Charlie Daniels

The Jaguars and a Song for Elvis Presley

When his family moved back to Wilmington the bluegrass band broke up, and Daniels found work singing and playing guitar in clubs in Jacksonville, North Carolina. His playing moved toward rock and roll. He formed the Jaguars, a band NCpedia dates from 1959 to 1967. In 1959, according to a Hall of Fame photo caption, they cut a rock instrumental called "Jaguar" in Fort Worth, Texas, which became a regional hit.

He was also writing. "It Hurts Me," a song he co-wrote with the record producer Bob Johnston, was recorded by Elvis Presley in 1964. It was Johnston who pushed him to move to Nashville, and in 1967 he did, to work as a session musician.

Nashville Skyline and the Session Years

The work came quickly. Daniels played on Bob Dylan's Nashville Skyline in 1969, and on Dylan's Self Portrait and New Morning the next year. He also recorded with Leonard Cohen, Flatt and Scruggs, Claude King, Al Kooper, Marty Robbins, Pete Seeger and Ringo Starr, and produced the folk-rock band the Youngbloods in 1969 and 1970. He went on the road with Cohen too: a Hall of Fame photograph shows him on fiddle beside Cohen and Johnston at the Isle of Wight Festival on August 31, 1970.

His own recording career started in 1970, and he soon put together the Charlie Daniels Band. "Uneasy Rider," a comic song about a hippie who has to get out of a redneck bar, was a Top Ten pop single in 1973. The 1974 album Fire on the Mountain carried "The South's Gonna Do It Again," a Top Forty pop hit that Jimmy Carter later used in his 1976 presidential campaign. Daniels played one of Carter's inaugural balls in 1977.

The First Volunteer Jam, 1974

The same year he launched the Volunteer Jam, a multi-artist concert in Nashville that sometimes ran past ten hours and where the performers were usually not announced in advance. Billboard counts the original run of the jams from 1974 to 1996 at various Nashville venues. Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe and Tammy Wynette shared those bills with James Brown, Billy Joel, B.B. King, Little Richard and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

The band lived on the road. The Associated Press reported that in the 1970s it sometimes played 250 shows a year. "There's not a city we haven't played in," Daniels said in 1998, the year the Academy of Country Music gave him its Pioneer Award. That year he also said: "I've kept people employed for over 20 years and never missed a payroll."

Johnny, the Devil and Million Mile Reflections

After moving to Epic Records, Daniels released "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" in 1979, a story song about a young fiddler named Johnny who beats the devil in a contest for a golden fiddle. It reached No. 1 on the country chart and No. 3 on the pop chart and sold more than a million copies. Billboard notes it was his only No. 1 on its country chart. The Country Music Association named it Single of the Year, and the band won the Grammy for Best Country Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group. The band then sang it in Urban Cowboy (1980), the John Travolta film tied to the country boom of those years.

The certification of the album it came from, Million Mile Reflections, depends on who is counting: the Hall of Fame calls it platinum, while NCpedia calls it triple platinum and the No. 1 country album of 1979. Both agree it turned the band toward country music. From 1979 to 2011 the Charlie Daniels Band placed 29 hits on the country charts.

In the 1990s Daniels softened some of his older lyrics. In "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" he changed "son of a bitch" to "son of a gun." His single "Simple Man" drew complaints for suggesting that drug dealers be lynched and child abusers fed to alligators.

A 1979 Song Under a Pre-1978 Contract

In the spring of 2010 Daniels phoned Brian Reisinger, then a reporter at the Nashville Business Journal, about a fight over the copyright in his best known song. The issue was termination rights: the right of a writer to take back a song from a publisher. Under the law before 1978, songwriters often waited 56 years to recover their songs. The law in force from 1978 shortened that to about 35 years.

Daniels said he wrote "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" in 1979, during a break in a recording session, but under a publishing deal signed before 1978. That put the song in a gap between the two regimes, and its publisher was trying to claim the longer term. "It's time for them to come back to me," Daniels told the Journal. "It's time for me to be able to do with those copyrights as I see fit."

His attorney, Casey Del Casino, was among the first to raise the question with the U.S. Copyright Office, which opened a notice of inquiry. The responses included one from the Columbia law professor Jane Ginsburg, who argued for the songwriters. Writing in Saving Country Music in 2021, Reisinger reported that legal records confirmed the office later issued a clarification: songs created after 1978 under the older deals revert to their writers on the shorter 35-year schedule. The change let Daniels go back to his publisher and negotiate a better deal, Reisinger wrote. Ginsburg warned against calling the clarification a precedent, since it was narrow and can still be challenged in court. The fight concerned only the song copyright. The recordings are a separate right.

