Charlie Daniels died yesterday at the age of 83. I have very mixed feelings.
As a kid in the late 1970s, I purchased two different Charlie Daniels Band 45s. First was the decade’s seminal novelty song, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia. Not long after getting it, I’d memorized the lyrical tale of Johnny’s epic fiddle battle Satan himself. It was the first Southern Rock music I ever bought. A year later I picked up “In America,” particularly drawn its characterization of Pittsburgh Steelers fans people you just don’t mess with.
In the early 80s I discovered Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers Band, music I still adore. Looking back from that, I then dug deeper into CDB, as Daniels’ fans often called his outfit, and got A Decade of Hits. It remains and outstanding collection of the band’s 1970s singles. I eventually also bought Saddle Tramp (1976), the only full length original Charlie Daniels album I ever owned. It’s also very good.
The one time I saw the Charlie Daniels Band in concert was in 1993. They were opening for a reconstituted, but still respectably originalish, version of Skynyrd. I’d repeatedly heard from others that Daniels always had a roster of crack musicians in his band, and they did not disappoint. It was a great show.
But there was also an odd moment during their set, an impromptu display of sadness and anger.
Toy Caldwell, lead guitarist, singer, and songwriter at the heart of another Southern Rock group, the Marshall Tucker Band, had just died. This was before the internet, and no one knew. We found out when, between numbers, Daniels somberly informed the crowd, adding that Caldwell was one of his dearest friends and a helluva musician.
The New York City crowd cheered a bit. But this is hardly the South, and even a room full of local Skynyrd fans didn’t have that many Marshall Tucker fans mixed in; dollars to doughnuts the majority of them didn’t even know there was no one in the band actually named Marshall Tucker; they’d named themselves after a blind piano tuner who’d previously rented the old warehouse they practiced in and had inscribed his name on the door key.
The crowd’s halfhearted response to Daniels’ choked up announcement of Caldwell’s death was clearly not to his liking. He got angry and excoriated them for not sufficiently recognizing Caldwell’s brilliance. I don’t remember his exact words, but they had an air of You fuckin’ Northern city slickers just don’t get it and fuck you.
At the time I somewhat sympathized with Daniels. He was clearly broken up about the death of a friend, and wasn’t getting the shared sense of grief from the crowd he wanted.
But in retrospect, it was a turning point. Not long after that, Daniels became an outspoken hard-right winger. It was a stark development.
During the 1970s, Daniels’ lyrics had gone from anti-establishment (“Uneasy Rider” and “Long Haired Country Boy“) to Reaganistic nationalistm (“In America” “Still in Saigon“). And that trajectory continued.
By the time I saw him in 1993, Daniels was singing different concert lyrics to “Long Haired Country Boy.” Instead of:
I get drunk in the morning
I get stoned in the afternoon
it was now:
I get up in the morning
I get down in the afternoon
The crowed booed the obvious Just say No pandering. When he later sang/yelled about how we should hang all the drug dealers from the highest tree, people just kept passing joints.
a few years after that showr, the internet appeared. Daniels was an early blogger, spewing increasingly hardcore right wing vitriol. As his identity became more tied to Conservative values, the man who once played bass and guitar on three Bob Dylan rock albums came to be identified as a Country artist instead of a Rock n Roller.
In 2003, Daniels openly supported the looming war in Iraq. He was hardly alone, but his Open Letter to the Hollywood Bunch spoke to America’s cultural tensions as much as it did to its misguided foreign policy.
A year later he was embracing the vicious swift boat rumors/lies about Democratic presidential Nominee John Kerry’s military service in Vietnam. Given Daniels’ heartfelt defense of all Vietnam Vets in “Still In Saigon” some 25 years earlier, it was a harbinger of the shameless Republican hypocrisies we are now all too familiar with.
Soon Daniels was sounding like a loon, with dire warnings about the Illuminati, and gems like “In the future Darwinism will be looked upon as we now look upon the flat eart theory.” Maybe if he’d lived just a little bit longer he could’ve become an actual flat earther.
Last year Daniels compared a New York State abortion rights law to Auschwitz.
Recently I reconsidered “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” Our hero, good ole Johnny, played the down home fiddle music of white Southerners, while the Devil’s music, as played in the song, was blacker. It had a funky rhythm backing the Devil’s often discordant fiddle solo. I’m sure it was just a coincidence, but one I now found difficult to not notice.
So I’m not here to praise Daniels, I’m here to bury him. I wished him no ill, and eighty-three years is a good run. But it’s easier to enjoy a problematic human being’s art after that artist has stopped breathing. Of course Daniels was not nearly as awful as say Richard Wagner or Ezra Pound, but then again, he wasn’t as talented either.
So tonight maybe I’ll have a whiskey, listen to “Uneasy Rider” and remember that while there were never any simpler times in the past, there were moments that certainly weren’t these.