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.
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.
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!”
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
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.
Thats only because they write with emotion in mind, in my opinion. They are trying to evoke feelings and cause dissonance, not lay out an intellectual thesis on the subject.
It’s unpopular because instead of just saying you don’t like them or personally think they lack depth you go straight to insulting their readers and fans.
Well, the problem isn’t that your take is unpopular, it’s that it’s confusing. You say they only appeal to the unintelligent or immature but you also say you don’t like them. I’m sure you can see the contradiction.
A famous legend in my culture is of a humpbacked man stumbling across some magical fuckers and they take pity on him and take away the hump in his back. He is so happy and chirpy he sings their praises and jumps with glee, so they give him a worse hump for being an annoying cunt.
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.
Christianity’s whole thing is that no sin is unforgivable (except deliberate rejection of the Holy Spirit’s work/testimony about Jesus (Mark 3:20-28))
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.
