The hat, the beard, that fierce patriotism and that fiery fiddle playing. That’s Charlie Daniels.
And he’s a blog-and-tweet man. On charliedaniels.com, the country superstar has blogged on everything from Paula Deen to the passing of George Jones, from NASCAR to immigration.
“I’ve gotten a real kick out of it,” he said. “I started that around when I started having a website. One of the guys who helped design it said, ‘You know, you’re opinionated; we’ll start a little section on this and we’ll call it your soapbox and we’ll just put your opinions up there.’
“I did one [blog] a week for a while, and readership picked up once I started doing it. I do two a week now. I really enjoy writing it; it gives me a chance to kind of get everything out. Another thing too is I show my humorous side once in a while.”
Daniels said he also enjoys Twitter and Facebook, where many of his posts end with, “Let’s all make the day count.”
“I started [tweeting] — of course, I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming into every kind of technology that I’ve gotten involved with,” he said and laughed. “My son got me started on Twitter, so I wanted to be a little different from the other things that I’ve seen on Twitter; I want to go my own way with it.
“I just started one day with a little personal saying, whatever the saying happened to be, what I called my words of wisdom for lack of a better title, ‘Let’s all make the day count.’ Of course, I do one every day now. Those sayings, the good Lord sends me one of them every day and I put it up. It’s kind of got to the point where people know that’s part of what I do, so they look for me to do it every day.”
Just like folks expect the music legend to stand up for America. In 2012, he released the single “Take Back the U.S.A.”
“I feel that it is incumbent on me to be patriotic. I’m not going to say it’s a requirement; it’s a joy, actually, to talk about our nation and what it means to me,” Daniels said during a call from a tour stop in Myrtle Beach, S.C. “I’ve been enough places to know that I have no desire to live anywhere else. There’s no place that compares with [America], no place that has the rights, the freedoms. We have so much. I hear people talking about what’s wrong with the nation; just stop and think about what’s right with it.”
The singer-songwriter also is known for pouring Southern storytelling over rock and country: “The Legend of Wooley Swamp,” “Still in Saigon,” “Simple Man,” “The South’s Gonna Do It Again,” “In America,” and “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”
“I felt that [‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’] was special; I had no idea how special,” he said. “You just give it your best shot and go for it. I felt that it would do well at the radio we were playing on at the time — [it] was called AOR, album-oriented radio — I figured it would do well on that, but I didn’t know it would break over into the pop stations.”
In February, the Charlie Daniels Band paid tribute to its roots with “Hits of the South,” which includes “Can’t You See,” “Sharp Dressed Man,” “Freebird” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”
“These are songs by bands that for the most part we toured with a lot that were friends of ours. It was natural for their music to become part of our lives, and our music has probably been part of their lives,” the fiddle player and guitarist said. “There’s nothing complicated about it. It’s fun to listen to [Southern music]. It doesn’t have a go-bad date on it.”
The Charlie Daniels Band will play at 8 p.m. July 29 at the Monroe County Fair, 3775 S. Custer Road, Monroe, Mich. Tickets are $25 and $35.
The 76-year-old Grammy Award-winner has been in the business 55 years and has been honored as a BMI Icon and with the Academy of Country Music’s Pioneer Award. He has no plans to slow down — not even after receiving a pacemaker in March.
“My heart is very healthy, the muscle part of my heart. The problem I had is the electrical part was goofed up and it was making my heartbeat slow and out of rhythm. So basically what the pacemaker does is when it starts doing that, between it and some medicine, it makes it kick in and do what it’s supposed to do,” Daniels said. “The battery is supposed to last for 12 years, so hopefully we won’t have any problems with it for 12 years.”
