I had half a mind to just post this picture of a pile of Phillipses and let that be my column for the week, because what could ever be more delightful and hilarious than this?
But Nashville, I think it’s time we have a serious talk about a subject we’ve been avoiding. “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” by The Charlie Daniels Band is a bad song. I feel uniquely qualified to make this assessment, because I have a degree in English and I am second cousins with a guy who made a deal with the Devil, for real. Well, I mean ... it was real enough that it made his Wikipedia page, though I haven’t asked the Devil if this really happened or anything.
From a book of New England legends and folk lore in prose and poetry
Here's the story of my cousin, Jonathan Moulton. So supposedly, the Devil comes to him and says, “I’ll fill your boots full of gold if you give me your soul." Cousin John ponders this, but he’s all, “What happens if, say, you can’t fill my boots with gold in a specific time? Like, could you have my boots filled with gold by morning?” And the Devil is all, “If I can’t, you can keep the gold and your soul. I’ll come by tonight to bring you your gold.”
Great. John runs home, takes off his boots, and cuts holes in the heels. He then cuts matching holes in the floor beneath the boots so that anything that goes into the boots will fall down into the basement.
So that evening, the Devil shows up with a huge sack of gold slung over his shoulder and begins to fill John’s boots. But even with that whole big sack of gold evenly distributed in the boots, those boots aren’t a bit full. So the Devil goes back to hell and gets another sack and another sack and another sack, and finally dawn comes and the boots are just as empty as they were when the Devil started. John keeps his soul and the gold.
Or does he?
Because there’s a second part to this story. Eventually, John dies of old age, and after his funeral, his friends are carrying his coffin to the cemetery when, wham, all of a sudden, the coffin weighs too much for his friends to hold. Imagine it. One minute, the six men are easily handling the coffin. The next minute, it’s like the coffin weighs 100 times what it did. They drop it, of course, and it smashes open on the ground. But does John’s corpse roll out of the splintered pile of wood?
No. Instead, the whole coffin is filled with gold. Everyone sees it. But as soon as the clouds part and the sunlight hits the treasure, it vanishes. The gold and John’s body were never seen again. It’s presumed the Devil got what was rightfully his in the end.
"The Devil Went Down to Georgia" was originally featured on The Charlie Daniels Band's Million Mile Reflections
Fast-forward 200 years, and now the Devil is going down to Georgia, looking for a soul to steal.
The main problem with this song is that the Devil is obviously a better fiddle player than Johnny. The Devil plays his solo and, wow, his fingers are flying, his strings are screeching. And the band has a funky beat going on. Then Johnny has his turn, and it’s fine. Like when you ask your partner what they want for their birthday and you get them socks and underwear instead. And, yes, they did need, but ... whatever. It’s fine. And somehow Johnny wins?
It makes no sense. It has never made sense. It feels like we’re all being gaslit, because Johnny’s song is bland as heck, and the Devil’s is great, yet Johnny is now the one with the golden fiddle.
So I thought that maybe Johnny was doing something in his solo that seems easy to outsiders, but is wowing the socks off of professionals. As an example: Sometimes I dye my own yarn, and it’s pretty easy to dye a very beautiful variegated yarn, even though it looks like a lot of work. But one time I dyed a blanket after I’d crocheted it. The whole thing was done in bare yarn, and then I folded it and rolled it and stuck it in the biggest dye pot I had. It was very difficult. But no one who looks at the blanket who doesn’t understand what they’re looking at will get the undertaking, nor will they understand my pride in that blanket. But I feel confident that anyone who has dyed yarn will see that and say, “Damn, wow. She pulled it off.” So I thought maybe it was that way with Johnny. Maybe musicians are listening to Johnny’s solo and saying, “Damn, it sounds like Johnny is playing with six fingers.” Or, “My God, that’s a nearly impossible note to hit when it’s following this other note.” Something that would make sense of the Devil’s awe.
This is Nashville, so I asked around. The answer is so terrible. It’s just so bad and stupid that I now get enraged every time I listen to this dumb song. But everyone I asked gave me the same explanation. When the song goes “Fire on the mountain, run boys run / Devil’s in the house of the rising sun / Chickens in the bread pan picking out dough / Granny does your dog bite? No child, no” — this is not Johnny’s solo, but the songs he played the Devil. We, as listeners, don’t get to hear them.
You thought you were in a story song, but no, you were actually in one of those country songs that, for some reason, wants to tell you the names of other songs you could be listening to, if this song weren’t in the way.
First, this breaks a basic rule of literature: Chekhov’s gun. If you make a point of showing an audience a gun in the first act, it needs to go off in the third act. If you tell people that the Devil and Johnny are going to have a fiddle fight, we need to hear the fiddle fight.
Second, Charlie Daniels was an amazing fiddle player. He could have easily played masterful snippets of one or all of those songs.
But now we’re in the uncomfortable position where, when the Devil is like, “Well, you won,” we have to take his — the Prince of Lies' — word for it that Johnny was better. And then Johnny turns right around and commits the sin of pride. And we have no way to judge if it’s deserved.
This is bad songwriting. How have we all not been throwing our radios across the room every time this song comes on for the past 50 years?
