One of my earliest musical memories comes courtesy of Charlie Daniels, who died on July 6 at age 83. “I was taking a trip out to L.A., tooting along in my Chevrolet,” he sang on “Uneasy Rider” on my first K-Tel album, unravelling a bizarre tale that included the anecdote, “So I just reached out and kicked old green teeth right in the knee.”

“Well I had them all out there steppin’ an’ a fetchin,’” he memorably continued, “Like their heads were on fire and their asses was catchin’/ But I figured I oughta go ahead an split before the cops got there…”

Many of the country-rock firebrand’s songs were similarly colourful, notably “Devil Went Down to Georgia,” his signature (and Grammy-winning) 1979 song about a fiddling duel between Lucifer and a whippersnapper named Johnny.

The song stirred controversy for Daniels’ outspoken language when his character Johnny called the devil a “son of a bitch,” though he later changed it to “son of a gun.”

Similarly, in his 1980 hit “Long Haired Country Boy,” Daniels sang about being “stoned in the morning” and “drunk in the afternoon,” but then softened the line to “I get up in the morning. I get down in the afternoon.”

Otherwise, he rarely backed down from in-your-face lyrics. His “Simple Man” suggested lynching drug dealers and using child abusers as alligator bait, and in “In America” he told the country’s enemies to “go straight to hell.”

Early in his career, the Wilmington, North Carolina, singer, guitarist and fiddler played on several Bob Dylan albums in the late 1960s, and also on albums by Marty Robbins, Flatt & Scruggs, Pete Seeger, Leonard Cohen, Al Kooper and Ringo Starr.

As solo success blossomed, he performed at the White House and Super Bowl, and appeared as himself in the 1980 John Travolta movie “Urban Cowboy.” Some of his other hits included “Drinkin’ My Baby Goodbye” and “Boogie Woogie Fiddle Country Blues.”

In 1998 he received the Pioneer Award from the Academy of Country Music and at the age of 71, he was invited to join the epitome of Nashville’s music establishment, the Grand Ole Opry. He was inducted in the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2016.

We found this performance of “Devil” from his induction ceremony at the Opry. – Mike