LINDALE — Tyler Pride is a big man. He’s built like a linebacker with a handshake to match. Which is not unusual, since he played all the major sports in high school. And he can sing.

To an uncanny degree, that follows the script of his father’s life. His dad was so gifted as an athlete, he played professional baseball before pursuing a singing career that produced four Grammy awards.

But the world at large knows little about Tyler Pride and his connection to his biological father — the country music and civil rights icon Charley Pride, whose legacy is memorialized in The Smithsonian, where in 2015 he became part of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Pride died of COVID-19 at age 86 in December, leaving a will that acknowledges three children, Carlton, Dion and Angela, whose mother is Rozene Pride, the singer’s widow, to whom he was married for 64 years.

On May 20, Tyler Pride, 41, a police officer in Tyler, filed suit in Dallas County Probate Court, contesting the will of his biological father. Rozene Pride is named as executor in her husband’s will.

Making no effort to challenge Tyler’s paternity, Rozene Pride has responded to the suit, sending a statement to The Dallas Morning News. It reads in part:

“It is heartbreaking to see Tyler try to tarnish Charley’s reputation and break Charley’s estate plan in the hope of getting more money for himself. Tyler’s relationship with Charley in the last years was all about money, since he only called Charley when he wanted money or something else he wanted Charley to get him. He viewed Charley as his ‘cash cow’ and little more.”

But in many ways, Tyler Pride’s lawsuit is broader. It is, sadly, a story about money and acrimony, and yet, it’s also a story about family — and what family means for a child who’s the product of an extramarital, interracial affair, whose siblings are “half-siblings,” whose father was never able to share his home.

It’s even more complicated by Charley Pride being a national treasure, who was profiled in Ken Burns’ landmark documentary Country Music. Pride was a part-owner of the Texas Rangers and a close friend to several American presidents, including George W. Bush, who said when the singer died that he and former first lady Laura Bush “send our condolences to Charley and Rozene’s sons and daughter, their extended family, and his countless fans. May God bless Charley Pride.”

Biographical sources mention only the children shared by the Country Music Hall of Fame inductee and his widow. But in 1992, when Tyler was 13, a Texas court used the results of a DNA test to decree that Charley Pride was indeed the biological father of Tyler Tines. The court, according to records obtained by The News, ordered that the boy’s surname be changed to Pride. Today, his legal name is Tyler Tines Pride.

In addition, Smith County District Court ordered that Charley Pride pay back child support of $92,000 and begin making additional support payments to Joyce Ann Tines, Tyler Pride’s mother, of $4,000 a month — until Tyler turned 18. We made efforts to reach Tyler’s mother, who did not respond to voicemails or text messages.

Dad ‘from Day One’

In his lawsuit and in an interview with The News at the kitchen table in his home in Lindale, Tyler Pride cites a long history of financial and emotional support that continued until his father’s death in Dallas.

Rozene Pride offers more detail about her husband’s financial support of Tyler, saying in her statement: “Although Charley had a long history of excluding Tyler from his estate plan, last year Charley decided to leave Tyler a $50,000 bequest. Less than a year before Charley died, Charley and I loaned Tyler $400,000 to buy a new house. He now has two houses that Charley and I helped him buy.”

Lawsuits, of course, are all about disagreements, and Tyler Pride disagrees sharply, saying his father bought two houses for him and his wife, Charity, and purchased both outright. Neither, he says, involved a loan.

Despite the acrimony, Tyler Pride speaks fondly of his famous dad, who some have called the Jackie Robinson of country music, calling him a good man and a good father, whose death he describes as crushing.

“I’ve always known he was Dad — from Day One,” says Pride, noting that his mother told him as soon as he was old enough to process the information. “I remember growing up playing his records, and listening to his music and knowing that he was Dad. So, it was never a mystery as to who he was or where I came from.”

During his first 15 months, baby Tyler and his mom — who never married and has no other children, her son says — lived in Dallas, where Tyler was born and where, he notes, the elder Pride made frequent visits.

