Soap Box

As I write this, it's a sunny mid March morning in the gorgeous north woods of Michigan. The ground is still covered with a thin layer of snow and there's a morning chill in the air, the sky is clear and blue and there's not a breath of breeze, the trees standing gray and tall, mute sentinels, their leafless formality attesting to the fact that winter doesn't turn loose so easily.

Down home in the Tennessee Midlands, the buttercups are blooming and Hazel's forsythia bushes have stubby little fuzzy buds, just before bursting into the brilliant yellow blooms that are among the first signs of a full blown spring.

The sap is rising in the trees and the animals somehow know that the tender new grass is just before popping out of the ground. The other day when I was horseback in the back pasture even our two thousand pound Hereford bull, Domino, was feeling his oats, frolicking around like a calf.

In all the seventy-seven summers I've spent on this earth, I cannot remember a more beautiful one than last summer. From first to last, summer in Tennessee last year was a panorama of deep green interspersed with wild flowers and blackberry blossoms all set to the symphony of whippoorwills and millions of night critters praising The Lord, glad to be alive and letting the world know all about it, and on nights when a full moon hung over our valley, it was just about enough to take your breath away.

Over in my birthplace of Wilmington, North Carolina, known as the City of a Million Azaleas, they'll be getting ready for the annual Azalea Festival and Greenfield Gardens will light up the lowlands as the big Formosa azaleas and the lesser strains create walls of pink and white and red and purple and if you've never been there during the height of the azalea season, you've missed one of the most memorable sights you'll ever see.

A neighbor caught a couple of big largemouth the other day and the crappie will soon be hitting the jigs on the deep end of the big pond and the catfish in the little pond in the back pasture will soon be stirring and hungry.

Saw my first newborn calf of the season while I was out and about a few days ago and the horses will soon start losing their winter hair and get all slicked up for the summer.

We are in the first stages of our 2014 touring season and our new Off The Grid album will be released on April 1st, and with a nod to nostalgia, we will be releasing vinyl copies in addition to CDs and downloads.

On the 20th of September, Hazel and myself will be married 50 years and I've decided to work that night, doing a concert in her home state of Oklahoma, the same state we tied the knot in on a Sunday morning in Tulsa In 1964.

All in all it's another typical early spring for the Daniels family and the CDB, working hard but taking the time to smell the roses, playing the old songs and writing new ones, rolling down old familiar roads that always look a little different through the windshield of the Twin Pines Rambler.

I thank God for letting me live to see another Spring, for blessing me with making a living in a profession I love so very much. For letting my eyes behold the beauty of so much of this planet He created.

I thank God for letting me be born in America, a nation that despite all the warts and wrinkles, the periodical insanity and unlearned lessons, still stands head and shoulders above all the rest.

I haven't been bored in years, life is to be lived to the fullest, and another spring is at hand.

Bring it on.

What do you think?

Pray for our troops and the peace of Jerusalem.

God Bless America

Charlie Daniels​