Post by Scully on Sept 24, 2013 7:29:42 GMT -6
DANIELS TELLS STORY IN E-BOOK
“THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO GEORGIA”
Written by Brad Schmitt
For The Tennessean
By his own admission, country legend Charlie Daniels has joined the online world “kickin’ and screamin’,” but he has joined it.
Back in 1985, Daniels published a collection of short stories — and an abbreviated autobiography — under the title of his most famous song, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”
And now, 28 year later, he’s releasing a $6.99 e-book version on Amazon and Apple iBooks.
Tell me why you wanted to come back out with an e-book version of your book nearly 30 years after putting it out?
Kind of like climbing Mt. Everest, because it’s there. You know Charlie, my son. He dragged me kicking and screaming into every kind of technology. I have the Twitter and this and that.
I come from a different world. I come from rotary dial up telephone and that sort of thing. I just did not want to be bothered with learningsomething that was so foreign to me. But he got me into it.
Of course, this was something that was not available the time we released the book before. So they put it up and we’re gonna see what’s gonna happen with it.
So let’s talk about the book. For me, my favorite part was your mini-autobiography.
That’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about before, but I’ve been working on an autobiography for several years and I hope to bring it to fruition sometime in the next couple of years. But that is the first part of it.
You’re in a place now where you feel like it’s time?
Well, you know, I’m not done (with my career). But you’ve gotta do it sometime or another. A lot of people write autobiographies when they’re still having active careers. I’m still out here doing it. I’ll do about 90 dates this year and 10 Grand Ole Opry appearances, that’s enough to keep me very much involved.
There’s enough that’s gone by that I feel comfortable writing about it. There’s a lot of lessons that I’d like to get across to some of the folks who’ve asked me for advice. I can do that because it’s not gonna change.
So back to what you wrote in your 1985 book — you grew up in North Carolina in a house with no indoor plumbing.
Uh, yeah. That was not an anomaly at all. We had electricity but we did not have running water. We had a pump on the back porch. It’s something that we didn’t think about. If you’re born that way in a house that’s that way, you don’t even think about it.
Today, I’d be totally lost. But at the time, it was no big deal.
When you were writing about growing up, your size came up a few times. You mentioned that you were “a big boy” growing up, and every time you moved, some other kid would feel threatened and challenge you to a fight.
Yeah, that was part of it, and part of it was the culture at the time. They just wanted to see what I was made of. I did go through quite a bit those first years.
Even though you held your own, it doesn’t sound like you enjoyed that very much.
I didn’t. I never enjoyed fisticuffs. Unfortunately at the time, it was pretty much a part of the culture. I don’t mean people fought all the time. I mean, insults were taken very seriously.
One of the things that made me sad, you said when you were starting out that nobody wanted a chubby fiddle player.
That was a couple times in my life. That was before I got established, learning the ropes, kinda learning what to do and where to go and that sort of thing.
It was interesting to me that there’s such an emphasis on appearance these days, but you had to deal with that, too.
Oh yeah, I think it’s something everyone has to deal with. Listen to how I sound, don’t look at how I look.
Tell me how you came to start writing these stories.
I had a guy I worked with, he said, “You write stories in your songs. Why don’t you write stories?” I thought, I’ll give that a shot. I went to my motel room one day and wrote a little story and it went on from there.
The stories themselves were to some extent about, well, I made them bigger than life and wrote about a lot of things that never happened. But if someone had an outlandish personality, I extended it, made it twice as outlandish as it was.
The hypochondriac lady, we had those. My wife knew a lady in Tulsa, Okla., who thought people on TV could see her when she watched TV.
Do you have a favorite story in the collection?
I like “A Carolina Christmas Carol” a lot. I read that as part of a Christmas tradition at my house. I’ve been doing it for years and years at my house.
Do you have any goals or hopes for the book by putting it online?
I’m trying it as more of an experiment than anything else, just to be honest about it. It’s all brand new to me. You know I write other things, opinion columns and that sort of thing.
