Long Haired Country Boy The Old Crossroads The Legend Of Wooley Swamp Charlie Daniels Band

Long Haired Country Boy Album: Fire On The Mountain (1975)
The Old Crossroads Album: Songs From the Longleaf Pines (2005)
The Legend Of Wooley Swamp Album: Full Moon (1980)
by The Charlie Daniels Band

Long Haired Country Boy, is about a guy with a very passive attitude who lies around all day doing nothing, was originally written very tongue-in-cheek. Because it contained references to drugs and drinking, however, Charlie Daniels felt it was inappropriate to play it during live shows for several years. In an interview with Daniels, he said, "Things have gotten so serious and it's such a big problem with drugs and alcohol with kids, and it just went against my Christian feelings to actually do anything that somebody could construe with promoting that lifestyle, or those things, the alcohol and drugs."

It wasn't until many years later that he decided to change some of the words in Long Haired Country Boy so he felt he could begin playing it in his live shows again. "The song was such a big part of our repertoire and was always just a popular song for us to do. And people kept wanting it, so I changed 'I get stoned in the morning, I get drunk in the afternoon' to 'I get up in the morning, I get down in the afternoon,' which means the same thing. I wish I had done that to start with."

It wasn't necessarily from personal experience that Daniels wrote Long Haired Country Boy, rather from the general way he was feeling at the time. Daniels says the song's message is tolerance. "If you don't like me, we don't need to have any trouble, we don't need to be going upside each other's head or anything,"... "Just leave me alone. Just walk around me. Maybe you don't like the way my hair looks, maybe you don't like the way I eat my soup, or whatever it is that you don't like about me, it doesn't make any difference to me. I don't care. If you don't like me it's okay. Maybe I don't like you either, but I'm not going to bother with you. Just walk around me, go to the other side of the street, or I go to the other side of the street, and let's just co-exist here. There's no need to have problems. You may mentally and intellectually disagree with people, but you don't have to be nasty about it. You certainly don't have to be physical about it. So if you don't like me, it's okay, just leave me alone. And that's what the song's about."

Songs From the Longleaf Pines was released on March, 22, 2005, the album was Daniels' first album to fully focus on bluegrass gospel music, after previously incorporating elements of the two styles on previously released songs. Naturally track 13 would be "The Old Crossroads"

"The Legend of Wooley Swamp" is a song written, composed, and recorded by the Charlie Daniels Band. It was released in August 1980 as the second single from the album Full Moon, which was later certified platinum.

Daniels was inspired to write another song similar to his 1979 hit "The Devil Went Down To Georgia". While searching for ideas, Daniels remembered Woolie Swamp, an actual place in Bladen County, North Carolina where he used to night hunt as a youngster. Recalling how swamps can take on a whole different personality at night, Daniels mused that Woolie Swamp "just seemed like the kind of place a story like that could happen".

The song tells of a man who, after hearing a fable about a ghost in a place called Wooley Swamp, stubbornly decides to confirm the story on his own, only to come away with the knowledge that, "there's some things in this world you just can't explain"; these words are repeated in the chorus between the two verses and then spoken at the very end of the song.

The second verse tells of Lucius Clay, who lived in Wooley Swamp, a darkened quagmire hidden “way back in Booger Woods”. Clay was an elderly recluse and a miser who cared only about his money that he kept sealed in Mason jars and buried in various spots around the shack where he lived. Clay did little more than dig up the jars "on certain nights if the moon is right" and pour all of the money out on the floor of his shack just to run his fingers through it.

The third and longest verse introduces the Cable boys, three sinister white trash brothers who live in nearby Carver's Creek. One night, the eldest brother decides that they are going to kill Lucius Clay and steal his money. The three meet later in Wooley Swamp, sneak up to the shack, and find Clay with a shovel and "thirteen rusty Mason jars" he had just dug up. The three young men beat Clay unconscious then kill him by throwing him in the swamp, laughing as they watch his body sink into the mire. They grab his money from the shack and try to escape only to become trapped in quicksand. The brothers scream for help and futilely struggle to free themselves, and right before they meet their own deathly comeuppance, they hear Clay "laughin' in a voice as loud as thunder".

The final stanza of the second verse closes the story, saying that even though the myth is fifty years old (as of 1980), if you go by the shack on certain moonlit nights, "you can hear three young men screamin', an' you can hear one old man laugh".

The lyrics mention Carvers Creek, a small community in Bladen County, North Carolina. The community is just down the road from the Wooley Swamp, which is located near Elizabethtown, North Carolina. While the places are real, Daniels said the story and the character of Lucius Clay were his own creation.

Daniels re-recorded the song with the group Smokin' Armadillos on their 1996 self-titled album.