Music Tuesday: Charlie Daniels, RIP

I was sadden to hear that Charlie Daniels passed away the other day from a stroke.  He was 83.  I mostly knew Charlie Daniels from one song, but in reading about him at this Rolling Stone magazine obituary he had a very long career.  He wrote songs for Elvis, played with Bob Dylan, and was a sort of hippie southerner before he became a right wing southerner.  He played for the Jimmy Carter presidential campaign in the 1970s and for the NRA afterward.  Some highlights from the obituary.

Singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Charlie Daniels, who played bass and guitar on Bob Dylan’s 1969 Nashville Skyline LP and would go on to pioneer the burgeoning Southern rock movement with his namesake Charlie Daniels Band, died Monday at 83. His publicist confirmed Daniels’ death from a hemorrhagic stroke to Rolling Stone.

With his fiery fiddle at the forefront of much of his recorded output, the leader of the Charlie Daniels Band paved the way for the mainstream country-rock success of that group and others, including Alabama and Lynyrd Skynyrd, and crossed over into the pop charts with his best-known song, 1979’s Grammy-winning “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” A country chart-topper about a fiddle contest between a boy named Johnny and Satan, the song also spent a pair of weeks at Number Three on Billboard‘s Hot 100.

Charles Edward Daniels was born October 28th, 1936, in the seacoast town of Wilmington, North Carolina, the only child of teenagers William and LaRue Daniel — the “s” at the end of his name was the result of a mistake on his birth certificate. Two weeks after Daniels started elementary school, his family moved to Valdosta, Georgia, bouncing between there and Elizabethtown, North Carolina, until finally moving back to Wilmington. A feverish bout with childhood measles forced Daniels to wear eyeglasses for most of his life, making him a target of school bullies, but the youngster, who grew up on Saturday matinees of Western films and Saturday nights spent listening to the Grand Ole Opry, would soon find his niche performing and writing songs.

You should read the entire obituary.  I bet there’s a lot you didn’t know about him.  For instance, that he played quite a number of instruments: bass guitar, mandolin, violin.

Here is first hit, “Uneasy Rider,” a hippie tour de force. 

Perhaps my second favorite Charlie Daniels song is “Simple Man.”  I don’t endorse the vigilantism message of the song, but I do love that guitar riff and the passion against our contemporary evils.

And then there is the great, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”  This from the obituary is what Daniels says on how the song came about.

“I don’t know where the phrase ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’ came from or why it entered my mind that day in the rehearsal studio,” Daniels wrote in his 2017 memoir Never Look at the Empty Seats. “I don’t even know where the song idea came from… But when it started coming, it came in a gush. The band grabbed ahold, and when Taz [DiGregorio] came up with the signature keyboard lick behind the devil’s fiddle part, we knew we were on to something.”

Finally let’s end this retrospective with a rollicking patriotic song that is so relevant today and perhaps fits the campaign of one of the presidential candidates.  I’ll let you guess who.  ;)

Eternal rest, Lord, grant onto Charlie Daniels, and your eternal light shine upon him, a man who by appearances loved God, family, and country.