Doctors determined that country music icon Charlie Daniels died from a hemorrhagic stroke. The Grand Ole Opry member’s publicist, Don Murry Grubbs, confirmed that Daniels passed at Summit Medical Center in Hermitage, Tennessee on Monday.
According to Healthline, a hemorrhagic stroke is “when a blood vessel ruptures and blood accumulates in the tissue around the rupture. This puts pressure on the brain and causes a loss of blood to the surrounding areas.
Daniels was a multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter best known his hit song “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” Over the course of his decorated career, he released 30 studio albums. Some of Daniels’ other hit songs include “In America,” “The Legend of Wooley Swamp,” and “Still in Saigon.”
During an interview with The Oklahoman in 2019, Daniels spoke about the success of the tune. He recalled a friend who told him he heard the song on the radio while mountain climbing in Chile. “It always amazes me when I hear about something like that,” Daniels said. “It’s just been a great song for us.”
The legendary fiddle player continued by talking about the experience of playing “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” live. “It is fun to play and one of the reasons it’s fun to play is because that’s the one everybody wants to hear,” he said. “You know when you get to that every night it’s gonna a song everybody’s gonna recognize and everybody’s gonna get into. So, it’s definitely a high point of the night. We close with that. There’s nothing we have to follow it with. …We’ve climbed all the heights we can, it’s time to leave.”
Daniels is survived by his wife, Hazel, and his son, Charlie Daniels Jr.
[H/T Pop Culture, The Oklahoman, Healthline]
