Shaped by country music's rich history of storytelling, Charlie Daniels made the often-contradictory politics of the American South his lifelong muse. But he was also a devotee of rock's unbridled attack, letting his wicked fiddle soundtrack an era of radical changes. By his solo debut in the early '70s, country had already been upended by successive revolutions, pulled between pop-aspiring smoothies, stripped-down outlaws, and rock-leaning iconoclasts. Daniels landed somewhere in the middle: the affable-but-incorrigible rebel, one who also came armed with crossover-friendly hooks. The North Carolina native brought subversive wit and shameless pride to wild yarns like "Uneasy Rider" and "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," never quite deciding if he was a stars-and-bars patriot or a born outsider. But his hard-driving mix of pedal steel and pedal-to-the-floor riffs would soon go from curio to canon, inspiring any flag-waving country singer who still harbored down-and-dirty rock-star dreams.