The one musician Bob Dylan considered a pure genius

(Credits: Far Out / Bob Dylan)

Wed 31 December 2025 17:45, UK

It takes a certain type of artist for Bob Dylan to give them a compliment.

This is one of the greatest songwriters of all time, and while his taste in music didn’t always align with what the public wanted, he wasn’t afraid to stand by whatever song he heralded as a classic. But if you want to truly get into Dylan’s state of mind, it’s better to focus on the people behind the songs rather than those who can play faster than anyone else.

From day one, Dylan was focused on the one who was singing. For him, lyrics mattered much more than the music half the time, and while he does have some fantastic musical moments throughout every one of his albums, it’s hard to imagine an album like Bringing It All Back Home without the pressing lyrics like ‘It’s Alright Ma I’m Only Bleeding’ or the perfect flow of poetry going on in ‘Mr Tambourine Man’.

That came from him spending years being a folkie, but there was much more out there for him to explore. Everyone may have felt betrayed by him picking up an electric guitar for the first time, but it was always about taking risks on every one of his songs rather than having to rely on a couple of chords. Then again, country music was never that far away from folk when Dylan started his next musical phase.

Whereas Woody Guthrie was Dylan’s all-time idol, it’s not like he could ignore the shadow of Johnny Cash every time he played. These musicians were practically a part of American folklore by the time he started making his own tunes, but when he began working on Nashville Skyline, he finally had the time to sing the country songs that best suited him. But even in a studio that had Johnny Cash, Dylan couldn’t help but marvel at what Charlie Daniels could do whenever he got a fiddle in his hand.

Daniels might not have been everyone’s first choice to have on a Dylan record, but Dylan seemed to take a liking to him the same way that George Harrison took a liking to Pete Drake. They knew what they wanted to hear on their songs, and Daniels was the kind of guy who could get pure emotion out of his instrument, no matter what kind of song was being thrown at him.

And while most people only knew Daniels for one song back in the day, Dylan could see that he was dealing with a true genius in the country world, saying, “Charlie eventually struck it big. After hearing the Allman Brothers and the side-winding Lynyrd Skynyrd, he’d find his groove and prove himself with his own brand of dynamics, coming up with a new form of hillbilly boogie that was pure genius. For a time there, Charlie had it all.”

The obvious answer would be to look at something like ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’ to see what Daniels can do, but a lot of what he does truly needs to be seen to be believed. He wasn’t the kind to focus on singing half the time, so when listening to him tear through one of his fiddle solos, he pulls off the kind of massive runs that would have had most 1980s shredders scratching their heads wondering how the hell he managed to come up with his lines.

Dylan didn’t even bother trying to match what Daniels could be, but that’s because he was ever interested in outmatching his session players. Everyone added a different piece to the puzzle, and if Dylan couldn’t manage to get the sound he wanted, he knew that Daniels could say more with a fiddle in his hand than most songwriters could with multiple verses.