While touring with a band called The Jaguars, Charlie Daniels regularly played a venue in Tulsa, Oklahoma called the Fondalite Club. That’s where he met Hazel.
“She’s not much of a clubgoer, but she came with a girlfriend of hers one night. And I said, ‘Hey I like that curvy little blonde over there. Hey how are you doin’?” Daniels told The Oklahoman in 2014. “It kinda went on from there, you know.”
Daniels wed the former Hazel Juanita Alexander in Tulsa on September 20, 1964. Daniels’ tour schedule was so busy back then that he hit the road the next day for work, not a honeymoon.
Touring also impacted Daniels’ time spent with the couple’s son, Charlie Daniels, Jr. The younger Daniels was born on April 28, 1965.
“I came home so anxious to see my family and hold my baby son, and when I picked him up, he started crying. He didn’t know who I was,” Daniels wrote in an essay for CNS News. “Even after we moved to Nashville in 1967, the periods of separation would continue as I pursued my dreams, logging millions of miles and untold weeks away from my family in the process.”
