Subject: RE: Origins: Devil's in the house of the rising sun ?
From:
GUEST,revtheteke
Date: 04 Feb 13 - 11:30 PM
I'm about eight years late to the discussion, but I think I may have some light to shine on things, with what is a somewhat educated guess at the meaning behind the song in question.
As we all know, the ballad of the Devil Went Down to Georgia is that he challenges young Johnny to a fiddle contest. The Devil then goes first and plays a pretty amazing fiddle solo with accompaniment from a band. Throughout the solo you pick up a very rocked up vibe, perhaps somewhat indicative of the type of music that the Charlie Daniels Band was most well known for in the 1970's. The CDB had paid homage to the country rock/southern rock of the era five years earlier in the song "The South's Gonna Do It Again" on the album "Fire on the Mountain" in 1974, and the CDB certainly was most well known for fitting into the vibe of the sort of music that you hear in the Devil's solo.
But, the next thing that happens in the ballad is that Johnny jumps up on a hickory stump and he plays, by my count, three songs. The first is easy enough to figure out: "Fire on the Mountain" is a traditional fiddle ballad that would have been played by many old-time bands in the early to mid 20th Century. Probably the best known recording of that song is Bill Monroe's version. Monroe was, himself, a fiddle and mandolin player, and on his recording the song (which would have often been played as an instrumental number) features Monroe's high pitched tenor singing the words repeatedly, "Fire on the Hillside, Run Boys Run, Fire on the Mountain Run Boys Run," and so forth.
Next, it would seem that Johnny plays "House of the Rising Sun". As you can see in the discussion above, lots of folks here have been wondering about the roots of the song, how old it really may or may not be, whether it is or is not an American adaptation of a Celtic fiddle tune, etc. All of those questions are good ones, but let me suggest a more likely reason for why this song makes sense in the trio mentioned in Johnny's medley: Roy Acuff, who himself was a prominent fiddler, was one of the first country musicians to record the song. It appeared as "Rising Sun" on the B-side of his 1938 single for "The Great Speckled Bird". Acuff was undisputedly one of the biggest stars of the pre-Hank Williams country music era, and so Daniels' parents and grandparents would have surely had that recording in their library, and it probably goes without saying that a country boy like Charlie Daniels probably heard Roy Acuff play that song before he ever heard the Animals or Bob Dylan do it in the 60's. From what I can tell on this thread, there's no version of "House of the Rising Sun" that specifically has the line "The Devil's in the House of the Rising Sun", so Daniels probably stuck that "The Devil's in the" in there to make the melody work, but the allusion is clearly to the "House of the Rising Sun" song, and the idea that it's an allusion to Roy Acuff's version makes as much sense as any other theory.
Finally, Johnny sings the refrain from "Granny Does Your Dog Bite". This song is a traditional fiddle tune as well, but what is notable about it is that it was one of the tracks on Seals and Croffts's 1970 album "Down Home". Seals and Crofts were a duet that were very popular in the 70's, and they were surely a group that Daniels himself would have been listening to, and the "Down Home" album was recorded nine years before "The Devil Went Down to Georgia". Daniels surely was familiar with that track on the record, and himself being a fiddler liked it because it was a traditional fiddle tune.
So, consider all of that and think about the meaning of the song. The Devil challenges Johnny to a fiddling contests, plays an impressive rock tune, but then loses to Johnny who plays a medly of tunes that were traditional ballads that would have been heard on country radio thirty and forty years before "The Devil Went Down to Georgia", along with at square dances across the south.
That all having been said, my take on the song is that it's Charlie Daniels' nod to fiddlers and fiddle tunes who inspired him to be what he is: a very talented fiddle player. I think the song is his clever way of saying that as much as he loves the music he makes, he knows that he's forever indebted to fiddlers like Bill Monroe and Roy Acuff, who were undisputed legends amongst Daniels' parents generation, along with those standard fiddle tunes that you'd hear at barn dances on Saturday nights LONG before you ever heard Charlie Daniels playing along with an electric bass and electric guitar accompanying him.
One more thing: while there was perhaps even more anti-rock reaction to rock music amongst southern evangelicals in the 1980's (Jimmy Swaggart wrote a book on the subject in 1986), it's still true that throughout the 60's and 70's, as rock music became less and less like Elvis and more and more like the Beatles, Black Sabbath, and Lynyrd Skynyrd, lots of folks in Daniels' parents' generation may have heard his brand of country-rock and associated it with the "devil's music". So, again, the song pits the CDB's sound itself--as it was being critiqued and characterized by old timers--against the traditional sounds of Bill Monroe, Roy Acuff, and fiddle tunes you'd hear at square dances. But, the genius of the song is that Daniels gives the Devil his due by championing the fiddlers of yesteryear.
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sj
