I heard this song playing in a restaurant at lunch today then I come home to find this. Freakin' weird.
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
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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.
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.
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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!"
the moral of the story was don't trust celery man
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
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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.
So this is cautionary tale of failing US educational system by OP?
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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
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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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It's a cautionary tale of the Devil's hubris. 😌
That uniquely "American" trait is just called optimism by people who don't fixate on a mythical monoculture.
This is not optimism. It's more irreverence. Which is honestly something we need more of these days. Everyone's so goddamn serious.
But Americans are, like, really optimistic.
Most Americans haven't read Candide these days. It used to be much more popular
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.
Perhaps the devil who went down to Georgia was Johnny all along .... and in the end he got the soul he wanted to take.