Chatting With Charlie Daniels

Being the resident office hillbilly has its advantages. Yesterday, at my real-world job as a newspaper editor, I had the honor of interviewing fiddler/guitarist/Southern music icon Charlie Daniels. (I can hear the editors assigning the story now: "Get Moores to do it. He listens to all that twangy stuff with the fiddles and the banjos in it.")

Daniels was in Washington to promote Tuesday's release of his new CD and DVD set "Live from Iraq," which was recorded during the Charlie Daniels Band's trips to entertain U.S. troops in the Middle East in 2005 and 2006. Some of the audio from my interview will be posted on stripes.com on Friday, but not all of it made the cut in our story or on our Web site. Our talk lasted for a little over 30 minutes, which was more than enough time to ask a question that would be pertinent to my online sideline, writing weekly for you folks who stop in to HickoryWind.org. Mr. Daniels, who I will continue to call Mr. Daniels because even at 70 years old he could probably still whip me good with that bow arm of his, had some interesting things to say about the labels we love to put on music when we're filing it in our neat and tidy boxes.

Q: I recall seeing you on a CMT special that was about Southern rock, I believe, where you talked about labels in music and how you thought of the Allman Brothers as a blues band, not as a Southern rock band. And certainly you've resisted labels to your own music over the years. What would you call the music the Charlie Daniels Band plays?
A: Charlie Daniels Band Music. And I'm not giving you a flippant answer; it's just a line of thought. I think what I said [on the special], and I'll reiterate what I said, but people talk about Southern rock as if it's a genre of music. Of course, if you want to get chauvinistic about it, and you stop and consider, all original American music came out of the South. It's just a fact. The stuff that we [Americans] came up with came out of the South, because the blues came out of the South. There's no doubt about that. Country music came out of the South. Rock and roll started as a combination of the two, basically.

It moved out of there quickly, and was developed in a lot of other places. So when you say Southern music, you're swingin' a wide loop there. The Allman Brothers Band are like a blues band. Skynyrd is as pure a rock and roll band as you'll ever hear. Tucker's got the country leanings, and Wet Willie is an R&B-type band. Who am I missing? … We're kind of lost off out in the middle of all of them. We're a little bit of all of it.

So it's not really to me a genre as much as it was a geographical thing and a personal thing in that most all of the people involved in all those bands were raised in the same … we're all WASPs, basically – that came up in a middle class, working class, blue collar for a large part, educated in the same type schools, ate the same food, went to the same kind of churches, and it's like people you feel like you've known all your life. We just all happened to have music that was successful at the same time, so people started calling it Southern rock.