The South’s Gonna Do It (Again): Charlie Daniels, the Confederacy and the Rise of the New South in the ’70s.
Charlie Daniels had his first hit in 1973, just three years shy of his fortieth birthday. He had been kicking around for a while, playing dives and sessions — anything that would bring in a paycheck — but he first attempted a solo career in 1971, after he amassed just enough clout in Nashville to snag a contract with Capitol Records. This was the same year the Allman Brothers Band released At Fillmore East, the double-live LP that turned the Georgian group into superstars and had a profound impact upon Charlie Daniels, who up to that point had proven himself to be a deft weathervane following the shifting winds of American roots and rock music in the ‘60s.
After his career-defining 1979 smash “The Devil Went Down To Georgia,” Daniels would be understood as a country music institution, even earning induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2016, but the first 25 years of his career could hardly be called strictly country, although his music could always be classified as Southern. Fittingly, his Charlie Daniels Band played a pivotal role in the rise of Southern Rock in the 1970s, creating a rallying call for the movement with “The South’s Gonna Do It” in 1975.
By tipping his hat to his peers with “The South’s Gonna Do It,” saluting everybody from the Marshall Tucker Band to ZZ Top, Charlie Daniels acknowledged how a New South had emerged in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, one that seemed progressive as it embraced some hippie ideals. The music’s rise in popularity ran parallel to the rise of Jimmy Carter, the idiosyncratic Democratic governor of Georgia who had a key ally in Phil Walden, the mastermind behind Macon, Georgia’s Capricorn Records.
Capricorn was home to the Allman Brothers Band, unquestionably the guiding light of Southern Rock. The Allmans pioneered a winding, bluesy style that leant into the volume of British rock while maintaining a lithe improvisatory bent. They sounded like nobody else in 1969 but soon there would be countless groups that would sound like them, many of them claiming Capricorn Records as their own. Capricorn was the hub of Southern Rock but the music had an important outpost a bit further south in Jacksonville, Florida, where Lynyrd Skynyrd sounded tougher, angrier and altogether more rebellious.
The Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd seemed to exist on two separate ends of the same axis. With their blend of blues, soul, jazz and rock, the Allman Brothers Band reflected the emerging New South, where cultures intermingled in ways that seemed impossible a decade prior. The Allmans were integrated racially, too, which was instrumental in helping forge a refurbished image of the South. Daniels claimed later “I think the Allman Brothers having a black guy in the group at that time was a real eye-opener for a lot of people outside the south.”
If the Allmans represented forward motion, Skynyrd appeared to represent a backlash to progression. This perception wasn’t necessarily accurate, but the subtleties of Ronnie Van Zant’s songwriting could be lost in his band’s triple guitar attack or his lyrics about segregationist George Wallace, not to mention the Confederate Flag flying at Skynyrd concerts. The Stars and Bars were an uncommon sight in pop culture in the early ’70s but would become familiar a decade later.
Between these two extremes lay Charlie Daniels. A native of Wilmington, North Carolina, Charlie Daniels was born on October 28, 1936, making him a full decade older than Duane and Gregg Allman, Ronnie Van Zant, Toy Caldwell of the Marshall Tucker Band — any other musician that could be conceivably called a Southern Rock peer. Charlie was from a different generation, one who could remember a time before rock & roll, and one who grew up in the thick of institutional racism. Daniels never denied this, recounting to journalist Mark Kemp in 2004 that he “never went to school with a black person one day in my life. My mind was conditioned in such a way that I felt they were an inferior race. That was just the way things were. And the thing about it is, when you’re raised that way, when you’re indoctrinated that way, it’s not even a conscious thing to you. It was a cultural thing.”
Where the Allmans and Skynyrd grew up in the wake of rock & roll, Daniels graduated high school in 1955, just as the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum. It also was the year Bill Haley took “Rock Around the Clock” to number one and the year Chuck Berry released “Maybellene” — in other words, the year rock & roll started to break, bringing African Americans into the pop Top 10 along with it. Daniels grew up listening to Black music — he claimed “the one thing the South has always done is respect black music. Whether you respected black PEOPLE or not, you respected the music.” Still, Daniels didn’t quite see a common ground between Black and White. “For me, it was like this: they had their music and we had our music. And everybody knew that black music was the pacesetter.”
