The devil in the song is in a bind and ready to make a deal, which is a little different from other Faustian tales.
Maybe the lesson is that you don’t make good music when you’re under pressure.
Or that gold fiddles sound bad.
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
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The devils part sounded better IMO.
Of course he sounded better, he had a whole band backing him up!
The Devil trying to cheat the contest is baked into the song musically.
Something else worth noting - the licks the Devil plays on the fiddle sound good but are easy to play. Johnny's licks are legitimately complex. He beat that sucker fair and square.
To add to this, the lyrics during the section where Johnny plays are about four traditional fiddle songs that aren’t played in the song itself: Fire on the Mountain, The House of the Rising Sun, Ida Red, and Granny Will Your Dog Bite. I think in the same way that the lyrics of Tenacious D - Tribute make it clear that Tribute is a representation of the greatest song in the world and not the greatest song itself, the music we hear from Johnny’s section is supposed to represent but not be the music he played to beat the Devil.
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Reminds me of when Bobby Newport stole Knope's heartwarming tale of support in the face of failure, but changed it and said "...And I won!"
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If you ignore all the folk tales about people one upping the devil or the local equivalent... everywhere, yes, it's a uniquely American trait.
Don't those involve creative approaches and tricking or otherwise outsmarting the devil or local equivalent?
This is just Johnny being better than the devil and having a massive ego about it. That specific situation tends to be punished.
Johnny having a massive ego about it is a great sin of Pride, and so the devil ends up getting his soul anyway.
It's not pride if you give fair warning that you just actually are that good. The devil was the boastful one challenging someone and not being able to back it up
The boy said, "My name's Johnny and it might be a sin
But I'm gon' take your bet and you're gonna regret
I'm the best there's ever been"
He's boasting about it before, and gloating about it after. But the devil is expected to sin, so it doesn't matter. Johnny on the other hand knows he's being boastful, and goes and does it anyway.
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What are you even talking about? That's not reflected in the lyrics of the song at all and a single sin doesn't condemn someone to hell.
There’s plenty of stories from other countries about the cunning hero outsmarting the fae or similar. Just that in America, the hero always wins vs other countries where there are also many stories where the hero gets killed.
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe, two of America's most famous writers, both based their bodies of work on people paying the price of losing to temptation/sin. Although to be fair I couldn't think of any popular songs about that.
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According to conventional wisdom, Johnny damned himself by accepting the bet in the first place. The devil "loses", but that just cements Johnny's sin of pride.
The devil might not have gotten Johnny's soul the day of the contest, but make no mistake, he does eventually get the soul.
Nah. Conventional wisdom says he can either
- the the priest all about it and do some chants
- find himself a baptizer and spend the rest of his time Jesusing real hard.
Johnny's options will depend on his local wise man, but I suspect either way he'll also be strongly encouraged to buy some merch.
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Well if you're religious. There's a whole class of individuals in the South that get off on showing the religious just how little they care for the tenets of Christianity. In addition to playing a mean fiddle, Johnny probably swears like a sailor and has extramarital sex whenever he can.
The song came out in 1979. The Southern Rebel was a big concept in the culture.
So this is cautionary tale of failing US educational system by OP?
I think the underlying realization for The Devil Went Down to Georgia is more that Americans will listen to good music even if they don't agree with the lyrics.
The same goes for Imagine by John Lennon, for example.
I love lyrics but i've found that most people I talk to about lyrics have no idea or don't pay attention
Yup this is my experience as well, it makes me sad honestly.
Imagine regularly gets changed to exclude the most 'objectionable' lines.
I loved Cee-Lo until his cover of it at [some event I forgot]. He changed "and no religion" to "and all religions" which...just totally butchers the meaning of the song. It's about a world where people are good to each other just because
I'm not an angry atheist but that really, really bugged me. Really spitting on his grave.
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Johnny admits to knowing that taking the bet was a sin and commits it anyway. Johnny gets the golden fiddle, but the devil gets his soul in the end anyway. What's 60 more years to an eternal being? The song can still be a cautionary tale you just need to finish it.
Point kinda holds, though. Ignoring the long-term consequences for short-term gain seems to also feature heavily in America.
Yep only in America
🙄
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Eh? The wager was Johnny either gets the fiddle or loses his soul, why would he go to hell anyway?
No human is without sin, after all.
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Johnny admits to knowing that taking the bet was a sin and commits it anyway.
No, he admits that it might be a sin.
The boy said, "My name's Johnny and it might be a sin
But I'm gon' take your bet, you're gonna regret, I'm the best there's ever been"
That means he's acknowledging its a sin but he will do it anyways. You are thinking it says it might be a sin or might not, but thats not how the sentence goes.
I definitely read it as an acknowledgement of a risk rather than an admission of wrong.
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The sentence can be interpreted either way.
It's a cautionary tale of the Devil's hubris. 😌
It's rooted in the tradition of American machismo and braggadocio. Hyperbole is a huge part of the American oral tradition. You go to any small town in the Southern US and the old timers will have some tall tales that beggar belief and they will tell them too you as if it were the gospel with no winks or nods.
I think Devil Went Down to Georgia is supposed to be viewed as a boast by Johnny himself. "I'm a really good fiddle player." "Oh yeah?" "Yeah, this one time I beat the Devil himself." "I told you once you sonofabitch, I'm the best there's ever been."
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That uniquely "American" trait is just called optimism by people who don't fixate on a mythical monoculture.
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Says the person with the Superman profile pic.
We are Americans! Arrogance is our life’s blood, ambition is our food and drink, but most of all, hubris is the air we breathe!
https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Quintessons_(Transformers)
I was just going to throw the quote away, but now it's getting to me. Why does the idea of Americans as Quintessons work so well? They're ruled by capricious five-faced nutters, and their five faces are known as "death, wrath, laughter, bitterness, and doubt". The only thing we haven't got going for us is superintelligence, but in fairness Quintessons have acted pretty stupid sometimes.
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