The Prairie Landscape

The Devil Before He Went Down to Georgia


Ari Frede


The Personification of the Devil
The Charlie Daniels Band's "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" was a country song on pop radio and Charlie Daniels sang a tight story of the devil and his relationship to humankind. The song made its way into popular culture when disco was hot. Hot, not only in its popularity but also in the fiery sense that many believed rock-n-roll was the devil's domain. The devil's role as the inspiration for rock-and-roll was already commonly understood. This southern rock band, however, used the devil as a folk figure (a character in the song), not a religious figure (whose evil influence led to the composition of such songs). In personifying the devil, the Charlie Daniels Band's twist was not unique, though. It had been done before in many different ways. The devil has been operating in our world for quite a while with his name appearing in stories for centuries.

The historical devil has not always been personified. Initially, in religious settings, he was represented as a feeling or power, in attendance as the force of evil, an antagonist to goodness and divinity, and temptation for humans. Although not always represented as human, he has always been represented. In fact, demonstrating that he has always been an uneraseable threatening force, early religious accounts show that his existence actually "precedes the worship of a benign and morally good Deity."1 Much later, certainly by the time of the blues of the 1920s and 1930s, songwriters were repeating the tradition of representing the devil as a person. Perhaps the most famous example is Robert Johnson's "Cross Road Blues," in which the singer describes a dangerous meeting with the devil while hitchhiking. In southern literature, Flannery O'Connor drew from Poe and Hawthorne to illustrate this, as well.2

A few centuries of literary evolution have not only reconfigured the devil, they have shifted the site of his battles from the heavens to the earth. Essentially, his battles changed arenas three times.3 First, the devil battled God in their once-shared home -- the arena of Heaven. After this falling out, the devil and God competed for the hearts of men in parables, as in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The third, most modern arena, is our plane, earth. The devil became personified as a character in literature, plays, operas, and music, striving for many different goals, the best known being human souls. No longer just a religious being, under the direction of artists, the devil assumed the shape of a fleshed-out character.4 Representations of the devil changed first from feared supernatural force to a "god of grace,"5 and next to a prankster and satirist6 and, at worst, a monster in appearance. With this final development, the devil was almost ready for the Charlie Daniels Band, but first he had to be fine-tuned.

The first important literary work in the devil's modern development was Milton's Paradise Lost. Although the devil's battle takes place in his earliest arena, Heaven, he is somewhat anthropomorphic, suspiciously human in anatomy but also bearing wings, horns, and hooves. Next was Goethe's Faust, whose title character is tempted by an under-demon, Mephistopheles, to whom he submits. Later, just as his contract with the devil is about to run out, Faust turns to God to escape damnation and repents. Although it had drawn from Theophilus, a medieval text, Faustus' originality lies in its non-biblical plot (unlike Paradise Lost).7 The devil had taken a new form in literature and other storytellers took to this incarnation.

By characterizing the devil as a person (most commonly a man), authors endowed him with significant qualities -- signifying qualities, really, many of which are recycled in "The Devil Went Down to Georgia." The devil is frequently wealthy, a sharp dresser, and ambiguously charismatic. He tempts people with riches, but his core is repulsive and unnerving. He rarely attempts to deceive humans into thinking that he is not the devil and few characters are ever deceived by his human appearance. Clues, such as "give the devil his due" and "I'll bet a fiddle of gold against your soul," demonstrate that he is not trying to fool Johnny. And, to allay any further doubt, "fire blew from his fingertips" and "a band of demons joined in."

The Devil's Deals
In modern stories, the devil is first and foremost a pact-maker, offering to trade something -- most commonly material goods, knowledge, and power -- for the human's soul. There are different hypotheses to explain his quest. C. S. Lewis and Edgar Allan Poe wrote of a hunger that demons feel. One of the earliest important devil stories in the United States, Washington Irving's "The Devil and Tom Walker," illustrates this perfectly. The devil takes advantage of Tom by appealing to his most present anxieties. He first abducts Tom's aggravating wife and then satisfies his financial desires, setting him up in business. Years later, in a heated argument with a friend and client, who is begging Tom not to foreclose on his property, Tom dares "the devil take me...if I have made a farthing!" Instantly, despite his recent repentance, the devil comes to keep the pact made years before.8 In this song, the devil is represented as a businessman in need of increasing inventory: he is behind in his quota for acquiring souls and so he strikes up a deal.9 Repeatedly, the devil takes the shape of the businessman looking to turn a metaphysical profit.

