Songfacts®:

• This song, about a guy with a very passive attitude who lies around all day doing nothing, was originally written very tongue-in-cheek. Because it contained references to drugs and drinking, however, Charlie Daniels felt it was inappropriate to play it during live shows for several years. In a Songfacts interview with Daniels, he said, "Things have gotten so serious and it's such a big problem with drugs and alcohol with kids, and it just went against my Christian feelings to actually do anything that somebody could construe with promoting that lifestyle, or those things, the alcohol and drugs."
  
  It wasn't until many years later that he decided to change some of the words so he felt he could begin playing it in his live shows again. "The song was such a big part of our repertoire and was always just a popular song for us to do. And people kept wanting it, so I changed 'I get stoned in the morning, I get drunk in the afternoon' to 'I get up in the morning, I get down in the afternoon,' which means the same thing. I wish I had done that to start with."
• It wasn't necessarily from personal experience that Daniels wrote this song, rather from the general way he was feeling at the time. Daniels says the song's message is tolerance. "If you don't like me, we don't need to have any trouble, we don't need to be going upside each other's head or anything," he told Songfacts. "Just leave me alone. Just walk around me. Maybe you don't like the way my hair looks, maybe you don't like the way I eat my soup, or whatever it is that you don't like about me, it doesn't make any difference to me. I don't care. If you don't like me it's okay. Maybe I don't like you either, but I'm not going to bother with you. Just walk around me, go to the other side of the street, or I go to the other side of the street, and let's just co-exist here. There's no need to have problems. You may mentally and intellectually disagree with people, but you don't have to be nasty about it. You certainly don't have to be physical about it. So if you don't like me, it's okay, just leave me alone. And that's what the song's about."