A High School Poem Inspired What Became Charlie Daniels’ Biggest Hit in 1979

In 1979, Charlie Daniels released “The Devil Went Down To Georgia“. The biggest single of his career, Daniels wrote the song. He also shares songwriting credit with his band members, Tom Crain, Joel DiGregorio, Fred Edwards, Charles Hayward, and Jim Marshall. It appears on his Million Mile Reflections album.

Videos by American Songwriter

“The Devil Went Down To Georgia” is the story of a young boy named Johnny, whom the devil challenges to a fiddle duet. If Johnny wins, he gets a golden fiddle. But if he loses, the devil gets his soul. Daniels later revealed that the idea for the song came from a poem he read in high school, called “The Mountain Whippoorwill”.

“We had gone in and rehearsed, written, and recorded the music for our Million Mile Reflections album,” Daniels tells Songfacts. “And all of a sudden we said, ‘We don’t have a fiddle song.’ I don’t know why we didn’t discover that. But we went out, and we took a couple of days’ break from the recording studio, and went into a rehearsal studio. And I just had this idea, ‘The Devil went down to Georgia.’”

“The idea may have come from an old poem that Stephen Vincent Benet wrote many, many years ago,” he adds. “He didn’t use that line. But I just started, and the band started playing, and first thing you know we had it down.”

What Charlie Daniels Disliked About”The Devil Went Down To Georgia”

Without question, “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” changed everything for Daniels. The song gave Daniels the only Grammy Award of his career. It also became a platinum-selling single. Still, later in life, Daniels conceded that there is a part of the song that he wishes he had changed.

“The devil’s just blowing smoke,” Daniels says. “If you listen to that, there’s just a bunch of noise. There’s no melody to it, there’s no nothing, it’s just a bunch of noise. Just confusion and stuff. And of course Johnny’s saying something. ‘You can’t beat the devil without the Lord.’ I didn’t have that in the song, but I should have.”

Daniels also disliked that it was used in the video game Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock.

“[It] is supposed to be a lighthearted novelty about a fiddling contest between a country boy and the devil, and the devil always loses,” Daniels says. “That is not the case with the Guitar Hero version, which comes complete with a horned, guitar-playing devil who battles the player and very often wins. … I did not grant these people my permission to pervert my song and am disgusted with the result.”

Still, the song remains a cultural phenomenon. It is also one that numerous artists have tried to cover in the years since Daniels first released it.

“People ask me if I imagined ‘The Devil Went Down To Georgia’ would be the success it has been,” Daniels admits in 2019. “My answer is I had no idea that forty years after the fact we would still be talking about it almost as if it was a new release.”

Photo by Donald Kravitz/Getty Images