What is at stake, though, is not only material wealth by way of a golden fiddle. There is also egotistical alpha-male competition for the best musical performance -- basically, a battle of the bands. This aesthetic competition is modern ground for the devil, but not new ground. He is no stranger to music. While he despises bells in "The Devil's Mother-In-Law,"10 he has taken a liking to other instruments: the guitar in the aforementioned "Cross Road Blues" and again in the associated gentrified legend-movie "Crossroads," and to parallel the Charlie Daniels Band song, the violin in the "Devil's Sonata."11 It is no coincidence that the devil is a skilled player. Although he enjoys challenges like playing against Johnny, he never picks a fight he is bound to lose. He chooses the genre of music in which he is highly skilled for competition.

The musical genre that the devil plays in the Charlie Daniels Band's song is telling. "Devil's music" is a phrase commonly applied to that music which we fear and do not understand.12 In this song, the devil's fiddle solo is backed by a loud, bass-heavy funk groove which turns into disco after the onset of a discordant, abrasive fiddle solo, apparently achieved by overdubbing two inexact replicas of one fiddle solo. The Charlie Daniels Band made an important decision pairing the devil with rock and roll this way.

It is no surprise that the devil is cutting heads with Johnny. He is a gourmet of aesthetics, even beyond his capable musicianship. In addition to possessing all the material fineries anyone could imagine, he is eloquent,13 has a taste for refined smoking and drinking,14 and loves to write.15 Here, beauty and knowledge -- twins of the devil's sensibility -- provide an Edenic apple for those not tempted by the baser rewards of golden fiddles. Since God's creation of humans, the devil has used knowledge as bait, but this does not entice everyone. When tied together with aestheticism, though, his prey cannot resist what they value so highly: perfect beauty and omniscience.

With his being able to grant wisdom, can one assume that the Prince of Darkness is an authority on every topic? His knowledge is vast, but he is not omniscient. He lacks the knowledge to predict the way he will be tricked out of his bargains, or in this case, to recognize that Johnny is a better fiddler than he. It is odd that the devil is an authority on anything at all, since his role has more often been that of a revolutionary: "[T]he patron of both reform and evolution."16 This was his role by the end of the 1700s, when he was revived by Romanticists as "noble rebellion against autocracy or served at least as an ambivalent symbol of both liberty and selfishness."17 His struggle with God in Paradise Lost is epic, and once in hell, Milton cast Satan as heroic.18 Characteristically, the devil strives just slightly beyond his means, ever the rebel. Here, authority is a mixed bag, established first by the devil's power and then by Johnny's musical prowess. Here is the motivation behind the battle of the bands. It is as if the devil says, "this is the way it should be played," and Johnny must assert himself as a musician and insist, "no, this is the way." Despite the devil's attempt at funked-up progress, Johnny's power as a retro-hoe-downer outdoes Old Scratch.

Perhaps the devil is fighting for control of the earth. Perhaps the devil has never really settled his differences with God, so again and again he attempts to seduce God's children. But in his literary evolution, just as in the song, he has lost his rebel yell and arrived at a position of authority, and humans rebel against him and his glamorous ways. They are the proletariat rebelling against him, the elitist.

Other readings of this struggle provide interesting parallels. Chastity against seduction. Thrift against luxury. Naivete against knowing. Innocence against corruption. Light against darkness. White against black. Even in the Archie comics, blonde against brunette: Betty, wholesome, economy-minded, cautious, and Veronica, sometimes vicious, always wealthy, devil-may-care, battle for Archie's date with tactics that mirror these patterns. Racial implications of the devil-mortal dichotomy have worked both ways. While African-Americans have used the devil as a symbol for white oppressors and slave owners,19 so, too, have whites in America styled the devil after African-Americans -- in both non-fictional20 and fictional situations.21 In the Charlie Daniels Band's song, the devil's solo is markedly different from Johnny's. It aspires to black music patterns of the time: funky syncopation, a disco arrangement, and a jazzy, almost atonal fiddle solo. The Charlie Daniels Band's complaint about pop music inevitably paints the devil's music black and whitewashes its own.

