The Charlie Daniels Band – The Devil Went Down to Georgia

Listeners still argue the Devil played the better solo, but Charlie Daniels played both fiddles and built the contest so Johnny couldn’t lose.

Charlie Daniels always insisted the Devil lost fair and square, and he had inside knowledge: he played both fiddles. On The Devil Went Down to Georgia, Daniels recorded the Devil’s solo and Johnny’s answer himself, and he later said he built the Devil’s part as noise on purpose, all flash and confusion with no real melody underneath. Plenty of listeners told him the Devil had played the better piece. His answer was that this was exactly the trick, and the whole song was designed to sell it.

Keep watching: explore more country →

The song began as a gap in an album. In 1979 the band was recording at Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville and realized the record had nothing built around Daniels’s fiddle. They wrote one on the spot, credited to all six members: Daniels, Tom Crain, Taz DiGregorio, Fred Edwards, Charlie Hayward and James W. Marshall. Producer John Boylan cut it as a story song in D minor, about a devil behind on his quota of souls, a boy named Johnny, and a golden fiddle wagered against Johnny’s own soul. The structure gave Daniels two instrumental bridges, one for each player, and the whole contest hangs on them.

Daniels was specific about what each solo meant. The Devil’s part, he explained, was smoke and mirrors: take it apart and there was nothing there, no music at all, just confusion. Johnny’s part actually said something. Daniels later wished he had made the reason explicit in the lyric, because in his view no one beats the Devil without the Lord on his side. The listener hears a dazzling demon and a plain country fiddler, and the song asks you to trust the plain one.

A country No.1 that crossed over

Epic released the single on May 21, 1979, from Million Mile Reflections. It went to No.1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Singles chart and No.3 on the Hot 100, becoming the band’s biggest hit. In February 1980 it won the Grammy for Best Country Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group, and the same year it turned up in the film Urban Cowboy. By then the song was traveling well beyond country radio, and the argument over who really won traveled with it.

Daniels defended the verdict for the rest of his life. In 1993 he recorded a sequel, The Devil Comes Back to Georgia, playing the Devil’s solo again while Mark O’Connor took Johnny’s. When the 2007 video game Guitar Hero III swapped the fiddles for guitars and let players lose to the Devil, Daniels objected that this was “violating the very essence of the song.” Covers came from every direction, from Primus’s stop-motion version to Korn and Nickelback in 2020, but the original stayed his: a duel whose outcome was never meant to be in doubt.

The record had no music video in its own day; it came out two years before MTV launched. The official video on the band’s channel arrived decades later, and it is where millions of people meet the song now. On May 14, 2026, the Library of Congress added the single to the National Recording Registry, and one of the fiddles Daniels played it on belongs to the Country Music Hall of Fame. Daniels died in July 2020, at 83.

That is the argument the song makes, and the reason it has survived every challenge to its verdict. Daniels wrote both sides of the duel and loaded the dice, giving the Devil every trick and Johnny a tune with something to say. Forty-seven years on, people still debate who played better. Daniels never doubted it, and he held the one advantage nobody else could claim: he had been both players at once.