RIP Charlie Daniels

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Swirls
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RIP Charlie Daniels

Post by Swirls »

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/06/entertai ... index.html
Country music scribe Charlie Daniels, best known for the hit "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," has died. He was 83.

The multi-instrumentalist had a hemorrhagic stroke in Hermitage, Tennessee, and was pronounced dead Monday, his publicists said in a statement.
Daniels, a Country Music Hall of Fame inductee and Grand Ole Opry alumnus, was born in North Carolina but quickly felt at home in Nashville. He moved there and played on records with music titans Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Ringo Starr.

With the eponymous Charlie Daniels Band, he and the instrument he's most closely associated with -- the fiddle -- spearheaded a new genre of "Southern rock."

His best-known hit, 1979's "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," is still a staple at classic rock stations.

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CardsofSTL
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Re: RIP Charlie Daniels

Post by CardsofSTL »

RIP. Helluva musician

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Leroy
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Re: RIP Charlie Daniels

Post by Leroy »

What a year.

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heyzeus
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Re: RIP Charlie Daniels

Post by heyzeus »

That was our go-to late night jukebox dive bar song in college. I'll set aside his deeply unsettling late-career opinions and stick to the music, which was good.

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Leroy
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Re: RIP Charlie Daniels

Post by Leroy »

Now that I have a moment, I'll say a little more. I keep stars and their politics out of my thinking. That said:

I was 11. I had been playing the violin for 5 years already. I was decent, nothing special. But my friends in a very small town were pretty rugged kids. They saw no value in playing any instrument, let alone the violin. So I was kind of a 'nerd', the last thing I wanted to be. I was really considering if I would rather fit in with my friends or keep playing. My answer was obvious...fit in. One day, I heard 'The Devil Went Down to Georgia' on the radio, and my friends did too. I bought the sheet music, and learned it. When my friends heard me play it, all of a sudden the violin/fiddle was cool, and so was I. So I kept playing. And playing. And playing.

On a completely different track, I thought again the fiddle was not cool when I started college. I mean, who wants to be the nerd walking around with a violin case? So I quit, and put the fiddle in the closet. When I started dating my wife, she noticed it and asked me to play it. I played the Wabash Cannonball. She said that I needed to keep that thing out of the closet and play it. So Charlie and Shelly are the two most important people as far as music goes with me.

The list of great things that have happened to me because of my fiddle, that would have never happened otherwise is long. I could bore you to death with stories. Had it not been for Mr. Daniels, none of those things would have happened. So I owe a huge thanks to the man.

As far as performing, I learned from him that you don't gotta be the best (he was far, far from it), but if you put yourself into your music, you will have fun, and the folks watching you play will too. It does not get much better than that for me.

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GeddyWrox
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Re: RIP Charlie Daniels

Post by GeddyWrox »

That's awesome Leroy. Thanks for posting that. And sorry for your loss.

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thrill
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Re: RIP Charlie Daniels

Post by thrill »

I'm not going to act like I was a fan because my knowledge of the man boils down to one song and the tangential awareness that he really did not like our previous president, but man did I love it when my dad would CRANK "devil went down to georgia" in the car when I was a kid. Fiddles are very bus-friendly instruments unlike more cumbersome stuff like cellos or drums. Hope he's shredding on his ghost bus (which Leroy will no doubt miss the most of all of us).

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Joe Shlabotnik
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Re: RIP Charlie Daniels

Post by Joe Shlabotnik »

Image

I bought this one for Long Haired Country Boy and played it a lot for No Place To Go, Trudy, and a few others.

By the time of DWDTG, I had moved on.

Great musician.

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