Charlie Daniels, Who Bridged Country and Rock, Dies at 83

His plucky attitude reached new heights in “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” a No. 1 country single and Top 10 pop hit from 1979 in which Mr. Daniels’s protagonist goes head-to-head with Satan in a fiddle contest, and prevails. The recording appeared on the multiplatinum-selling album “Million Mile Reflections” and won a Grammy Award for best country vocal.

His championing the underdog, coupled with his band’s constant touring, won Mr. Daniels a following, which included President Jimmy Carter, who invited the Charlie Daniels Band to perform at his 1977 inaugural ball.

But as the 1970s gave way to the ’80s, Mr. Daniels’s politics became increasingly right-wing and his songs more strident, beginning with “In America,” a Top 20 pop hit written in response to the Iran hostage crisis of 1980. “Simple Man,” a No. 2 country single in 1990, called for the lynching of drug dealers and sex offenders, while “(What the World Needs Is) A Few More Rednecks,” also from 1990, ran counter to the hippie nonconformity of his early hits.

“If I come across an issue, or something I feel strongly about, and I happen to think of a song that would go in that direction, then I do it,” Mr. Daniels said, discussing how he came to write “Simple Man,” in an online interview. “But that’s not what I start out, necessarily, to do.”

Such disavowals notwithstanding, Mr. Daniels proved to be anything but reluctant to share his increasingly right-wing views, especially on the Soap Box section of the Charles Daniels Band website, where he would pontificate on the Second Amendment, patriotism and other issues, and in his 1993 book, “Ain’t No Rag: Freedom, Family and the Flag.”