Is this the story of the sacred and the profane? Does Johnny have a helping hand from heaven while being tempted by the deceit of hell? No. Johnny exhibits pride when he boasts of his talent and even recognizes that "it might be a sin" to gamble his soul. Both characters' motivations for playing are pride and ego-driven hedonism, reducing the contest to a mere shootout between two bad boys. There is no God here. And when Johnny curses the devil again, he iterates: "I done told you once, you son of a bitch, I'm the best there's ever been." This presents a paradox: Johnny is being sinfully proud even as he sends the devil away in shamed defeat.22 He might very well be escaping the devil only to wind up in hell? Johnny earns a wage by collecting the golden fiddle but this infernal material possession is just the kind of thing that will keep him out of the pearly gates. Johnny's situation is a dilemma: he is truly damned if he does and damned if he doesn't. Without playing, he may be martyred, but with playing, he makes a material profit by acting like the devil himself.

Johnny's ultimate victory, however sinful, should come as no surprise. For that matter, neither should the devil's defeat. In story after story, the devil is tricked into traps,23 back to hell,24 out of his contract,25 and even into dying.26 The goal of mortals in these tales is first to save their souls, and second to get away with as many worldly goods as possible. The mortals who are held up to their contracts are a breath of fresh air, as in "The Devil's Wager"27 and "Never Bet the Devil Your Head."28 Once, the devil refused to take a man's soul when the subject offered it to him for three reasons: the devil lacked the funds to purchase the soul, he already had an ample supply, and he didn't want to take advantage of a drunk. He is a dignified and consistent businessman.29 True, Johnny kept his end of the bargain, but that is the limit of his innocence. He commits all the sins of the devil except soul-snatching.

The Devil Inside
What is happening is simple. The devil is a mischief maker30 and businessman, but he is not offering Johnny anything new. What he offers is exactly what Johnny has always wanted: fame and fortune. History shows that we worship what we fear, that which is both uncontrollable and dangerous.31 The golden fiddle is Johnny's fame and fortune, represented partly by the material of the fiddle and partly by the fiddle itself. To phrase it as irony, if he loses he is not as "good" as the devil but if he wins he plays the devil's fiddle.

The danger Johnny knows in the devil is, in a psychological sense, attractive because it is dreaded. The devil is a projection of something internal. He represents all that Johnny fears, and Johnny does appear to dread fame and fortune. Why else would he resort to a pure old time fiddle tune to contrast the corrupt, big city, downtown groove the devil provides? The devil-within represents a fear of what he might achieve or do and the devil-without, a fear of what might be done to him. These inner demons can be just as uncontrollable, dreadful, and threatening as the devil himself. This is what was meant above by "the meanness of man." The devil's place is "usually as an ironic metaphor for the corruption and foolishness of humanity."32 The black devil is a fear of one's own racism. The sexual devil, a fear of one's sexual sins. The fiddling devil, a fear of one's own musical ability.

The fair angels -- all frankness and goodness -- are beyond our comprehension, but the fallen angels, with all their faults and sufferings, are kin to us.33

Poor Johnny, chased by the devil, has come all this way only to discover that he was chasing himself.

Bibliography

  • Jacob Aranza, Backward Masking Unmasked. Shreveport, LA: Huntington House, Inc., 1984.
  • Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil. New York: Bell Publishing Company, 1969.
  • Neil Forsyth, The Old Enemy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton, University Press, 1987.
  • Zora Neale Horston, Mules and Men. New York: Harper Perennial, 1963.
  • Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
  • Robert Palmer, Deep Blues. New York: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1981.
  • Edgar Allen Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems. New York: Vintage, 1975.
  • Maximillian Rudwin, The Devil in Legend and Literature. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1931.
  • Maximillian J. Rudwin, ed., Devil Stories. New York: Knopf, 1921.
  • Jeffrey Burton Russell, Mephistopheles. Ithaca, NY: Cornell, University Press, 1986.
  • Lyle Saxon and Robert Tallant, Gumbo Ya-Ya. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1987.
  • William Bysshe Stein, Hawthorne's Faust. Gainesville, FA: University of Florida Press, 1953.
  • Stith Thompson, One Hundred Favorite Folktales. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1968.
  • Werblowski, R. J. Zwi, Lucifer and Prometheus. New York: AMS Press, 1973.