Martina McBride's Card at the Ryman, 2007

On November 19, 2007, while Daniels was hosting his annual Christmas for Kids benefit at the Ryman Auditorium, Martina McBride walked on stage with a small box. Inside was a card inviting him to join the Grand Ole Opry. He was 71. "I never ever in my wildest dreams when I came to Nashville with my precious wife and son dreamed that this would happen," he told the crowd. He became an Opry member in 2008.

In 2014 he co-founded the Journey Home Project, a charity for veterans, and in 2015 the Charlie and Hazel Daniels Veterans and Military Family Center opened at Middle Tennessee State University. On October 16, 2016, Brenda Lee placed the medallion of the Country Music Hall of Fame around his neck at the induction ceremony in the museum's CMA Theater.

Hazel Daniels and the Fondalite Club in Tulsa

Daniels met Hazel Juanita Alexander at the Fondalite Club in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Two Townsquare Media sites, Taste of Country and Wide Open Country, date their wedding to September 20, 1964, before a justice of the peace in Tulsa; NCpedia gives the year as 1963. Daniels told the Oklahoman in 2014 that he was "50 years after, without a regret in the world about marryin' my darlin' from Tulsa." They had one son, Charlie Daniels Jr., born in 1965, who worked for his father for two decades.

Hermitage, Tennessee, July 6, 2020

Daniels played his last show on March 13, 2020, at the Mark C. Smith Concert Hall in Huntsville, Alabama, before the pandemic stopped touring. At 83 he was still playing up to 140 dates a year. On July 6, 2020, he had a hemorrhagic stroke and died later that day at a hospital in Hermitage, Tennessee.

He left a will, his son told Billboard, but had done little estate planning. The family went through his royalties, recordings, instruments and equipment for tax purposes. The estate closed the touring business, laying off 25 staff, and sold equipment and personal items through the memorabilia company Rockology: a bass boat for $5,995, the couch from his studio for $995. His manager David Corlew, who had worked with him since 1973, said there were about 4,000 pieces of equipment to sell. "It took us 50 years to build what Charlie represented, so we're not going to unravel it anytime soon," he said.

Blue Hat Records and the Masters Split Three Ways

Daniels founded Blue Hat Records in 1997 and released most of his later work on it. Corlew estimated in 2021 that the vault held at least 40 master recordings Daniels owned, including unreleased tracks, plus decades of Volunteer Jam tapes. The first posthumous release, Duets, came out on Blue Hat on July 16, 2021. Daniels Jr. was working separately with Sony on reissues from his father's 1975 to 1991 years at Epic, including Honky Tonk Avenue, a concept album recorded in 1984 and never released.

On February 17, 2022, MusicRow reported that Bob Frank Entertainment had bought into the catalog of masters. Its chief executive, Bob Frank, now owns one third. The other two thirds belong in equal parts to Blue Hat Records, run by Corlew, and to the Daniels estate, held by Hazel Daniels and Charlie Daniels Jr. The price was not disclosed. The partners announced a live album of the first Volunteer Jam, held in 1974 at the War Memorial Auditorium in Nashville.

No reliable figure for Daniels' net worth or for the value of his estate has been published. Billboard's account of the estate gives no value, the masters sale had no published price, and the numbers that circulate online cite no source, so this article gives none. Daniels would have turned 90 on October 28, 2026.

Sources

• Charlie Daniels - Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
• Daniels, Charlie | NCpedia
• Country rocker and fiddler Charlie Daniels dies at age 83
• Charlie Daniels, Country Music Hall of Famer, Dead at 83 - InsideHook
• Charlie Daniels' Legacy: How His Music Will Live On
• Bob Frank Entertainment Acquires Portion Of Charlie Daniels Masters - MusicRow.com
• How Charlie Daniels' "Devil Went Down to GA" Was Copyright Law Lynchpin - Saving Country Music
• Charlie Daniels receives a surprising invitation
• Flashback: Charlie Daniels' Grand Ole Opry Invitation in 2007
• Charlie Daniels + Wife Hazel Daniels: a 50-Plus Year Love Story
• Inside Charlie Daniels + Wife Hazel's Five-Decade Love Story