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“My intention was I was going to go to the major leagues and break all the records that had ever been set by the time I was 36. Every kid has some kind of dream to do something, and when I saw Jackie Robinson go to the big leagues I said, ‘Oh, lookie here. Here is my way out of these cotton fields.’”

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Pride is sitting in the eighth-floor lounge of a fancy Toronto hotel. The lake is at his feet. The Rogers Centre, home to the Blue Jays, is right around the corner. He is 74, and his shoulders droop, and he has a bad ankle and a bum elbow and Canadian concert tour to get ready for. Right now, though, what he wants to do is remember, back when his bones didn’t ache and his elbow wasn’t a reminder of the dream that could have been.

Pride slugged his way out of Sledge in 1952, catching on with the Memphis Red Sox of the Negro American League. He pitched, played outfield, smashed home runs and drew the interest of the St. Louis Cardinals. “I sound like I’m bragging, but I was good,” he says. “I could throw the hummer the hook and the chain. I could hit. Boy, could I ever hit.”

But the night the Cardinals’ chief scout came to watch him in Saxon, Mo., he heard a sharp “crack” in his elbow.

“I thought why is this happening?” Pride says. “I would have been picked up. I ate and slept baseball. Baseball was my plan.”

It didn’t end on the mound in Saxon, though it was only a matter of time before it did. Pride bounced around the minor leagues for a decade, at one point being traded for a “bus.” It was on the buses, in between the nowhere towns, where he would pluck away at his guitar singing the songs he grew with up. Country songs.