Soap Box

​When I was a kid, it was hard for me to understand how anybody could actually love to go to work. Why they would want to crawl out from under the warm covers - having to become wide awake in the process - and spend the day toiling away when there were so many fun things to do with your time.

One of the most profound pieces of advice my Dad ever gave me I must confess that I didn't grasp the full impact of until many years later.

He said, "You should do work you like because you're going to be working more than you�re not working".

It was my Dad's totally rural way of telling me that I should choose employment that I was happy with because work was going to consume so much of my life that I could never be happy otherwise.

The middle of June 2015 will mark the beginning of my 57th year as a professional musician and I cannot imagine having spent my life in a profession I enjoyed more and I thank God for blessing me with making a living doing something I love so very much.

In the summer of 1958 I cut the apron strings and left Wilmington, NC with a four-piece band, a guitar and a dream, headed out to either make my mark on the world or let the world have the chance to make its mark on me.

I found out early on that the life of a traveling musician has a lot more to it than walking on a stage playing music for a crowd of adoring folks and anybody who thinks there isn't had best get ready to learn some hard lessons.

From the outside show business has a glitzy, glamorous facet that tends to out glow the rest and blind any but the experienced eye to the hardcore infrastructure of the entertainment game.

First of all, you've got to learn what you're doing and that has to become a consuming task that you eat, drink and breathe if you're going to make the caliber of musician who can cut it well enough to go up against the other ten thousand pickers in the world who would like to have your job.

Competition is fierce and if you can't beat �em you ain't gonna join �em. It takes a tough and determined person to put in the hours of running scales, learning chord progressions or whatever else it takes to whip yourself in shape to run with the big dogs.

Then there's the schedule. Holidays, birthdays, wedding anniversaries, graduations and such don't count. They're just another day on the calendar. In other words, you work while everybody else plays and unless you're dead or in a hospital bed, no other excuse applies, you're expected to be there and if that's too much for you do yourself and the rest of us a favor and just stay home,

Some people get the impression that the music business is a never ceasing movable party and those who persist in that manner soon find out that it just don't work that way, we call them burnouts.

The entertainment business is a tough, demanding task master, it sets the pace for your life, teaches you lessons the hard way and reserves her greatest rewards for those who take her seriously, who give her their best, every night on every stage, feeling good, feeling bad, those who can put aside the circumstances and devote every fiber of their being to passion for what they feel privileged to be doing.

For something they love.

And I do.

What do you think?

Pray for our troops and the peace of Jerusalem. 

God Bless America

� Charlie Daniels

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