Although Tyler is the product of an extramarital affair, it was, he contends, different from most.

“I was planned,” he says.

Tyler, his wife, Charity, 38, and the couple’s three children live in a 2-year-old, 2,612-square-foot Lindale home assessed by the Smith County Appraisal District as having a value of $315,464. The owner of the house is listed on tax records as, simply, “Tyler Pride.”

For years, the younger Pride worked as a cop on the beat, but now he mans a desk at the police station, where he also serves as president of the Tyler Patrolman’s Police Association. His career in law enforcement began in Cleveland, Tenn., in 2006. He attended Lee University in Cleveland after graduating in 1998 from Bullard High School, near Tyler, where he excelled as a varsity athlete. During his college days, he turned his attention to music, singing in the campus choir and touring the world, including a memorable concert in Israel.

“Tyler has won numerous voice competitions,” his wife says. “Like his dad, he has a beautiful voice.”

When his mother met Charley Pride, she was working as a senior flight attendant for Dallas-based Braniff Airways, which folded in 1982, three years after Tyler was born. His parents met, Tyler says, on a Braniff flight. Yes, the affair lingered for a decade, but, Tyler says, it was not his mother’s idea to give birth to Charley Pride’s child.

“It was Charley’s,” he says, a story that he says both parents shared more than once.

Initially, he says, his mother protested. But, his son contends, Charley insisted.

Tyler’s court filing in Dallas County Probate Court notes that “Charley told Tyler he and his mother planned Tyler’s birth, and he intended on treating him like his other three children.” He was born on July 19, 1979.

Why would Charley Pride want to father a child out of wedlock?

“He loved her. They loved each other,” Tyler says. “It was not a casual affair.”

Before he was 2, Tyler and his mother moved to Hideaway Lake near Lindale, a move he contends was necessary after Charley’s wife, Rozene, found out about Joyce and Tyler. “He came around to see us until his wife found out,” forcing the move from Dallas to East Texas. “At that point, she didn’t let him come around anymore.”

The emotional impact has extended to Charley Pride’s other children. Reached at her home in Farmers Branch, the singer’s 56-year-old daughter, Angela Rozene Pride, said tersely, “Charley Pride has three children — two sons and a daughter. Carlton, Dion and Angela.”

We made a formal request through the Pride family attorney, Will Hartnett, to interview the couple’s other children, but neither responded.

The children shared by Rozene and Charley are mentioned in their father’s will, though Tyler is not. Parents in Texas are, however, legally permitted to omit any children from being designated as beneficiaries should they choose to do so.

Carlton Pride, Dion Pride and Angela Pride are named in the Pride Living Trust, dated Aug. 6, 2020, four months before the singer’s death. In November, a month before he died, Pride flew to Nashville to accept the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Country Music Association. During the live, nationally televised broadcast on ABC, he sang one of his biggest hits, “Kiss An Angel Good Mornin’.” It was his last performance.

Rozene is named as executor of her husband’s will, which is customary when one spouse precedes the other in death. But there is also language in the document, obtained by The News, noting that Charley Pride and his wife agreed not to “amend or revoke” the other’s will.

Charley and Rozene Pride, according to Tyler Pride’s court filing, submitted by Dallas attorney Michael J. Collins, “were portrayed by the media as having a ‘blissful marital life of over six decades’ when, in fact, bitter disagreements over a Pride family secret were kept silenced for decades protecting Charley’s brand and legacy.”

By the time he reached 11, Tyler says, he and his mom were finding it hard to make ends meet. At that point, he says, his mother petitioned the elder Pride for formal support payments in 1990, which, until then, had not been a part of their arrangement. But the court did not issue its decree until August 1992.

After Braniff’s demise in 1982, his mother worked as a bookkeeper. “She did the best she could,” he says. “She worked hard. But there were so many things I didn’t get to do, never got to do, because Mom couldn’t afford it.”

When Joyce Tines asked Charley Pride for child support, Tyler says, the singer challenged Tyler’s paternity in court. Which raises a question: Why would he do so if he already knew he was the father?