Despite this, Daniels started his musical career playing bluegrass in 1953 but he couldn’t resist the pull of rock & roll. Moving north to Washington DC after high school, he formed a combo called the Rockets and played as often as possible. Through these gigs, he became exposed to jazz and blues and the Black musicians who played it. Daniels slowly started to shed his preconceived notions. He’d later say, “One of the hardest things about giving up any kind of prejudice is being honest with yourself. It’s not easy to say, ‘For nineteen years I’ve been living and believing a certain way and I’m beginning to wonder if what I believed is right.’ Then you go a little further and start admitting, ‘No, I KNOW what I believed is not right. I have no right to feel that way.” Once Daniels fell for Black music, he started to understand the Civil Rights struggle and his mind opened.
Running alongside this spiritual awakening came the reality of playing in a working band. Apart from a brief spell in Denver where he toiled away at a stockyard, Daniels played in a bar band for the better part of twelve years, adapting with the changing fashions. Sometimes, the group built up enough steam to get inside a studio. The first time this happened was in 1959, when they entered a Fort Worth studio with producer Bob Johnston to cut a greasy, groovy instrumental called “Jaguar.” Johnston convinced the group to name themselves after this side and that was the beginning of a long friendship between him and Charlie. Daniels attempted to cash in on the post-Atomic sci-fi craze with “Robot Romp” in 1960 but his next big break arrived in 1964, when Elvis Presley recorded “It Hurts Me,” a song Daniels wrote with Bob Johnston. It went to 29 — a modest hit for Elvis, who was in a commercial downturn in ‘64 — but that wasn’t enough to make Daniels abandon the Jaguars just yet. In 1965, the Jaguars released another 45, a mildly trippy soul single called “The Middle of a Heartache,” then slogged through two more years of constant gigs before Daniels relocated to Nashville on the advice of Johnston. Daniels later explained “I was playing a lot of clubs, and I wanted to get off the road” — a somewhat ironic assessment from a musician who would later have a reputation as a road warrior — and he settled into the Music City session circuit, receiving an invitation from Johnston to play on Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline in 1969.
Dylan dug Daniels. Charlie was scheduled to play only one song but Bob asked him to sit in for the rest of the session. This interaction is key in Charlie Daniels lore, the moment where Daniels becomes something a bit more than a hotshot session player — which, by most accounts, he wasn’t. He didn’t play on many records prior to Nashville Skyline but after Dylan, Daniels became an in-demand musician, playing on Ringo Starr’s 1970 country record Beaucoups of Blues and produce a Ramblin’ Jack Elliott album alongside a pair of Youngbloods platters. Daniels also struck up a collaboration with the Youngbloods’ guitarist Jerry Corbitt. The pair recruited session stars — including Billy Cox, who played bass in Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsies — for a group that lasted no longer than six months. Nevertheless, this is a crucial project for Daniels, pushing him from the studio to the spotlight and sparking his country-rock fusion. Corbitt-Daniels played music that was heavily indebted to the earthy roots fusion of Delaney & Bonnie and Daniels channeled that sound and energy into his eponymous album for Capitol in 1971. Before he got to that, he did another Johnston production, playing on Leonard Cohen’s 1971 album Songs Of Love And Hate, along with its accompanying tour.
Daniels had a perceptive read on Cohen’s music, one that was born from his years as a professional musician. Charlie said Leonard “spoke in poetic ways andwas able to communicate with people who had never lived in that world, like myself, and had never been exposed to that side of things. I’ve never seen anybody that had that softness of touch that could play a gut-string guitar with the strings tuned down like that, almost flabby. He has a very unique kind of music, very fragile, that could very easily be bruised or destroyed by somebody being heavy-handed.”
“Leonard would stand there with his guitar and sing a song and we would try and create something around it that would complement it. If there was a place that we feel needed enhancing, in one way or another that’s what we tried to do. The main thing was being part of it but unobtrusive, very transparent, nothing that would distract from his lyric and melody. You could put something in there that would mess it up real quick.”
What’s so fascinating about this insight isn’t just what it says about Cohen’s music — it’s what it says about how Charlie Daniels perceives music. He’s not playing from instinct — a dismissal commonly lodged at roots musicians — he’s making considered choices based on how they’d enhance or detract from a given song. Given that he spent so long playing Top 40 hits for impatient crowds, it’s no surprise Daniels developed a keen sense of what works musically but he also developed an idea of what an audience wants, and he started to act upon this in 1972, once he signed to the bubblegum label Kama Sutra and developed the first incarnation of the Charlie Daniels Band.
