USA TODAY International Edition
It’s another tip of the hat to Charlie Daniels
‘ Long Haired Country Boy’ headed to the Country Music Hall of Fame
Charlie Daniels was driving around Nashville one day when his manager seemed to remember something he’d neglected to mention.
“He said: ‘ The Country Music Association needs a picture of you. We’re just a couple of blocks away. Let’s go by and take one,’ ” Daniels recalls with a chuckle. “So we went there. I stood in the lobby and waited. A few minutes later ( CMA chief ) Sarah Trahern came down and very matter- offactly said: ‘ You think you’re here to take a picture. But we’ve actually asked you here to invite you to become a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame.’ ”
In his nearly 80 years, Daniels has seen a lot. He has traveled from raucous honky- tonk shows back home in North Carolina to Nashville, working first as a session player on albums by Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Tammy Wynette and other luminaries. From there he built his own career as Grammy- winning singer, entertainer, songwriter and fiddle virtuoso. He has migrated from an earlier countercultural stance epitomized on Long Haired Coun
try Boy to become an advocate for patriotism and the military.
But this was one river he never expected to cross. “My first thought was, ‘ Did she say what I thought she said?’ ” he says. “I didn’t want to make a fool out of myself, but when it dawned on me that’s what she actually said, it got to be a very emotional moment for me. You don’t even dream about that one.”
Induction into this pantheon is the genre’s most exalted honor. On Sunday, Daniels, along with Randy Travis and record label executive Fred Foster, will be officially welcomed in the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s Medallion Ceremony.
No one in today’s country music can be mistaken for Daniels. If he has any T- shirts or baseball caps, he keeps them at home. Instead, he performs his concerts as well as his daily business in button- down shirts and working- man jeans fronted by a massive, proud- to- be- a- cowboy belt buckle. His beard is gray, his voice dusty and cracked, his gut ample. He prays unapologetically before each meal and plays The Devil
Went Down to Georgia on the fiddle with a ferocity undiminished by having done it for decades on thousands of stages. On his latest album, Night
Hawk, Daniels further bucks modern trends by honoring an often neglected branch in country’s family tree. “I’d wanted to do an album of cowboy songs for a decade or longer,” he says. “But I didn’t want to get involved with the cowboy as portrayed in the movies. I wanted to get involved in the working cowboy’s life. It’s still a very big profession at cattle ranches way out West, but I was more interested in remembering the days of the big trail drives, when you had to drive cattle a thousand or more miles across pretty much a wasteland to a railhead where you could sell them. You had to scout out water for them. You had to make sure you were going in the right direction. Thunderstorms and lightning could cause a stampede; you had to slow them down.”
Daniels pauses and continues maybe a little wistfully. “Those days are long gone. To me, that was kind of our Knights of the Round Table era. But even now, if you went to a foreign country and asked them ‘ What is your prototype of American history?’ they’d probably think of the cowboy, the guy with the big hat, the spurs and the big boots.”
In other words, a guy pretty much like Charlie Daniels.
“My first thought was, ‘ Did she say what I thought she said?’ You don’t even dream about that one.”