"Uneasy Rider '88" recast his first hit's hero as a good ol' boy getting stuck in a gay bar. That doesn't justify hostage-taking, of course, but one suspects that in the Iranian students' minds, they too were telling Uncle Sam to leave their, um, long-bearded country boys alone.ĭaniels stumbled into yet more contradictions in the ensuing years. Most notably, it had asked Iranians to tolerate the brutal regime of the Shah, then sheltered him after he was overthrown - not unlike the Taliban's willingness to shelter Osama bin Laden, come to think of it. The song may be a response to the Iranian hostage crisis, but the only foreigners to be cited by name are the Russians, who had just launched their own war against fundamentalist guerrillas in Afghanistan.Īt any rate, while the Ayatollahs and Soviets certainly deserved Daniels' ire, the American government hadn't exactly refrained from askin' nobody for nothin'. 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. The longhaired country boy may be anti-authoritarian, but he's also patriotic. 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.
#REDNECK IN A GAY BAR SONG PROFESSIONAL#
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.įortunately, it was the era of Willie Nelson and Lynyrd Skynyrd, of outlaw country and Southern rock. The hero nearly gets into a fight with "some fella with green teeth" and his right-wing redneck buddies, then outwits them. And so he didn't.ĭaniels 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. 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. When Country Music Television held a benefit for the victims of the September 11 attacks, one performer who'd been invited didn't appear.Ĭharlie 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.