Charlie Daniels, the singer, songwriter and bandleader who changed into a force in each country and rock for many years, bringing a brash, down-home
personality and blazing fiddle work to hits like “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” died on Monday in Nashville. He became eighty three.
His publicist introduced the death, at Summit Medical Center inside the Hermitage phase of the town, saying the reason become a hemorrhagic stroke.
Mr. Daniels made his first mark as a session musician within the overdue 1960s and early ’70s, playing guitar, bass, mess around and banjo on Nashville
recordings through Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr and Leonard Cohen. He additionally produced albums for the Youngbloods, which include the group’s 1969 people-rock
touchstone, “Elephant Mountain.”
But his best acclaim came because the chief of the Charlie Daniels Band, a rustic-rock ensemble that hosted the Volunteer Jam, the
freewheeling Southern music competition, set up in 1974, that featured Roy Acuff, Stevie Ray Vaughn, James Brown and the Marshall Tucker
Band.
Modeled after the Allman Brothers, another normal act on the Jam, Mr. Daniels’s band used dual lead guitarists and dual drummers inside the
provider of an expansive improvisational sound that blanketed elements of u . S ., blues, bluegrass, rock and Western swing.
Formed in 1971, the Charlie Daniels Band earned a recognition early on for recording cloth of an outspoken countercultural bent, plenty of it
written by means of Mr. Daniels.
I ain’t askin’ no person for nothin’/If I can’t get it on my own,” Mr. Daniels asserted in a gruff drawl at the refrain of “Long Haired Country
Boy” (1975), which unabashedly extolled the virtues of unfastened speech and marijuana. “If you don’t like the way I’m livin’/You simply go away this
lengthy haired us of a boy alone.”
His plucky mindset reached new heights in “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” a No. 1 us of a unmarried and Top 10 pop hit from 1979 in which Mr.
Daniels’s protagonist is going head-to-head with Satan in a mess around contest, and prevails. The recording regarded on the multiplatinum-promoting
album “Million Mile Reflections” and gained a Grammy Award for exceptional country vocal.
His championing the underdog, coupled together with his band’s consistent travelling, gained Mr. Daniels a following, which included President Jimmy Carter,
who invited the Charlie Daniels Band to carry out at his 1977 inaugural ball.
But because the 1970s gave way to the ’80s, Mr. Daniels’s politics have become increasingly more right-wing and his songs extra strident, beginning with “In
America,” a Top 20 pop hit written in reaction to the Iran hostage crisis of 1980. “Simple Man,” a No. 2 united states of america unmarried in 1990, known as for
the lynching of drug dealers and sex offenders, while “(What the World Needs Is) A Few More Rednecks,” additionally from 1990, ran counter to the
hippie nonconformity of his early hits.
“If I encounter an problem, or some thing I feel strongly about, and I appear to consider a tune that would cross in that path, then I do
it,” Mr. Daniels stated, discussing how he got here to jot down “Simple Man,” in an internet interview. “But that’s not what I start off, necessarily, to
do.”
Such disavowals notwithstanding, Mr. Daniels proved to be something however reluctant to proportion his an increasing number of proper-wing perspectives, especially on the
Soap Box phase of the Charles Daniels Band website, in which he would pontificate on the Second Amendment, patriotism and other problems, and in
his 1993 ebook, “Ain’t No Rag: Freedom, Family and the Flag.”
On 2003 he published “An Open Letter to the Hollywood Bunch” in defense of President George W. Bush’s Iraq policy.
“You human beings want to get out of Hollywood on occasion and get out into the actual world,” he wrote. “You’d be amazed at the hostility you
might find out here. Stop in at a truck stop and tell an overworked, long distance truck driving force that you don’t suppose Saddam Hussein is doing
some thing wrong.”
Charles Edward Daniels was born on Oct. 28, 1936, in Wilmington, N.C. His mother, LaRue (Hammonds) Daniels, was a homemaker, and his father,
William Carlton Daniels, changed into a lumberjack who performed mess around and guitar. Mr. Daniels observed in shape, gaining knowledge of to play each instruments while in
college before forming his personal group, the Jaguars, in the overdue Nineteen Fifties. He had started writing songs with the aid of this point, inclusive of “It Hurts Me,” a
collaboration with Joy Byers that become the B-side of Elvis Presley’s Top forty hit “Kissin’ Cousins” in 1964.
Mr. Daniels disbanded the Jaguars and moved to Nashville in 1967 at the urging of the producer Bob Johnston, with whom he without delay
installed a a success career as a consultation musician. Among the albums on which he appeared were Mr. Dylan’s “Nashville Skyline” and Mr.
Cohen’s “Songs of Love and Hate,” both produced with the aid of Mr. Johnston.
Mr. Daniels made his first report underneath his personal call in 1970, a solo album, titled genuinely “Charlie Daniels, for Capitol Records; it went
nowhere. He and his band later signed with the Kama Sutra label, for which they recorded “Uneasy Rider” before locating a protracted-time period domestic with
Epic Records in 1975. Over the following decades they recorded more than dozen singles that hit the u . S . Chart, 4 of which, inclusive of
“The Devil” and “In America,” crossed over to the pop Top 40.
In 1997, after a short stint with Warner Bros. Nashville, Mr. Daniels based Blue Hat Records, an independent label with an distinct
distribution arrangement with Walmart.
His numerous honors covered the Pioneer Award by way of the Academy of Country Music in 1998 and the BMI Icon Award on the 53rd annual Country Music
Awards in 2005. He joined the cast of the Grand Ole Opry in 2008, the identical yr he celebrated his fiftieth anniversary in the tune business. In
2016, he became inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Survivors consist of his wife of more than 50 years, Hazel Juanita Alexander Daniels, and their son, Charles William Daniels Jr.
In 2014 Mr. Daniels paid tribute to his early days as a sideman with Mr. Dylan with a cover album of Mr. Dylan’s songs titled, “Off the Grid:
Doin’ It Dylan.” Mr. Daniels remembered this era fondly, describing it as “free, unfastened and, maximum of all, fun” in a 2015 interview with The
Tennessean.
Mr. Dylan recalled a comparable affinity in his 2004 memoir, “Chronicles.” “I felt I had a lot in not unusual with Charlie,” he wrote. “When Charlie
become round, something right would commonly pop out of the classes.”
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