RWB recently acquired Charlie Daniels’ 2003 book, Ain’t No Rag. Readers of the “Soap Box” on Charlie’s web site would be familiar with the winsome style of his writing—indeed, the book is largely a collection of things he had written in that forum first. For a silver haired country singer from North Carolina, Charlie sure saw the positive potential of the internet pretty quickly. He was blogging—though not calling it that—before a lot of the familiar names who are now legends in their own minds. Charlie’s approach is sincere, commonsensical, heart-on-the-sleeve and finger-on-the-trigger commentary, and I’d take a few pages of his stuff over a ream of New York Times sophistry any day. Charlie Daniels is a true American patriot, and has made it count by performing with his band for U.S. troops from Baghdad to Bagram.

Charlie of-course has some Dylan-related history. He played on Nashville Skyline, New Morning and the Self Portrait sessions, before he had made a name for himself in his own right. And, come to discover, one of the items in his book is his personal reaction to reading Howard Sounes’ mean-spirited Bob Dylan bio, Down the Highway. Sounes had interviewed Daniels during the writing of the book. As Charlie tells it in these extracts:

By the conversation I had with him, I assumed that it would be an informative, upbeat book celebrating the life and music of one of the greatest musical poets the world has ever known.

Wrong.
…
He painted a picture of a vindictive, hard-nosed individual who took advantage of situations and was unfaithful to friends. He seemed to take delight in belittling Dylan’s numerous and incredible accomplishments and emphasizing his problems and failures.
…
He painted a totally different picture from the one I have always had of Bob Dylan after spending admittedly a limited amount of time with him. But I just can’t believe that I’m that bad a judge of character.

Neither can I.

The Bob Dylan I remember was fun to work with and fun to be around. With a sense of humor and friendly and courteous manner toward the people with whom he was working, he had a way of making you feel free to do your own thing when you were in the studio with him.
…
I remember him as the family man who brought his wife, Sara, and his young son, Jesse, to Nashville when he recorded Nashville Skyline. I remember him as the giant who gave a bottom-of-the-totem-pole guitar player a chance to be a part of musical history. There’s only one Bob Dylan, and I’m thankful to have had the opportunity to walk in his shadow for a season.

Daniels also played on the much talked-about (and bootlegged) studio session when Dylan and George Harrison goofed around on a variety of tunes. Charlie played bass, with Russ Kunkel on drums. Paul McCartney had just split from the Fab Four, and in his book Charlie recalls Harrison asking him (laughingly), “Do you want to be a Beatle?”

So much for Charlie Daniels’ recollections—all warm ones—of working with Dylan. Come the fall of 2004, we got to hear Dylan’s recollection of working with Charlie, in his still-to-be-fully-appreciated book, Chronicles. Writing about the recording of New Morning, and his colorful producer Bob Johnston, Dylan says:

I was wondering who he was going to bring to the sessions this time and was hoping he’d bring Charlie Daniels. He’d brought Charlie before, but he’d failed to bring him a few times, too. I felt I had a lot in common with Charlie. The kind of phrases he’d use, his sense of humor, his relationship to work, his tolerance for certain things. Felt like we had dreamed the same dream with all the same distant places. A lot of his recollections seemed to coincide with mine. Charlie would fiddle with stuff and make sense of it. … When Charlie was around, something good would usually come out of the sessions. … Years earlier Charlie had a band in his hometown called The Jaguars who had made a few surf rockabilly records, and although I hadn’t made any records in my hometown, I had a band too, about the same time. I felt our early histories were somewhat similar. Charlie eventually struck it big. After hearing the Allman Brothers and the side-winding Lynyrd Skynyrd, he’d find his groove and prove himself with his own brand of dynamics, coming up with a new form of hillbilly boogie that was pure genius. Atomic fueled—with surrealistic double fiddle playing and great tunes like Devil Went Down to Georgia …

It doesn’t get much warmer than that. Admittedly, Chronicles is a memoir disinguished by its kindness to the characters Dylan remembers from his strange and long trip. He’s clearly thinking like Johnny Mercer a lot of the time; accentuating the positive. Still, I’m hard-pressed to come up with another musical contemporary who gets quite the treatment Charlie Daniels does in that passage just quoted. Since Chronicles came out about a year after Ain’t No Rag, one might speculate that it was a little quid pro quo, so to speak. But that would be a stretch, I think. Dylan had been working on Chronicles since 2001 or even earlier, and what are really the chances he’d read Ain’t No Rag and made last minute changes to his own book as payback? No—as already mentioned, his way of remembering Daniels fits the overall tone of his book, and it rings true, just as the rest of Chronicles rings true, despite some peoples’ preference for dismissing it as “re-invention.”

Dylan and Daniels: mutual admiration society. Speaking well of eachother speaks well of them both, in RWB’s humble opinion.

Oh, and I couldn’t resist the following montage. On the left, Bob Dylan in Paris in 1966 (this shows up during the Scorsese film). On the right, Charlie Daniels, in Iraq, in 2005.

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