Daniels, Charlie (1936—)

Charlie Daniels came to prominence during the early 1970s, at a time when country music was caught up in Vietnam patriotism and anti-hippie sentiment. Rock was the music of the counterculture, which saw the South through newsreels of civil rights battles and movies like Easy Rider. A white southern band had to choose one or the other, and many followed the lead of the likes of the Allman Brothers to create the sound known as Southern Rock. The Charlie Daniels Band began as Southern Rockers with an anti-redneck anthem, "Uneasy Rider" (1973), a song about a longhaired guy going into a bar full of good old boys. One of the few musicians to fit into both rock and country genres, Daniels' manipulated his image and music brilliantly in an attempt to capture his place in twentieth-century popular culture.

Most of the Southern Rockers separated themselves totally from country music … and they remained separate. Even in the 1980s and 1990s, when rock had become a staple of the new country sound, groups like the Allman Brothers, Little Feat, and the Marshall Tucker Band never showed up at country concerts or on the country charts. Daniels was an exception. Right from the start he managed to keep a presence in both worlds, working as a studio fiddle player on Nashville sessions. When pop came to Nashville, Daniels was there, playing hot fiddle parts on Bob Dylan's album Nashville Skyline. Even "Uneasy Rider" made the lower rungs of the country charts (it was in the top ten on the pop charts).

Southern Rock faded as a chart phenomenon with the end of the 1970s; it did, however, retain a core audience. Daniels then made his move toward country. In 1980, country music was in the grip of the Urban Cowboy phenomenon, and there was a lot of country overlap on the pop charts. Daniels was no Urban Cowboy, but he was an artist with the capacity to play to both audiences, and he made the most of it with his biggest hit "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," which hit number one on the country charts and was number three as a pop hit. It won him a Grammy for best country music performance by a group, and the Country Music Association award for Single of the Year. The single was Daniels' high water mark as his career was middling through the 1980s. He continued to have a mystique of sorts, remaining signed to the same label (Epic), releasing one record after another, and never cracking the top ten—mostly, in fact, languishing near the bottom of the charts.

Then, in 1989, Daniels had another career breakthrough. His hit album, A Simple Man, aggressively advocated the lynching of bad guys and hopped onto the anti-communist bandwagon (a little late) by suggesting that it would not be such a bad idea to assassinate Gorbachev. And, as a final rejection of his youthful fling with the counterculture, he recorded a new version of "Uneasy Rider" in which the hero is himself—one of the good old boys from whom the original uneasy rider had his narrow escape. This time, he accidentally wanders into a gay bar. Daniels had made himself over completely, from protest-era rebel to Reagan-era conservative.

—Tad Richards