How the Late Charlie Daniels Eased My Mother’s Mind

I am disheartened to hear that country rock legend Charlie Daniels has died from a stroke at age 83. I have a long history with the man and his music.
I was 13 when I bought 𝘍𝘪𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯 by the Charlie Daniels Band after it came out in 1974. It started me on a long and abiding love affair with southern rock which included the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Marshall Tucker Band, Wet Willie, The Outlaws and more. I loved the cover art on some of his early albums, too. I played that record a ton and still love most of the songs on it. The hits like “Long Haired Country Boy” and “The South’s Gonna Do It Again” of course, but also “Caballo Diablo” and “New York City King Size Rosewood Bed” and the epic live cut “No Place to Go” with its fantastic keyboard solo by Taz DiGregorio.
But it was the CDB’s version of “Orange Blossom Special” which turned out to be the track which had the biggest impact on my young life. Read on.
I had then and still have now an eclectic taste in music. In my early teens I was listening to everything from Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass to Frankie Yankovic to Johnny Cash and my Mom’s meager collection of early rock compilation albums featuring hits by Chuck Berry, Etta James and other rock pioneers. But then I started buying records by The Guess Who, Deep Purple, Jethro Tull, Ten Years After, Pink Floyd, Grand Funk Railroad, Black Sabbath and the like. It was when I started really digging those harder rock bands that my mom expressed some alarm at my changing listening preferences. She never made stop listening and would never have taken the albums away because she mostly trusted my judgement on things like records or books with what might be considered questionable or “mature” subject matter. But there was some disapproval to be sure.
That is until she heard me playing 𝘍𝘪𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯 and “Orange Blossom Special.” Finally I was once again playing something we both liked and could listen to together. It was the CDB and a short time later the outlaw country albums I bought by Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and those kinds of guys which made my musical explorations less of a concern to her. Apparently she thought such music would save me from the temptations of what at the time was heavy metal and the darker themes of those great rock artists in the early 70s whom I listened to on the progressive FM radio station KQRS in Minneapolis and purchased at my local record store/head shop, Fancy Colors. I would be okay after all, I guess. Sort of.
In college I discovered what became one of my favorite live album tracks from any artist. It’s from a Marshall Tucker show in Milwaukee where Charlie joined in for a long and killer rendition of “24 Hours at a Time.” I could listen to his fiddling on that one forever.
I got to see Charlie and his band play a couple of times. The first was in 1982 at the Great Northern Picnic at old Parade Stadium in Minneapolis, an annual show which usually featured southern and country rock bands. That year was different, though, as the CDB headlined but Elvis Costello and Blondie (both artists which I also liked) incongruously opened. It was fantastic. The second was a decade later in 1992 (I think) at Kaukauna River Jam. I also met him personally but very briefly that night. The band was great but Charlie by then had started bringing his born again evangelical Christian beliefs to the stage and seemed to want to preach quite a bit. He became that “preacher man talkin’ on TV, puttin’ down the rock and roll” which he used to sing about. The lyrics from “Long Haired Country Boy” which had always been, “I get stoned in the morning, I get drunk in the afternoon, ” became, “I pray to the lord each morning, and again in the afternoon.” At that point I decided that I’d “tell that preacher man to do a little walking, too.” It was also disappointing to me that Charlie became a big supporter of Donald Trump in recent years because it was antithetical to what it seemed he was all about earlier in his career. But we all have a right to hold our beliefs, the right to change them and the right to speak up about them. He certainly did that.
That said, the man had himself a hell of a career and I’m glad to have been able to enjoy his music and talent. While I am not a believer in the afterlife, I know that he was. So, for his sake, I hope he’s gone up, not down. If it’s the latter, though, I’ll bet the real fiddle battle with the devil will be even more legendary than the fictional one set in Georgia about which he wrote so well.