As the Charlie Daniels Band hits the road for another year of touring, Daniels continues to explore his vast musical influences with his Beau Weevils band featuring James Stroud, Billy Crain and Charlie Hayward. The group’s debut album, Beau Weevils — Songs in the Key of E, arrived last fall and offers a spectrum of musical stylings heavily steeped in the blues, a genre that’s inescapable growing up in the American south. He describes the project as a “downhome, swampy rock meets funk with a little taste of ’Delta’ type of style.”
“The songs themselves are very southern,” Daniels tells CMT.com of the Beau Weevils material. “They’re very southern philosophically, culturally and musically. Charlie’s from Alabama. Billy’s from Tennessee. James is from Louisiana, and I’m from North Carolina. We all had a pretty good taste of that kind of culture and that kind of music.”
Daniels adds that the project can be interpreted as an expression of the different music genres that shaped him into the artist he is today.
“I was exposed to so much different music when I was a kid because the radio stations were not formatted,” Daniels adds “They played something for everybody — country, Gospel, big band — I developed a broad love for all different kinds of music. Basically, when you get down to it, the blues and the offshoots of the blues are the basics of American music that appeal to me the most. It always seems like I end up going back to that … There’s a mystique and a haunting nature to blues that makes it so great to listen to. It creates a mood like nothing else does.”
One departure on the collection is “Mexico Again,” a laidback, Tejano-tinged song about chasing señoritas and running from the cops south of the border that’s loosely based on a moment in Daniels’ life. Directed by David Corlew, the official video features the band in performance with scenes of folks living it up in Mexico interspersed throughout.
“Well, there’s actually more than a little autobiographical stuff in ’Mexico Again,’” Daniels says in a release. “I really did get put in jail in Juarez, Mexico back in my wild, young, crazy days, and the U.S. border was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. So, you could say my motivation for writing the song was fact and fantasy.”
Daniels’ 2019 on the road includes shows on Alabama’s 50th anniversary tour, and the Outlaws & Renegades tour with Travis Tritt.