Charlie Daniels — a gentleman and a patriot — is currently on tour and has an album of duets out called Deuces. On that album he does the Bob Dylan tunes Like A Rolling Stone and Maggie’s Farm. In interviews recently he’s been asked about Bob.

From the Cincinnati Enquirer:

Question: On your latest record, “Deuces,” there’s a couple of tunes written by Bob Dylan, whom you did session work for on records like “Nashville Skyline” and “New Morning.” He’s somebody who started as a protest singer, but now he steers clear of the finger-pointing songs. On the other hand, you don’t shy away from mixing politics and music. Do you have any thoughts on the different approaches?

[Charlie Daniels]: One time we did a song called “Three Angels,” and we were sitting there listening to the playback, and Dylan said, “I wrote that about three angels they put on a church across the street from where I was living, and they lit them up at Christmastime.” When the album came out, some guy wrote this thing about Dylan’s insight into humanity with the three angels and all this stuff, and I thought, “Man, he wrote it about Christmas decorations.” That’s the point about Dylan, with somebody like that who’s so unique with words, you don’t really know. Of course some of the stuff was protest stuff. He was kind of the father of it, the intellectual side of it anyway. My stuff, I don’t look at it as political. I just look at it as being patriotic, as far as “In America” or “This Ain’t No Rag, It’s a Flag.”

From the Free-Lance Star:

[Q:] On the new “Deuces” album, you cover a couple of Dylan songs—having worked with him when you were coming up in Nashville, did you feel a personal connection with his songs?

[Charlie Daniels:] The songs that I did were not songs that I played on– they were just songs that I felt were compatible with the people I did them with. I just thought it would be a good song for me and Darius to do. Other than [its being] some of my favorite Dylan stuff, I didn’t really think about it in that way—it was just songs that I felt would be good and would work—trying to find a compatible song to do a duet on is not always the easiest thing in the world- although it worked out to be fairly–not too stressful to try to do in this particular setting. So that’s basically what I was doing, I was trying to find stuff that was compatible for us to do.

I played bass on most of the stuff on ‘New Morning’. I played guitar on ‘Nashville Skyline’ and ‘Self Portrait.’ We just went in the studio with Dylan and he played the songs and we’d just start chiming in and doing our own particular thing. It was very loose—when I say loose, I don’t mean loose in a sense where it was not a controlled… together sort of thing—what was going on someone there, somebody was sitting there on top of it—Bob Johnston was sitting there making sure everything went right. But as far as it being uptight by any stretch of the imagination, it was certainly not that. It was very loose in that Dylan was enjoying himself and we were all enjoying ourselves.

[Q:] Do you keep up with Dylan at all on a personal level?

[Charlie Daniels:] How do you keep up with Bob Dylan, really? Once in a long while I do—I haven’t seen him in years…. I don’t know how you keep up with Bob Dylan.

He’s sure got that right.

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