RIP Charlie Daniels

RIP Mr. Daniels,

This was one of the first concert's my Dad took me too. He was the country music fan and I was along for the ride as a grade schooler. But I quickly learned that Charlie Daniels could play any type of music he wanted and that man in a big cowboy hat could sure entertain.

I found this snippet and thought it was a good read during the current times.

"Where the Allmans and Skynyrd grew up in the wake of rock & roll, Daniels graduated high school in 1955, just as the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum. It also was the year Bill Haley took “Rock Around the Clock” to number one and the year Chuck Berry released “Maybellene” — in other words, the year rock & roll started to break, bringing African Americans into the pop Top 10 along with it. Daniels grew up listening to Black music — he claimed “the one thing the South has always done is respect black music. Whether you respected black PEOPLE or not, you respected the music.” Still, Daniels didn’t quite see a common ground between Black and White. “For me, it was like this: they had their music and we had our music. And everybody knew that black music was the pacesetter.”
Despite this, Daniels started his musical career playing bluegrass in 1953 but he couldn’t resist the pull of rock & roll. Moving north to Washington DC after high school, he formed a combo called the Rockets and played as often as possible. Through these gigs, he became exposed to jazz and blues and the Black musicians who played it. Daniels slowly started to shed his preconceived notions. He’d later say, “One of the hardest things about giving up any kind of prejudice is being honest with yourself. It’s not easy to say, ‘For nineteen years I’ve been living and believing a certain way and I’m beginning to wonder if what I believed is right.’ Then you go a little further and start admitting, ‘No, I KNOW what I believed is not right. I have no right to feel that way.” Once Daniels fell for Black music, he started to understand the Civil Rights struggle and his mind opened."

Full read here. link

I also thought he was in his 80's in the 1980's ... but nope... I was wrong.