It's my impression that Charlie Daniels wrote "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" to showcase his fiddle playing--it's the story of the devil trying to steal the soul of a fiddler named Johnny by offering him a fiddle made of gold as prize in a fiddling contest between Johnny and the devil. Daniels doesn't quite have the mythic/heroic hubris thing down--the human who gets into a contest with a diety (even the devil) always loses unless he has divine help: Arachne ends up a spider, Bellerophon gets blasted off the winged horse, Daniel Webster wins because he recognizes that all the condemned in the jury are possessed by the spirit of America, John Bosco finally outsings the devil when he finds the right prayer to get God's help. But Johnny beats Satan simply because he can play fiddle better.

Sometime after he recorded the piece, Charlie Daniels cut off his fingers with a chainsaw. --seed