Interview: Charlie Daniels celebrates 40 years of "The Devil Went Down to Georgia"

The Charlie Daniels Band is spending the summer celebrating the phenomenon that launched them to stardom in May 1979.

"The Devil Went Down to Georgia" - a song Charlie Daniels calls the "voice of America", because of its international popularity - reaches its 40th year of being the most impactful fiddle-centric song to ever be released. 

In an interview with News Channel Nebraska's Hunter Arterburn last month, Daniels said it's highly unusual to have a song last that long and have it still be a vital part of radio.

"When I get my performance statements, it's amazing to me how many times this song plays on the radio around the world in a year's time. We still do it at every show we do. It's been an amazing tune. It's been a real blessing. It's hard to believe it's been 40 years ago when we recorded it."

Daniels had no idea we would still be talking about the song almost as if it was a new release today.

He began creating the genre-crossing hit song with just one line: "The devil went down to Georgia." He got the rest of the idea for the song from a poem about a fiddle contest he read in school called "The Mountain Whippoorwill" by Stephen Vincent Benét.

"Taz, our keyboard player, came up with that incredible riff behind the devil's part. I just went off, wrote a set of lyrics, went back and we put it together in-studio. We had an outline of what we wanted to do, but we kind of created it with all the sounds after we got started with it. It was just one of those things that you cannot plan on."

The band continues their summer tour in Montgomery, AL tonight (Friday) and Asheville, N.C. on Saturday.

You can listen to Charlie's full interview on "The Burn" (weekday mornings from 5 a.m. to 10 a.m.) below.

 

Follow Hunter on Twitter: @TheBurnRadio