Friday, December 26, 2025
Time: 7:15 PM
Song: Uneasy Rider ‘88
Artist: The Charlie Daniels Band
Mode of Consumption: Listening to 94.3 FM on the way home from my family’s Christmas celebration.
Link to song: https://open.spotify.com/track/59yEymxln8Hyuz8XNkUTIX?si=53ba72ebdbe84e14
As we turned west away from my childhood home, this song was playing and I couldn’t place it. In fact, it seemed like an odd choice for a classic rock station.
The lyrics are about a couple of redneck boys who end up in a bar filled with men dressed as women. The song was released in 1988, so I am sure it was received differently than it would be now.
I have to admit I wasn’t even paying much attention to the lyrics. I was trying to figure out who the artist was, and I couldn’t help but notice the rhythm and vocal cadence of the song seemed to match Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue.”
I have to imagine that Charlie Daniels did that on purpose, taking the sound of a song about a boy with a girl’s name and then applying it to a song about men who dress as women.
The difference being that Cash was singing Shel Silverstein’s lyric, and it was clever and fun. Daniels version viewed through the lens of 2025 just seems unnecessary and mean-spirited. The resolution is that the narrator and his friend, Jim, essentially
Cash’s song upends expectations by making the boy with a girl’s name tough and strong. Daniels plays to stereotypes and phobias. It’s probably why so many of Cash’s songs endure through cultural shifts and time, while outside of “A Devil Went Down to Georgia,” Daniels songs are lost for most anybody other than hardcore fans.
I mean, as this blog attests, I spend a lot of time zooming through songs and artists from the last fifty years across the rock and country genres, and I couldn’t name another Daniels’ song off the top of my head.
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