Notes

  1. Carus, Paul, History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil (New York: Bell Publishing Company, 1969), p. 6.
  2. Russell, Jeffrey Burton, Mephistopheles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 256-257.
  3. Russell, p. 76.
  4. Werblowski, R. J. Zwi, Lucifer and Prometheus (New York: AMS Press, 1973), pp. 220-221. Also, Russell, p. 213: "The literary imagination dominated the concept of the Devil in the 19th century, but by midcentury...he had been milked dry of much of his horror and even of his comedy. ...[T]he literary focus on evil [changed] to the human personality."
  5. Rudwin, Maximillian J., ed., Devil Stories (New York: Knopf, 1921), p. xi.
  6. Rudwin, p. xvii.
  7. Russell, p. 62.
  8. Irving, Washington, "The Devil and Tom Walker," in Rudwin, pp. 28-45.
  9. "He was in a bind/'Cause he was way behind/and he was willing to make a deal."
  10. Caballero, Fernán, "The Devil's Mother-In-Law," in Rudwin, p. 160.
  11. Russell, p. 92: "Giuseppe Tartini (1692-1770) wrote a 'Devil's Sonata,' alleging that it was inspired by a dream in which the Devil came and played to him on the violin."
  12. A prime example of the misunderstanding of rock and roll can be found in Aranza, Jacob, Backward Masking Unmasked (Shreveport, LA: Huntington House, Inc., 1983).
  13. Baudelaire, Charlies Pierre, "The Generous Gambler," in Rudwin, p. 164-165: "We talked of the universe, of its creation and of its future destruction; of the leading ideas of the century -- that is to say, of Progress and Perfectability -- and, in general, of all kinds of human infatuations. On this subject his Highness was inexhaustible in his irrefutable jests, and he expressed himself with a splendour of diction and with a magnificence in drollery such as I have never found in any of the most famous conversationalists of our age. He explained to me the absurdity of different philosophies that had so far taken possession of men's brains, and deigned even to take me in confidence in regard to certain fundamental principles, which I am not inclined to share with any one.
    ..."The memory of this famous orator brought us naturally on the subject of Academies, and my strange host declared to me that he didn't disdain, in many cases, to inspire the pens, the words, and the consciences of pedagogues, and that he almost always assisted in person, in spite of being invisible, at all the scientific meetings.
    "Encouraged by so much kindness I asked him if he had any news of God -- who has not his hours of impiety? -- especially as the old friend of the Devil. He said to me, with a shade of unconcern united with a deeper shade of sadness: 'We salute each other when we meet.' But for the rest, we spoke in Hebrew."
  14. Baudelaire, in Rudwin, p. 164. Also, Poe, Edgar Allen, "Bon-bon," in The Complete Tales and Poems (New York: Vintage, 1975), p. 522. Also, Hauff, Wilhelm, "The Memoirs of Satan," in Rudwin, p. 60.
  15. Rudwin, p. xi: "[W]hen Satan was asked to explain the cause of God's enmity...he replied: 'I wanted to be an author.'"
  16. Carus, p. 407.
  17. Russell, p. 12.
  18. Revard, Stella Purce, The War in Heaven (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 234.
  19. Levine, p. 403.
  20. Saxon, Lyle and Robert Tallant, Gumbo Ya-Ya (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 1987), p. 80.
  21. Irving, in Rudwin, p. 31.
  22. Werblowski, p. 96.
  23. Caballero, in Rudwin, p. 154.
  24. Caballero, in Rudwin, p. 161.
  25. Werblowski, p. 219.
  26. Baudelaire, Charles Pierre, in Rudwin, p. 222.
  27. Thackeray, William Makepeace, in Rudwin, p. 79.
  28. Poe, p. 482
  29. Caballero, in Rudwin, p. 157.
  30. Carus, pp. 407.
  31. Carus, p. 7. Also, "...there seems to be no exception to the rule that fear is always the first incentive to religious worship." Carus, p. 6.
  32. Russell, p. 12.
  33. Rudwin, p. xi.

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