When Grunge ranked the greatest storytellers in country rock, it put Charlie Daniels on a list alongside Johnny Cash, Garth Brooks, Neil Young and Kenny Rogers. For the North Carolina native, the honor caps a life story as colorful as his songs.
Daniels’ path to music began in his teens. He bought his first guitar at age 15. He taught himself how to play by listening to early Elvis Presley music on the radio. Around 1953, he and some friends formed a bluegrass band called the Misty Mountain Boys, a tribute to Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs’ Foggy Mountain Boys.
After graduating from Goldston High School in 1955, at about 18, Daniels began singing and playing guitar in clubs in Jacksonville, North Carolina, often for little pay.
By the late 1950s, he and his band, the Jaguars, had moved on to the bar circuit around Washington, D.C., and Maryland. In his 2017 memoir, Never Look at the Empty Seats, he recalled playing six nights a week at venues like the Dixie Pig in Bladensburg. While on the road, the band recorded the song “Jaguar” with producer Bob Johnston, a connection that would change Daniels’ life.
His big break came from Bob Dylan. In 1969, Daniels played bass and guitar on Bob Dylan’s 1969 Nashville Skyline LP, and he went on to play on Dylan’s Self Portrait and New Morning albums. Daniels later recalled, “It was the first time I felt at home in Nashville. You experienced a lot of freedom from Dylan.”
After forming the Charlie Daniels Band, he broke through in 1973 with “Uneasy Rider,” a largely spoken-word story about a hippie outsmarting a bar full of rednecks.
His most famous story arrived in 1979. “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” pits a young fiddler named Johnny against the Devil in a musical showdown. Johnny wins, and so did Daniels. The song rose to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned him a Grammy. Daniels played all the fiddle parts himself, and according to Grunge, he deliberately made the Devil’s solo a jumbled, unmelodic mess.
Over his career, he sold more than 13 million albums, wrote giant hit songs and collected Grammy, Dove, CMA, BMI and ACM awards.
Charlie Daniels died of a hemorrhagic stroke in Hermitage, Tennessee, at the age of 83 on July 6, 2020.
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