A few weeks ago, NASCAR announced the banning of the confederate flag and I felt the need to re-visit the music of the Charlie Daniels Band. The flag imagery was everywhere growing up in the South and I went to see the CDB six times in concert before I left home for college. Much like Jimmy Buffett, Charlie Daniels wrote songs that spoke to the counter-culture. It was about rejecting mainstream, corporate agendas and embracing all that is good about America. And then, it wasn’t.
Southern rock always had a fuzzy relationship with country music and the early CDB albums certainly felt more rock than country to me. Sure, “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” sounded country but “Still In Saigon” rocked just as much as The Allman Brothers or Lynyrd Skynyrd. Daniels was also a brilliant musician and can be heard on Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen albums. His political shift to the far-right happened slowly at first and in recent years, I think his politics are all most of us think about when we hear his name. The Soap Box on his website gave him a platform to attack Obama and progressive ideals. It really is hard to read and I stopped after a few random clicks.
The 1973 song “Uneasy Rider” was one of the first CDB songs to really hook me as a kid (apart from “Devil…”). I loved how the pot-smoking liberal had to outsmart the rednecks by accusing one of their own of the very things they assumed about him based on his appearance: he is a communist who supports the liberal George McGovern. If we are tracing the shift in Charlie Daniels, this song makes for an easy reference point because in 1988, he released a new version which revealed a different ideology.
In “Uneasy Rider ’88”, Daniels and his friend end up in a gay bar and he starts a fight when a man in drag approaches him. It is ugly on every level and especially sad for an artist who once preached tolerance and community. That was the beginning of the end for me. The 1989 Simple Man album was the last I bought and it was a mix of his poignant songwriting ability (“Old Rock And Roller”) and emerging anger (“Simple Man”) against progressive values. It was time for us to head in different directions as I left for college not long after and he started doubling-down on religion.
There are so many lines in his early songs that would lead you to believe that Charlie Daniels would stand against the current Trump regime including this indictment against Russian meddling:
This lady may have stumbled
But she ain’t never fell
And if the Russians don’t believe that
They can all go straight to hell
“In America”
Sadly, that is not the path he chose and it will forever overshadow some innovative music that bridged the gap between rock and country music. When we sang along to “The South’s Gonna Do It Again” growing up, it was about Southern Rock bands like ZZ Top and the Allman Brothers finding commercial success. Daniels himself went as far as denouncing anyone who interpreted it differently.
“I’m damn proud of the South, but I sure as hell am not proud of the Ku Klux Klan. … I wrote the song about the land I love and my brothers. It was not written to promote hate groups.”
“KKK Lashed by Daniels on Song Use,” Billboard magazine, 20 December 1975, p. 4
As the son of a Vietnam Veteran who earned multiple Purple Hearts, the CDB song “Still In Saigon” has always been close to my heart. As a music fan, I thought Daniels nailed the noble nature of a barroom band hanging tough night after night on “Old Rock and Roller”. There are a lot of great moments in the CDB catalogue that might be difficult to appreciate given how horrific the man’s politics became in later years. In a few years, I might be writing these same words about Morrissey and that is the problem with our heroes. In the end, heroes always let us down because they aren’t supposed to be heroes. Take the music, leave the politics.