“A Simple Man” is coming to the Swiss Wine Festival – and it promises to be anything but ordinary.
Charlie Daniels, the music legend and Country Music Hall of Fame member, will be in concert on Friday night, August 25th, on the Big Stage at this year’s festival. Admission to the concert is admission to the festival; and Daniels will take the stage at 9 p.m.
Originally from Wilmington, North Carolina, Daniels has lived on the same piece of land east of Nashville, Tennessee for more than 50 years. He will celebrate his 81st birthday this October; and took some time last week for a phone interview about his career; old and new projects; his love of country and God; and his upcoming appearance at this year’s festival.
“We’re looking forward to being there,” Daniels said. “We’re looking forward to celebrating with everyone.”
Daniels was born in 1936, and after a long period of writing and reflecting, his autobiography will come out later this fall.
“I feel pretty good about it, as far as my part of it is concerned, telling the story,” he said. “It took me like 20 years to write the thing. I just kept writing and writing; I just couldn’t find a place to end it, because interesting things kept happening to me. I didn’t get into the Grand Old Opry until I was in my 70s as a member. These things just kept happening, and I kept writing and writing, I couldn’t find a place to end it. Then when I found out I was being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, I thought this would be a great place to kind of pause this thing.”
Daniels doesn’t remember a time without music in his life, sharing that music has been a part of his life as long as he’s been alive.
“I just seems like I was born with a love for music,” he said. “When I was a kid, radio was a lot different then. Instead of being formatted for one specific kind of music, they played everything. There weren’t nearly as many radio stations, and in our small, rural areas there would be maybe one station in your town, or maybe you wouldn’t have a station, you’d listen to the station in the next town. They’d play something for everybody. I got an awful lot of music, a lot of different genres and types of music when I was a kid. I love some of all of it. I don’t even remember my love of music beginning. I must have been born with it.”
There have been all sorts of changes to the music industry during the 45 years that the Charlie Daniels Band has been together, but the legend says that those industry changes haven’t translated much to his band and style.
“We haven’t changed a whole heck of a lot,” Daniels said of his band. “As far as our personnel is concerned. Of course we’ve had some changes, but not as many as a lot of bands have. I’ve got people who have been with me for over 40 years, people in the band and the crew, and in the offices. I’ve kind of built my band on that type of longevity situation.”
Through the years Daniels has also been one of the biggest supporters of our nation’s military, touring bases all over the world, many times into war zones in order to entertain the troops.
“I was born in 1936, and I remember the day that Pearl Harbor was bombed. I was five years old at my grandaddy’s house. We heard it come in on the real scratchy, overseas broadcast that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. I was way too young to grasp the gravity of the situation; but I knew something serious had happened. My formative days were during the second world war.
“I say this on stage every night: ‘The only two things that protect America is the grace of God and the United States military’; it was that way then, and it’s that way now, and will be that way as long as America remains a free nation. There’s no two ways about it. I so much appreciate our military.”
And what can fans expect when he takes the stage here on Friday night?
“We always do the songs that people have heard on the radio, you owe that to people, that’s what they come to see you for,” Daniels said. “They don’t know about new songs you’ve got. Our main thing is entertaining people from the time we hit the stage until the time that we come off. That’s what they want. They want to be entertained. We do our popular tunes and we do some new things that you haven’t heard us play before that we feel are entertaining. We’re really looking forward to being with you folks.”