More rock than country and with most of the Southern grit polished off, the slick “In America” was made with a larger audience in mind - it found it too, nearly cracking the Top 10 on the Hot 100 in 1980, just a few months before the Reagan presidency. J.F.ĭaniels preaches American perseverance and unity among the “cowboys, hippies, rebels, and yanks” in this patriotic-to-the-hilt anthem off Full Moon. But of course when Daniels stops singing to put his serious narrator hat on, you know some dark shit is going down - not a one of the siblings makes it back out of that swamp. “I’m familiar with them and spent quite a bit of time in them - hunting and logging and that sort of stuff - and especially at night, they take on a whole other look.” Mixing brawny-yet-intricate guitar riffs with funky stabs of clavinet, it follows in the sing-speak tradition of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” to spin a haunting story about a greedy old man and three murderous brothers who come to take his money. “I come from the coast of North Carolina, and we’re loaded down with swamps,” he told Rolling Stone in 2015. had already primed the pump with the acoustic Southern-rock sound and passive-aggressive belligerence that Daniels invented with “Long Haired Country Boy.” D.C.ĭaniels drew on the geography of his Southern upbringing to supply the vivid imagery for the chilling narrative “The Legend of Wooley Swamp,” the opening track of the CDB’s 1980 album Full Moon. He admits he’s lazy as a hound in the heat, but he “ain’t askin’ nobody for nothin’” - could you leave him the hell alone? This 1974 album cut became a minor country hit in 1980. Like any good “Okie From Muskogee,” he loves getting drunk, but he also has hippie hair and you better believe he smokes marijuana. “Long Haired Country Boy” finds Daniels believing Jesus walked on water but cursing the TV preachers who condemn rock & roll. This has to be the conflicted-and-then-some Daniels’ most successful attempt to straddle our culture-war battle lines. But there are also echoes of Lost Cause mythology in there, if you’re listening closely enough: “You can be proud, hear now/Be proud you’re a rebel, because the South’s gonna do it again and again.” It’s everything good about Daniels, along with everything that now, in a time of national reckoning, looks problematic. And on its face, it serves as a friendly shout-out to his Southern rock brethren, name-checking Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers Band, ZZ Top, Wet Willie, and the Marshall Tucker Band, among others. On the one hand, it’s a scorching country-rock tune that makes plenty of space for some flashy fiddle and sizzling electric guitar licks. If there’s a song that manages to embody the complicated duality of Charlie Daniels, it’s “The South’s Gonna Do It” (popularly known as “The South’s Gonna Do It Again”) from 1974’s Fire on the Mountain. Image Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images Alas, Daniels laid it on too thick in a 1988 remake, a homophobic song that is more unfortunate than uneasy. “I laid it on thicker and heavier I went,” he recounts. To get out of a fight, Daniels starts spinning yarns about a patron who is really an FBI spy sent to keep tabs on you yokels. Daniels sang-spoke his way through his biggest song, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” in 1979, but first embraced that style six years earlier with “Uneasy Rider.” At its core it’s a novelty song, with Daniels in the role of a long-haired hippie (not the long-haired country boy that was to come a year later) who suffers a flat tire and finds himself in an unwelcoming redneck bar.
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