Singing about the Devil
There's a long musical history of Faustian pacts, temptation, success, and the problem of evil.
This May, my favorite country band, The Turnpike Troubadours, released their latest album, “The Price of Admission.”
The album continues Turnpike’s run of excellent, Red Dirt country music.
The band, which has sold out multi-night runs at the legendary Ryman Auditorium but remains ignored by Music Row, is finally getting some broader exposure with this album. They performed the elegiac opening track, “On the Red River,” on CBS Morning’s Saturday Session. Spotify placed that same song on its “Hot Country” playlist.
This blessing from the algorithmic gods led lead singer and songwriter Evan Felker to quip “Nothing says hot country like a 5 minute waltz about intergenerational alcoholism and obscure dog breeds.”
I could say more about this album in particular and the band in general. The long story, for those of a mind to hear it, is available on a recent episode of the Political Beats podcast on which I discussed them last month. The short story is I think they’re the best country band of the 21st Century.
For present purposes, though, I want to focus on one song from the latest album: “The Devil Plies His Trade.” Felker’s lyrics offer one of the most theologically subtle accounts of the devil and temptation I’ve seen in popular music. (Musically, it’s also a banger.)
When talking about the topic of country songs about Satan, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” by the Charlie Daniels Band is unavoidable.
That song, when you think about it, is quite silly, as demonstrated by an old article in McSweeney’s.
The premise of the song is the devil challenges the protagonist Johnny to a fiddle contest: win and get a golden fiddle, lose and the devil takes your soul. There are so many questions about the bizarre set-up (McSweeney’s offers 39, such as what would Johnny do with a golden fiddle, why would he risk his soul for one, and who judged the contest?), but it’s more or less a country-fried Faust. Goethe in a ten-gallon hat; Marlowe with a mullet.
And then of course there is the Rolling Stone’s “Sympathy for the Devil.” We have some better lyrical flourishes—Satan as “a man of wealth and taste” stands out as apt—but otherwise the account veers between blandness and spotty theology. The Devil, you see, is personally responsible for Pilate’s cowardice, killing the tsar and his family, leading the blitzkrieg, and shooting the Kennedys (hoo-whoo etc.).
Perhaps it is too much to ask a rock song for a subtler take on human agency in cooperation with evil, and I’m loath to discount the presence of the demonic in the world, but Mick’s take on Old Nick bears an uncanny resemblance to a certain kind of churchy person who pins everything bad on devil.
Turnpike’s treatment, however, better captures the current shape of our temptations. Ours is not much of a heroic age and few of us today (or ever) are world historic figures (or fiddlers) put to the direct and explicit choice between our soul and worldly glory.