They’d strike gold in 1973, when “Uneasy Rider” became a fluke hit. “Uneasy Rider” rolled along with a finger picked guitar figure, sounding not quite country or folk, but clearly belonging to the hippie hangover from the ’60s. Of course, the song’s title is a nod to Easy Rider, the groundbreaking 1969 independent film by Dennis Hopper about two hippies traveling across the country on their motorcycles, but Daniels’ tale shifts the focus to a long-haired redneck — not exactly a hippie, but somebody who didn’t belong with the shit-kickers with crew cuts who represented the southern status quo. These conservatives would be set off by some long hair passing through, which is the tale Daniels tells in “Uneasy Rider.” Our hero suffers a blown out tire in the middle of Jackson Mississippi, so he tucks his hair underneath his hat and walks into a bar, hoping to pass the time until his Chevrolet is fixed. Naturally, he’s menaced by rednecks anxious to pick a fight with a guy sporting a peace sign on his bumper. Unnerved, he turns the tables on his rivals, claiming that their ringleader is an undercover lefty.
Daniels later claimed, “The whole point of ‘Uneasy Rider’ was that you don’t have to take crap from people. I was like, ‘Are you gonna let some guy come up and shoot you like they did in that movie?’ Hell no, I’m not gonna let some guy shoot me. I’ll run over him in my car if I have to.” That’s a bit disingenuous because Charlie’s narrator in “Uneasy Rider” taunts with provocative, progressive politics. Our narrator tells the gathering mob stories about their chief:
“Would you believe this man has gone as far/as tearing Wallace stickers off the bumpers of cars/And he voted for George McGovern for President/Well, he’s a friend of them long haired hippy-type pinko fags/I betchya he’s even got a commie flag/Tacked up on the wall of his garage”
His rival retorts that he’s a far rightwinger:
“Now just wait a minute Jim!/you know he’s lying I been living here all of my life/I’m a faithful follower of Brother John Birch/And I belong to the Antioch Baptist Church/And I ain’t even got a garage, you can call home and ask my wife”
Now, anybody who wrote those lyrics understands the power of cadence and signifiers, so when our hero winds up escaping the bar and plowing through the bikes of his rivals, he proclaims “I had them all out there steppin and fetchin,” it’s a clear allusion to the comedian whose stage name became a shorthand for the stereotype of lazy Black Americans long before Charlie Daniels picked up a guitar.
So…why did Daniels slide this phrase into his song? Maybe it’s for the same reason that he transformed Jefferson Davis’ Civil-War era Confederate rallying cry “The South Will Rise Again” into “The South’s Gonna Do It,” that 1975 hit that celebrated all of the Southern Rockers who emerged in the past five years. Charlie later said “The fact is, until then, neither the North nor the South knew much about each other….so I think this music and these bands kind of opened things up in terms of them understanding us and us understanding them,” which is somewhat true. Prior to the rise of Southern Rock, there wasn’t a widespread understanding of Southernness as a unifying factor for musicians, an aesthetic that was a sensibility as much as a specific sound. Charlie would say, “when people talk about southern rock, I say it’s not a genre of music — it’s a genre of people” — and “The South’s Gonna Do It,” helped codify this because it represented a slight shift in southern rock: it introduced the fiddle breakdown, a direct connection to country music that the style otherwise lacked in the previous years.
And by transposing the Jefferson Davis’ slogan into an anthem, he emphasized the southern roots of Southern Rock. Like the “steppin and fetchin” line in “Uneasy Rider,” some audiences responded to it as if it were a dog whistle: the Louisiana branch of the Ku Klux Klan put it into radio ads in 1975, a move Charlie quickly denounced. He said, “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.” Jimmy Carter shared a positive view of “The South’s Gonna Do It,” adopting the tune as his campaign song for his 1976 Presidential run. In Carter’s hands, “The South’s Gonna Do It” didn’t seem like a retrograde revival of the Confederacy: it was claiming the past for a progressive future, a view Daniels shared at the time. Years after Carter’s inauguration, Daniels would still claim “Jimmy Carter is the most honorable man to hold the office of president of the United States of America in my lifetime.”
By the time Carter ascended to the presidency in 1976, the bloom was off the Southern Rock rose. The Allmans were dealing with the aftermath of Duane’s death, Lynyrd Skynyrd would soon lose Ronnie Van Zant and guitarist Steve Gaines in a plane crash in 1977, while other bands simply were getting long in the tooth. But Daniels dug into his professional instincts, deciding his namesake group would be better off if they turned into a working band, churning out a record every year and focusing their attention on concerts, including the yearly Volunteer Jam festival that he launched in 1974.
