Uneasy ride: The cultural contradiction of Charlie Daniels.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Brief Article

When Country Music Television held a benefit for the victims of the September 11 attacks, one performer who'd been invited didn't appear.

Charlie Daniels had hoped to play a new song at the October concert, but organizers worried that its opening lines might offend Arabs: "This ain't no rag, it's a flag/And we don't wear it on our heads." Daniels gamely tried to defend the lyric, claiming at one point that it was aimed at Osama bin Laden alone, not all Arabs ("If Osama wore a cowboy hat, I'd write about a cowboy hat"), and at another point that he was merely expressing his disapproval of American-flag bandanas. On one matter, though, he stuck to his guns: If he couldn't play the song at the benefit, he wasn't going to appear there at all. And so he didn't.

Daniels had come a long way since 1973, when his first hit, "Uneasy Rider," told the tale of a hippie whose car breaks down in Mississippi. The hero nearly gets into a fight with "some fella with green teeth" and his right-wing redneck buddies, then outwits them. But for all the song's hick-baiting, the singer couldn't conceal his Southern drawl: A North Carolina native who's spent most of his professional career in Tennessee, Daniels' long hair couldn't cover up his red neck, to borrow a phrase from David Allan Coe.

Fortunately, it was the era of Willie Nelson and Lynyrd Skynyrd, of outlaw country and Southern rock. With 1974's "Long Haired Country Boy," Daniels embraced his cultural contradictions: "People say I'm no good, crazy as a loon/'Cause I get stoned in the morning, I get drunk in the afternoon.../I ain't askin' nobody for nothing, if I can't get it on my own/If you don't like the way I'm livin', just leave this longhaired country boy alone." Suddenly, the hippie ethic didn't seem that far removed from backwoods libertarianism.

The Longhaired country boy may be anti-authoritarian, but he's also patriotic. In 1980, four years after campaigning for Jimmy Carter, Daniels had another hit with the hard-rocking "In America." A sample lyric: "We may have done a little bit of fighting amongst ourselves/But you outside people best leave us alone/'Cause we'll all stick together, and you can take that to the bank/That's the cowboys and the hippies, and the rebels and the yanks." The sentiment isn't very different from that of a country boy, longhaired or otherwise, telling a trespasser to get the hell off his yard. But the target is a bit more diffuse. The song may be a response to the...