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.
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.
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.
I know it's not a popular take, but I don't like Poe or Hawthorne. I always felt like their shallow exploration of death/edgy topics really only appealed to the immature or unintelligent reader.
I can see their work on a shelf between The Nightmare Before Christmas and a Dashboard Confessional CD- maybe a Jr High textbook as well.
I wouldn't use them as an example.
But america is special
/s
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.
Yes and no. While the rules are all made up, and different people can just make up more rules, the standard rules say that any deal with the devil, even this bet, is a sin, an unforgivable sin. Adding in the sin of pride, which means Johnny is unlikely to ever repent, and the devil got a soul.
Also, there's a sequel song with a bunch of big names on the project, Johnny went down due to the sin of pride.
he’ll also be strongly encouraged to buy some merch.
Eh, they usually don't see merch as much as ask you to subscribe to their crowdfunding (ideally for 10% of your total income) for performative Jesusing done bi-weekly.
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?
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.
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"
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.
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."
That uniquely "American" trait is just called optimism by people who don't fixate on a mythical monoculture.
But Americans are, like, really optimistic.
Most Americans haven't read Candide these days. It used to be much more popular
This is not optimism. It's more irreverence. Which is honestly something we need more of these days. Everyone's so goddamn serious.
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.
Perhaps the devil who went down to Georgia was Johnny all along .... and in the end he got the soul he wanted to take.
I heard this song playing in a restaurant at lunch today then I come home to find this. Freakin' weird.
We've been trying to send you hidden messages all day.
The devil came to JOHNNY, not the other way around. The moral of the story is not that it is possible to beat the devil out of ego or for glory, but that even the devil could not defeat a man completely dedicated to his pure, uncorrupted love for a craft. It's not a story about Johnny's hubris winning out, it's a story about the respect one should have for genuine passion when it is lovingly applied to creativity. It is a story about the indomitable human spirit.
But okay, America bad or whatever, sure.
