Dylan and Daniels tracked together and when Daniels got up to depart, Dylan asked Johnston, “Where is Charlie going?” Johnston told him Daniels was leaving but another guitarist would take his place. Daniels was conscripted for a four-hour session, to be replaced afterward by another session man. Daniels packed up the family and moved straight away, and the next thing you know he was being prominently featured on Dylan’s Nashville Skyline. More or less out of the blue in the mid-1960s, his old friend and legendary producer Bob Johnston called to see if he wanted to move to Nashville to be a session player. By the mid-1960s, Daniels was already a hard-luck veteran of the roughest margins of the music biz, having spent more than a decade playing in distinguished, itinerant boogie bands without any apparent future. They were good enough to be in demand throughout the competitive mid-Atlantic touring circuit and to get booked on a USO tour of an army base in Greenland, where for a handful of weeks they entertained blitzed GIs in endless all-night blowouts at what felt like the barren edge of the known world. The Jesters, one of his first real outfits, was a four-piece cover band known for energetic takes on tunes by Fats Domino, Lloyd Price, and Little Richard. Pain recognizes pain, even if it doesn’t always react palliatively. He knew that he had been privileged ahead of Black Americans, and he also knew he had been condescended to by wealthier white ones. The Charlie Daniels Band’s first hit was a novelty song called “Long Haired Country Boy,” the opening stanza of which went like this: “People say I’m no good and crazy as a loon / ’Cause I get stoned in the morning / And get drunk in the afternoon.” Having grown up around segregation, Daniels’s conceptions of hierarchies based in race and class were a hard-wired factotum. The Atlanta International Pop Festival in 1969 drew a hundred and fifty thousand with a bill featuring Booker T., the Staple Singers, CCR, and Zep.Ĭharlie Daniels was, in one very real sense, hippie to the core. Radio programmers would soon enough sort the “rock” and “r&b” genres into separate, racially coded categories, but that process of untangling took longer in the regions between Jacksonville and Memphis. The counterculture of the 1960s South was fraught with cross-pollination and contradictions. Like bison, they were once all over America. People think about hippies and they think of Woodstock or California. To parse that particular contradiction is to understand something crucial about contemporary American life. It confers a knee-jerk love of the military, along with a quasi-rational contempt for the government that makes their marching orders. Like a lot of kids brought up during the pivot point between recovery from the Depression and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Daniels developed a profound sense of patriotism coupled with a provincial suspicion of the big banks and speculators that had, in some faraway distance, nearly destroyed the country. In his youth he learned gospel songs like “Kneel at the Cross” and railway blues like Waldo O’Neal’s “Hobo Bill’s Last Ride,” which reduced him to tears when his father performed it for him. Where the music ended and the evangelism began was difficult to discern and ultimately immaterial. When he was born to LaRue and William Daniel in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1936, a paperwork error resulted in an extra “s” being added to his surname, an anomaly within the extended clan that stuck. Indeed, he was the first “Daniels” in his family. His signature hissing fiddle sounded like no one before or since. He lost part of a finger on his right hand in a middle school shop accident, and his unique four-fingered strumming style became the hallmark of his playing. Or the stately but strange guitar and bass on Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline and New Morning? That was Daniels, too. You know the queasy string arrangement and overall vibe of Leonard Cohen’s 1969 standard “Bird on a Wire”? That’s Charlie Daniels. His specialty was knowing just what weird chord shapes to strike and which mood to evoke, however idiosyncratic. An instrumentalist of wildly diverse talents and little training, Daniels lacked the technical proficiency of the formally educated and was perceptive enough to make it a virtue. This is the best available explanation for the scarcely credulous, Zelig-like life that saw him write for Elvis Presley, become a crucial sideman to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, befriend Beatles and presidents, and invent an entirely novel form of country boogie over the course of a five-decade career in music. Harlie Daniels was a musical genius and a human charm offensive.
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