I just thank God I can make a living doing something I enjoy as much as I do playing music.
~Charlie Daniels
I had been on the road for a long time and was not really getting anywhere. Bob Johnston, a friend of mine, had taken over Columbia in Nashville. He asked me if I wanted to come down. I did – thank God I did.
~Charlie Daniels
A talented and showy fiddler, Charlie Daniels and his band fuse hardcore country with a hard-edged Southern rock, boogie, and blues. The group — which has had a rotating cast of musicians over the years — has always been known for its instrumental dexterity, but Daniels and company were also notorious for their down-home, good-old-boy attitude..
~Stephen Thomas Erlewine (allmusic.com)
Charlie Daniels becomes member of the Grand Ole Opry in 2008:
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“Devil Went Down to Georgia” | Live at the Grand Ole Opry:
Shadows are falling and I’ve been here all day It’s too hot to sleep, time is running away Feel like my soul has turned into steel I’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal There’s not even room enough to be anywhere It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there
University Of Illinois
Champaign, Illinois
27 October 1999
Bob Dylan (vocal & guitar)
Charlie Sexton (guitar)
Larry Campbell (guitar, mandolin, pedal steel guitar & electric slide guitar)
William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
At a Baltimore hotel society gath’rin’
And the cops were called in and his weapon took from him
As they rode him in custody down to the station
And booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Take the rag away from your face
Now ain’t the time for your tears
~Bob Dylan (The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll)
The story I took out of the newspaper and I only changed the words. It’s, er… ..Well, I changed, er… the reporters view into… I used it I used it for something I wanted to say, er, and I used his view, the Maryland reporters view to get at what I wanted to say and turn it that way. And I used a true story, that’s all. I could have used a made-up story.
~Bob Dylan (to Steve Allen – Feb. 1964)
audio from the interview:
“The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” is an extremely moving song that has stood the test of time better than any of Dylan’s other early topical songs of this sort (retellings of real events, usually tragedies, usually with a moral attached or implicit). Dylan sings it from the heart; he really cares about the woman who
died-her dignity and the value of her life come through in the song, it is a memorial to her and a tribute to people like her as much as it is an attack on her killer and people like him and the system that coddles them.
~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan Performing Artist I: The Early Years 1960-1973)
Sixteen years
Sixteen banners united over the field
Where the good shepherd grieves
Desperate men, desperate women divided
Spreading their wings ’neath the falling leaves
~Bob Dylan, Changing of The Guards
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They do. Changing Of The Guards is a thousand years old. Woody Guthrie said he just picked songs out of the air. That means that they were already there and that he was tuned into them. Changing Of The Guards might be a song that might have been there for thousands of years, sailing around in the mist, and one day I just tuned into it. Just like Tupelo Honey was floating around and Van Morrison came by.
~Bob Dylan (to Jonathan Cott, September 1978)
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… the title is brilliant, as is the phrase that leads into it (“Or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards”). The rhythm and melody are original and powerful; and Dylan’s use of the back-up singers to echo his words at strategic moments throughout each verse is a marvelous device, effective and haunting. The fade-in at the start, followed by the first words of the song-“Sixteen years,” intriguing in any case and neatly self-referential to those listeners who know how many years it’s been since Dylan’s first album came out, since he started his publicjourneypromises something really special; the storytelling structure of the song, mixing political and romantic intrigue, rich imagery, and fascinating setting, singer slipping neatly between first and third person narrative, seems more than adequate to deliver on the promise.
~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan: Performing Artist, Vol 2: The Middle Years 1974-1986)
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