Soap Box

“You better watch where you’re goin’, remember where you been. That’s the way I see it, I’m a Simple Man” – Charlie Daniels 1989

In 1989, Dad was approached to write some songs for the Patrick Swayze motion picture, “Next of Kin,” a movie about a Chicago cop who grew up in the hills of Kentucky, who tries to catch the killers of his younger brother, as his older brother prepares for a blood feud with the Chicago mob.

The film ended up using an original CDB song called “My Sweet Baby’s Gone,” and the filmmakers passed on the other one he wrote as a title song, “Next of Kin.”

I never heard his title song, at least not in its original form, however. Dad felt like he had something special, and he decided to rework the song, and called it, “Simple Man.”

I remember when I first heard Dad talk about the song, I thought he had covered the Lynyrd Skynyrd song of the same name which was one of the band’s biggest songs and is still heard today on everything from classic rock radio to Sean Hannity’s intro music for when Bill O’Reilly is a guest, as Bill is a self-proclaimed “simple man.”

But Dad’s song was way different, even though they both describe men with a no-nonsense approach to life and plain old common sense, but whereas the Skynyrd song was about advice to a young man, Dad’s was a man who was fed up with the direction that the country was heading, and was “madder’n hell,” and he “ain’t gonna take it no more.”

Dad said that he felt he had put his finger on the pulse of common folks who were increasingly feeling left out of the public discourse, and unless you were on one of the coasts or a major city, your opinion had little value.

If you believed that violent criminals shouldn’t be let out with little more than a slap on the wrist and then back on the streets to commit the same crimes over and over, then you weren’t compassionate caring intellectuals who understood that what violent criminals really needed was for us to treat them kindly.

But what about the victims of these crimes?

That’s where Dad found the pulse of the common folk, those who felt more compassion for the victims than the perpetrators of the crimes against them.

Dad took aim at drug dealers, child predators, rapists and murderers and offered up extreme solutions to extreme problems that many left-leaning individuals felt were over the top, with the talk of stringing up drug dealers to a tall tree, or tying violent criminals to a stump in the swamps and let nature have its way with them.

“Racist!” many in the media said, “Too far” and that Dad was advocating vigilantism. No, he was saying we need to deal with violent crime and it’s not being taken seriously, so here are some ways to deal with it that would definitely make a difference.

And as I’ve written about before, self-proclaimed “the original black redneck” JoelPatrick pointed out to the new wave of outrage among Gen Zers on TikTok and Instagram regarding “Simple Man” that Dad never once mentions race in the song, and if you think “black person” when you hear “drug dealer,” then YOU are the racist.

Dad would follow up “Simple Man” with what he thought was the solution to the problem with “(What This World Needs Is) A Few More Rednecks.” “Rednecks” was nowhere near as successful as “Simple Man” was with regards to radio airplay, but it still became a CDB fan favorite. The song also espouses a love for the common sense of John Wayne and good old Southern cooking, along with taking jabs at politicians and the former Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev.

On Dad’s first and only release on Liberty Records, he would revisit some of the themes in “America, I Believe in You” in 1993.

So that was 1989 and 1990, have things improved in our nation since then?

Sadly, “Simple Man” is perhaps even more relevant than it was thirty-five years ago. The riots of 2020, soaring crime rates, talk of mandatory gun "buybacks" (confiscation) which would decrease the average citizen's safety to the completely unrealistic talk of defunding the police and replacing them with social workers.

More recently, the stunning success of a completely unknown Oliver Anthony with his song, “Rich Men North of Richmond” echoed the simple man mindset, one of just trying to keep his head above water and fed up with the taxes that the politicians in DC keep hammering the common man with, a sentiment that also shows up in “Rednecks.”

Also making a huge impact recently was Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” which I wrote about last year. It’s a spiritual successor to “Simple Man.”

In the last few years, “Simple Man” has had a resurgence in popularity. Back in 2014, we did our 25th Anniversary tees, and they didn’t sell as well as I had anticipated. The design was great, but it was a different time. By 2019 when the 30th Anniversary rolled around, things had picked up tremendously, and those tees sold exceptionally well. The same goes for streaming, just a few years ago “Simple Man” probably would have been in the top ten of CDB songs, but it’s consistently in the top 5 or even up to number 2 depending on the streaming service.

One final note, an artist named Tyler Farr on Jason Aldean’s Night Train Records covered the song recently, but the original license request went back to 2022. For those of you who don’t know how the music business works, once a song has been recorded and released, anyone can release it, that’s what is called a compulsory license. The music publisher can’t keep an artist from recording it just like the original artist did, of course, songwriter royalties would still be paid to the writers. The only exception to the compulsory license would be with regards to song parodies or major lyric changes, that need approval, at least it does with Dad’s catalog.

We got the request to change the lyric about stringing up drug dealers to “put ‘em up high and watch ‘em cry till the sun goes down.” I was on the fence about the change, I weighed the pros and cons and decided that the majority of the song was intact, so I begrudgingly allowed them to go forward with the lyric change.

Just a few months ago, the song was finally released, and I decided to check it out, and I was pleasantly surprised that the original lyrics made the cut after all, perhaps Jason Aldean’s own controversial song tipped the scale to keep the original lyrics intact.

It just goes to prove that the song is still relevant, even thirty-five years later, and sadly probably even more relevant.

Dad was a Simple Man, but he was also a very wise one, and the pulse of the common man is still there and always will be.

What do you think?

Let’s all make the day count!

Pray for our troops, our police, the Peace of Jerusalem and our nation.

God Bless America!

#SonyReleaseHonkyTonkAve

#BenghaziAintGoingAway #End22

PLEASE READ BEFORE YOU POST