm & blues, and pop music sounds, this retro-sonic homage to legendary singer/songwriter Brook Benton demonstrates that Pride’s versatility as an artist extended well beyond the confines of country music. Originally recorded in Pride’s adopted home of Dallas, Texas, during a brief mid-1980s interlude between his RCA Records and 16th Avenue Records recording contracts, this previously unreleased album displays Pride flexing newfound artistic freedom on productions that sound notably different than his 1970s/1980s country music output. Produced and engineered by Bob Pickering, chief engineer at Pride’s home studio CECCA Sound, Endlessly features a genuine string section, and an impressive array of world-class musicians who proudly called North Texas home during the mid-1980s, including legendary bassist Chuck Rainey (Steely Dan, Aretha Franklin, Quincy Jones), drummer/percussionist Gene Glover (Ricardo Arjona), jazz pianist Fred Crane (Al Belletto, Johnnie Mercer, Al Hirt, Doc Severinsen), guitarist Jerry Matheny (LeAnn Rimes) and Texas Western Swing Hall of Fame inductee Billy Briggs Jr. (Bob Wills) on sax. The rest of the session players backing Pride were all handpicked, seasoned North Texas studio professionals with breathtaking resumes.
The songs that Pride chose to record for this tribute album were mostly derived from Brook’s initial 1959 to 1961 flurry of hits. “It’s Just a Matter of Time,” “Endlessly,” “Thank You Pretty Baby,” “So Close,” “So Many Ways,” and “Kiddio” were all Top 5 R&B smashes that also crossed over to become significant Top 40 pop chart hits. More than just an outstanding homage to Brook Benton, this lavish, timeless-sounding album is a potent testament to both Pride’s versatility as a music artist and the exceptional abilities of the world-class North Texas studio talents that backed him. Perhaps in time, this long-lost treasure will earn the respect and acclaim necessary to elevate it into the upper echelon of Pride’s already extraordinary body of work.
An incredibly versatile singer, gifted songwriter and superb entertainer with little interest in being pigeonholed into a particular genre, Brook Benton exploded on the pop music scene in 1959 with “It’s Just a Matter of Time” and then notched an enviable string of 30 Top 40 R&B hits, including several major pop crossover hits and Top 10 pop duets with Dinah Washington. Following a mid-to-late 1960s drought of major hit singles while recording for the RCA Records and Reprise Records labels, Brook signed with Cotillion Records, a new subsidiary label of Atlantic Records, where his comeback during the early 1970s netted five additional Top 40 R&B hits, including the massive Top 5 pop crossover success of “Rainy Night in Georgia.”
