back if y'ever wanna try again" before repeating his claim to be "the best that's ever been". Reception Cash Box praised the "engaging narrative story line" and said the song has "thundering piano", "screaming fiddle work", "pounding drums and screeching guitar". Record World said that Daniels "administers heavy doses of both [storytelling and fiddle-playing] with producer John Boylan capturing theexcitement like no one else can." Censorship Johnny's final boast, from the album version of the song, goes, "I done told you once, you son of a bitch, I'm the best that's ever been". But to accommodate radio airplay for Country and Top 40 formats, Daniels changed the lyric for the single release to, "'Cause I told you once, you son of a gun", though AOR stations continued to use the unaltered version. Musical references The ballad's story is a derivative of the traditional deal with the Devil motif. Charlie Daniels has stated in interviews, "I don't know where it came from, but it just did. Well, I think I might know where it came from, it may have come from an old poem called 'The Mountain Whippoorwill' that Stephen Vincent Benét wrote many, many years ago (1925), that I had in high school." Personnel Charlie Daniels - guitar, fiddle, vocals Tom Crain - guitar, vocals "Taz" DiGregorio - keyboards, vocals Fred Edwards - drums, percussion James W. Marshall - drums, percussion Charles Hayward - bass Parodies and covers The Levellers released a version of the song in 1991. Although it is frequently misattributed to David Allan Coe or "Weird Al" Yankovic, the musician Travis Meyer performed a parody entitled "The Devil Went to Jamaica" circa 1998, in which Johnny is recast as a Jamaican drug dealer who is challenged by the devil to a pot-smoking contest to see whose marijuana is best: his, or Johnny's. On a 1980 The Muppet Show episode (Episode 420), the Muppet versions of the Devil and Johnny are portrayed in an opening number cover of the song. The rap group K.M.C. Kru released a hip hop re-imagining of the song entitled "The Devil Came Up to Michigan" in 1991, featuring the devil and a deejay competing for a turntable of gold. In the 2000 movie Coyote Ugly, the original song version by the Charlie Daniels Band is sung and danced to as an on-bar line dance by the troupe of female bartenders. Steve Ouimette (with