“He was trying to keep peace at home,” Tyler says. “He used to tell me all the time, ‘Son, there’ll come a day when we’ll be one big happy family. But now, I need to do my best to keep peace at home.’ He was always torn between two families and would always say, ‘I want to treat all my kids — all four of you — the same.’”

‘Keep peace at home’

As Tyler advanced in his teenage years, he says, he and his father spoke “maybe three to four times a year.”

At times, he says, there was acrimony, which he calls “typical father-son stuff. I would ask if we could hang out together, and he would say, ‘Son, it’s complicated. I’m trying to keep peace at home and balance two families.’ But every time he mentioned his wife, he always called her my stepmom.”

Growing up in rural East Texas, Tyler says he felt caught between two worlds, with a white mother and a Black father. His skin is a light brown. The stubbles on top of his head are curly. When he was a teenager, he grew his hair out, “and,” he says with a wry laugh, “it was an Afro. A big Afro.”

He made no attempt, he says, to conceal his father’s identity. If anything, he was proud of it.

“It was tough, but I’m not ashamed. For some people, I wasn’t white enough. For others, I wasn’t Black enough. I was always told to be proud of who I was and who I came from.”

His being open about his dad didn’t make it easier. Kids at school called him “zebra” or “Oreo,” or worse yet, when a new brand of Oreos came out — white on the outside, black on the inside — they heckled him with “Uh-Oh! Oreo,” the cookie’s name. That one stuck.

He harbors no bitterness toward Charley Pride, he says, calling him a dad who did the best he could under the circumstances. Tyler and Charity Pride, who married in 2010, share three children, ages 13, 10 and 4.

The elder Pride went out of his way, his son says, to meet the three kids that the singer called “my grand-babies.” Among the dozens of photographs Tyler and Charity have in their collection are pictures of Charley holding Maddison, the 10-year-old, who was then an infant, at Charity’s birthday party. It took place at an Uncle Julio’s in Grapevine in 2011, when everyone at the party knew, Tyler says, that he was Charley Pride and that he was Tyler’s father.

At the party, Tyler says, “he could not have been more gracious.”

Tyler Pride says he’s contesting the will “to find out what I’m entitled to.” It isn’t the first time he’s acted as a plaintiff in court. In February, he filed suit against his mother, going to the extent of obtaining a restraining order to keep her from seeing his children.

“I don’t want to discuss it,” he says.

But in the court action, filed in Smith County on Feb. 1, Joyce Ann Tines is accused of “stalking Tyler Pride and his children for nearly a decade.” The suit also alleges “emotional and physical abuse.”

Rozene Pride responded to Tyler’s lawsuit against his mother, saying in her statement: “I do hope that Tyler can find peace in his life. It is hard to believe that during the last four months Tyler sued his mother, sued me, and publicly trashed his father’s reputation. Tyler sent me a draft of his 13-page lawsuit and threatened to file it if we would not give in to his demands. That shows how little he knew about his father, because Charley would never be bullied and neither will I.”

But litigation has also passed between other members of the Pride family. In 2011, a legal dispute ensued between Rozene and Dion Pride, one of the three children she shares with Charley. Dion sued his mother over money he felt he was owed from a trust fund that she managed.

It was, Tyler Pride’s attorney says, “a very contentious situation,” albeit one that resulted in a settlement whose terms have never been disclosed.

As for Tyler’s lawsuit, yes, it involves money, but some of it also involves what happened at the end of Charley Pride’s life. No one in Charley’s family, he says, “bothered to tell me” of his father’s illness or death, which he learned about from a friend. He inquired about attending his father’s funeral, he says, but was told it would not be a good idea.

He says in his lawsuit that he has spent his life as “a secret that Charley believed threatened his brand and reputation.” His lawsuit uses the word “secret” 13 times.

He wants the world to know, he says, that he “was a part of Charley Pride’s family. And I loved him. After all, he was my dad, too.”

Researcher Ana Niño contributed to this report.

Twitter: @mgranberry