During the late ’70s, Outlaw Country — a Nashville variation of Southern rebellion, one focused on songwriters and swagger, not jams — overtook Southern Rock, but by 1980, these two ’70s phenomenona began to merge, particularly in the realm of mainstream country. The music no longer shunned brawny rock production and signifiers of the South became common, including the Confederate flag’s Stars And Bars, which popped up in the logo for Alabama — a vocal group that never attempted to rock the boat — and on the roof of the General Lee, the car the Duke Brothers drove in the hit TV series the Dukes Of Hazzard, which debuted in 1979.
That was the same year Charlie Daniels Band finally scored an undeniable hit in the form of “The Devil Went Down To Georgia. This fiddle-fueled talking blues set to a disco beat captured the imagination of pop audiences as thoroughly as country crowds, peaking at three on the Hot 100 and reaching number one on Billboard’s country charts. Mere chart listings can’t quite quantify the impact of “The Devil Went Down To Georgia.” It not only became a pop culture touchstone, it pushed the Charlie Daniels Band into the top of the country charts for the first time. Prior to this, the best country placement for CDB was reaching 22 with “Wichita Jail” in 1975. “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” transformed Charlie Daniels from a rock artist into a country one: “Long Haired Country Boy,” a don’t tread on me anthem of southern defiance, was a country hit five years after its initial release and if “Still In Saigon” made it to 22 on the Hot 100 in 1982, it’d be the last time he scored better on the pop charts than country.
And, modern country music as a whole wound up fundamentally changed by what Charlie Daniels kicked off with “The South’s Gonna Do It.” By fusing hillbilly fiddle with guitar boogie, Daniels gave country a rock & roll kick but his reclaiming of southern pride paved the path for country acts to raise the rebel flag. Unlike Charlie, who never capitalized on the Confederacy during the ’70s, other artists started to speak the quiet part out loud. Seven years later after “The South’s Gonna Do It,” Hank Williams Jr cut “The South’s Gonna Rattle Again,” which wasn’t a celebration of a resurgent progressive South, even if he dropped allusions to Merle Haggard and George Jones and even Charlie Daniels. Where Charlie slyly nodded at the Confederate past, Hank Jr sang “you can bet our brag on that rebel flag” and that set the pace for the rest of defiant conservative politics for the rest of the 80s. Daniels too began to take a strident stance, advocating the lynching of drug dealers in his rabble-rousing 1989 hit “A Simple Man.”
By that point, there was no question that the popular perception of the South was that it was politically conservative. Maybe it was the failure of Carter’s presidency, maybe it was the rise of Ronald Reagan, maybe it was a change in generations but any trace of progressive politics had been erased from the Southern mainstream. If the mainstream changed shape, so did the image of what constituted a redneck. As Mark Kemp put it in his Dixie Lullaby, “Ten to fifteen years earlier, a redneck was a fellow who wore his hair short and slicked back, was hostile to long-haired hippies who looked like Van Zant or Charlie Daniels, and was loath to accept new kinds of music or new ways of thinking. Now, many of the guys who looked like Van Zant and Charlie Daniels WERE the rednecks.”
Ever attuned to trends, Charlie Daniels illustrated this shift by revisiting his old hit “Uneasy Rider” in 1988. In this new version, he wasn’t the freak stranded in the boondocks, he and his pal Jim were a pair of good old boys cruising along to Houston in a Chevrolet — notably, they’re pulling into a big urban city, not a southern outpost. They pull into a bar, walking into discover “a punk rock band and some orange haired feller singing about suicide.” Jim convinces Charlie to stay but when a woman who “looked like a girl but talked like a guy” takes Jim to the dancefloor, things go awry, with “this funny looking feller” coming onto Charlie, putting his hand on our hero’s knee. Charlie threatens the guy, who says “I love it when you get that fire in your eye,” so Daniels decks him, starting a barroom brawl where it’s revealed that Jim’s “beautiful girl was just a beautiful man/And old Jim just got sick right there on the floor.”
In the original “Uneasy Rider,” Charlie Daniels was in fear for his life because he looked unlike than the cultural conservatives in the south, but in “Uneasy Rider 88” the tables are turned: he’s the one who is revolted by somebody who isn’t like him. Daniels himself hasn’t changed much — he was still the long haired country boy, the Charlie Daniels Band still sounded in 1988 as they did in 1978 — but the times had changed, with cultural politics falling along clear cut lines dividing the city from the country, a divide that happened in part to the proudly rebellious South Charlie created with “The South’s Gonna Do It.”