It’s something that is an outlet.
“THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO GEORGIA”
Written by Brad Schmitt
For The Tennessean
By his own admission, country legend Charlie Daniels has joined the online world “kickin’ and screamin’,” but he has joined it.
Back in 1985, Daniels published a collection of short stories — and an abbreviated autobiography — under the title of his most famous song, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”
And now, 28 year later, he’s releasing a $6.99 e-book version on Amazon and Apple iBooks.
Tell me why you wanted to come back out with an e-book version of your book nearly 30 years after putting it out?
Kind of like climbing Mt. Everest, because it’s there. You know Charlie, my son. He dragged me kicking and screaming into every kind of technology. I have the Twitter and this and that.
I come from a different world. I come from rotary dial up telephone and that sort of thing. I just did not want to be bothered with learningsomething that was so foreign to me. But he got me into it.
Of course, this was something that was not available the time we released the book before. So they put it up and we’re gonna see what’s gonna happen with it.
So let’s talk about the book. For me, my favorite part was your mini-autobiography.
That’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about before, but I’ve been working on an autobiography for several years and I hope to bring it to fruition sometime in the next couple of years. But that is the first part of it.
You’re in a place now where you feel like it’s time?
Well, you know, I’m not done (with my career). But you’ve gotta do it sometime or another. A lot of people write autobiographies when they’re still having active careers. I’m still out here doing it. I’ll do about 90 dates this year and 10 Grand Ole Opry appearances, that’s enough to keep me very much involved.
There’s enough that’s gone by that I feel comfortable writing about it. There’s a lot of lessons that I’d like to get across to some of the folks who’ve asked me for advice. I can do that because it’s not gonna change.
So back to what you wrote in your 1985 book — you grew up in North Carolina in a house with no indoor plumbing.
Uh, yeah. That was not an anomaly at all. We had electricity but we did not have running water. We had a pump on the back porch. It’s something that we didn’t think about. If you’re born that way in a house that’s that way, you don’t even think about it.
Today, I’d be totally lost. But at the time, it was no big deal.
When you were writing about growing up, your size came up a few times. You mentioned that you were “a big boy” growing up, and every time you moved, some other kid would feel threatened and challenge you to a fight.
Yeah, that was part of it, and part of it was the culture at the time. They just wanted to see what I was made of. I did go through quite a bit those first years.
Even though you held your own, it doesn’t sound like you enjoyed that very much.
I didn’t. I never enjoyed fisticuffs. Unfortunately at the time, it was pretty much a part of the culture. I don’t mean people fought all the time. I mean, insults were taken very seriously.
One of the things that made me sad, you said when you were starting out that nobody wanted a chubby fiddle player.
That was a couple times in my life. That was before I got established, learning the ropes, kinda learning what to do and where to go and that sort of thing.
It was interesting to me that there’s such an emphasis on appearance these days, but you had to deal with that, too.
Oh yeah, I think it’s something everyone has to deal with. Listen to how I sound, don’t look at how I look.
Tell me how you came to start writing these stories.
I had a guy I worked with, he said, “You write stories in your songs. Why don’t you write stories?” I thought, I’ll give that a shot. I went to my motel room one day and wrote a little story and it went on from there.
The stories themselves were to some extent about, well, I made them bigger than life and wrote about a lot of things that never happened. But if someone had an outlandish personality, I extended it, made it twice as outlandish as it was.
The hypochondriac lady, we had those. My wife knew a lady in Tulsa, Okla., who thought people on TV could see her when she watched TV.
Do you have a favorite story in the collection?
I like “A Carolina Christmas Carol” a lot. I read that as part of a Christmas tradition at my house. I’ve been doing it for years and years at my house.
Do you have any goals or hopes for the book by putting it online?
I’m trying it as more of an experiment than anything else, just to be honest about it. It’s all brand new to me. You know I write other things, opinion columns and that sort of thing.
It’s something that is an outlet.