those devilish intentions

I've written about Devil Went Down To Georgia before. But today I just settled on one word, and all it means: down.

Think about that: the Devil went ... down to Georgia. Down "below" Hell or something? Makes no sense. ... Ah! "Down," as in North is up and South is down. The Devil is a Yankee, a carpetbagger. Wherever he's from, it was down South to Georgia. 

Suddenly that brings light to the politics of the song, no?

•••

A friend asks, "Is it possible that none of the above urbane analysis is particularly on target, Barry, and that Charlie Daniels simply wrote a fun song?"

Heh! of course. And if it weren't a fun song we wouldn't be talking about it.

To go into it a bit deeper, though, we don't want to be guilty of what they call the Intentional Fallacy — the trap of thinking that an author's or artist's intentions are the last word on a work.

For instance, what if Charlie Daniels hadn't had the pop-ifying country music biz in mind? Would this analysis still apply? The good guy's music is traditional fiddlin', which was disappearing on country radio in the 70s, and the bad guy's music is disco/rock. That's true no matter what the writer's intentions were, and indeed who knows what our own intentions are?

Authors are notoriously suspect when talking about their own work. Does Lord of the Rings owe anything to Wagner's Ring Cycle? Tolkien says "the ring was round; there the resemblance ends." Uh-huh. Wagner's tale of an evil dwarf who steals magic gold from a riverbed to forge an all-powerful ring, battled over by giants and dwarfs and elves and dragons and humans, causing destruction and sorrow until it's finally returned to its rightful place, has no influence on Tolkien except it happened to have a ring?

J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series is a tale so well-structured and insightful it brings gasps at times as well as tears — but she has shown since then that she often misunderstands the basics of her tale.

Especially in the world of art, intention is a dicey thing. There is no possible way the makers of "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane" intended it to be a gay icon, but you can't say it isn't.

By the same token, Johnny Marks may not have had Christology in mind in writing "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer," but it doesn't matter what he thought or intended: it's in there. You can't say Rudolf resembles Ganesha. He doesn't. (Or maybe I just don't know enough about Ganesha.) But Rudolf most definitely is a Christ figure, whether or not Johnny Marks intended it. (Marks's intentions likely had more to do with delighting children and making money for Montgomery Ward.) Maybe the biggest thing is that Marks grew up in America where Christological Northern European fairy tales were all children's fare.

That's why I'd say the above urbane analysis is perfectly well on target, even if Daniels did simply write a fun song! 

To come at it from the other side, consider Michael Ward's 2008 book Planet Narnia, in which he says Lewis wrote his Narnia books to fit into medieval cosmology.

In Lion the Pevensies become monarchs under sovereign Jove; in Prince Caspian they harden under strong Mars; in Dawn Treader they drink light under searching Sol; in Silver Chair they learn obedience under subordinate Luna; in Horse and His Boy they come to love poetry under eloquent Mercury; in Magician's Nephew they gain life-giving fruit under fertile Venus; and in Last Battle they suffer and die under chilling Saturn.

Who knows what Lewis's intentions were, or if even he knew them. But — man — if such thoughts were ever on Lewis's mind as he wrote, I think everyone here would agree Lewis failed. Hah!

I tend to think it was Ward who failed.