Pryor had a Midwestern earnestness about him, even in his Cosbyesque middlebrow period in the mid to late 60s. After escaping the Midwestern chitlin’ circuit for Greenwich Village, he told jokes that didn’t involve winos and aliens, carpenters and jack-legged preachers, fucking and shitting, doing cocaine on his grandmother’s dining room table and lighting himself on fire while freebasing, but he still described a lifestyle in his 1968 self-titled debut album that middle and working class negroes recognized, and he did it in a voice that, while still in formation, was true and irrepressible.

-Brandon Harris, Pryor Restraint