David Allan Coe, the outlaw country singer known for his bold, confrontational image and songs like “You Never Even Called Me by My Name” and “The Ride,” has died, ROLLING STONE has confirmed. He was 86 years old. A cause of death was initially not known.
Coe was one of country music’s most colorful and contradictory figures. A walking old wives’ tale who boasted of stories from prisons and the streets and created his own mythology. He wrote mainstream hits for Tanya Tucker and Johnny Paycheck – “Take This Job and Shove It” was written entirely by him – and recorded country songs that are still played on countless playlists and on the radio today (hardly a jukebox can do without “You Never Even Called Me by My Name”). Nevertheless, a phase of offensive, racist songs, which Coe described as parodies, still causes discomfort today.
Born on September 6, 1939, in Akron, Ohio, Coe spent his early years in and out of reform schools and prisons, convicted of offenses ranging from grand theft auto to possession of burglary tools. While serving time in prison in the fall of 1963, he claimed to have killed a fellow prisoner with a mop bucket rack after the man threatened him in the prison showers. In a 1975 interview, Coe said that at times he felt like he belonged in the prison system. “There were many moments when I was sitting in the city jail, waking up after an arrest and saying to myself, ‘Thank God it’s over; I’m glad I’m going back to prison now where I know I’m safe, where I’m out of society,'” he said.
Myth and reality
This claim was more than questionable. “Ninety percent of what he tells you is probably bullshit,” Shelby Singleton, the Nashville producer who discovered Coe, told Rolling Stone in 1976. “We thought it was a gimmick and marketed it accordingly.”
Although Coe was prone to exaggeration, he lived the kind of uncompromising life that other outlaw country figures only sang about. He was a thoroughly eccentric character who never missed an opportunity to stand out in the music industry: He drove a hearse, wore a Lone Ranger mask and, according to one report, worked himself up in sweats outside Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium to look as if he had just performed on the venerable stage. He then gave autographs to tourists.
But Coe, who arrived in Nashville in 1967, didn’t have to play the star. After Tanya Tucker took his song “Would You Lay With Me (In a Field of Stone)” to number one on the country charts in 1973, he was a sought-after – if still idiosyncratic – singer-songwriter. He signed with Columbia Records and released his major label debut (and first country album, after two blues LPs), “The Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy” in 1974. The follow-up album, 1975’s Once Upon a Rhyme, included Coe’s own recording of “Would You Lay With Me” as well as the jukebox perennial favorite “You Never Even Called Me by My Name” – including the spoken interlude on the “perfect country and western song”.
The perfect country song
“You Never Even Called Me by My Name,” written by Steve Goodman and an unnamed John Prine, was the ideal vehicle for Coe – an opportunity to simultaneously poke fun at and pay homage to country music, sprinkle in spot-on impersonations of then-stars Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard, and weave in his own mythologized biography. “The only time I know I’ll hear ‘David Allan Coe,'” Coe sang in his own verse, “is when Jesus holds his final judgment day.”
This talent for self-reference ran throughout his career. In the powerful 1976 rocker “Longhaired Redneck,” he sang: “They told me I look like Merle Haggard / and I sound a lot like David Allan Coe.” In 1977’s “Willie, Waylon and Me,” he wrote himself into the friendship story of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, opening the second verse with the blustering announcement: “My name is David Allan Coe and I’m from Dallas, Texas!” – and he came from Ohio. And in 1986’s “Son of the South,” he dropped a whole list of artists whose records he would play “as loud as they would go,” including Hank Williams Jr., Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers — and “David Allan Coe.”
Although Coe enjoyed some success as a singer in the 1970s, his greatest triumph of that decade was as a songwriter. In 1977, Johnny Paycheck, another hard-core outlaw singer, recorded Coe’s song “Take This Job and Shove It,” scoring a number one country hit and cementing a saying about rebelling against your boss in the collective memory. Coe himself recorded his own version a year later for 1978’s Family Album – an LP that also contained the tropical vibes of “Divers Do It Deeper” (“divers do it deeper, jockeys do it shorter… sails do it wetter, soldiers do it better,” went the refrain).
Scandal and comeback
“Divers Do It Deeper” was a comparatively harmless piece, but it hinted at what was to come from Coe. He self-published and mail order two offensive albums with self-indulgent songs about sex and race. Known as “X-rated” albums – 1978’s “Nothing Sacred” and 1982’s “Underground Album” – they received harsh criticism for their use of racist slurs and misogynistic language. Coe claimed they were created as a parody, inspired by Dr. Hook’s 1972 album of Shel Silverstein songs, Freakin’ at the Freakers Ball.
In the ’80s, Coe returned to more conventional songs and made a comeback with 1983’s Castles in the Sand, which reached the top 10 of the country album charts thanks to the single “The Ride.” Written by Gary Gentry and JB Detterline Jr., the song depicts a hitchhiker’s encounter with the ghost of Hank Williams. Coe couldn’t resist another opportunity for self-immortalization: He added an outro verse in which Hank praises the new crop of country singers – from Waylon Jennings and Billy Joe Shaver to David Allan Coe.
Coe continued to release new albums, live recordings, spoken word projects and compilations well into the 2000s. Between 1999 and 2003 he recorded a number of songs with members of the heavy metal band Pantera, which were released in 2005 as the album Rebel Meets Rebel. He also became friends with Kid Rock and began working with him: Kid Rock signed Coe as the opening act for one of his tours and recorded his song “Single Father”.
Late years and tax scandal
On stage in his later years, Coe was a striking, intimidating presence with long hair and a braided beard. He played hunched over his guitar – one decorated with a Confederate flag motif – and sang into a headset microphone, belting out his own hits and covers of artists ranging from Kid Rock to Merle Haggard. He was particularly popular on the motorcycle rally circuit and recorded a concert album, Live From the Iron Horse Saloon, at the 2001 Biketoberfest in Daytona Beach, Florida, not far from his home in Ormond Beach.
In the mid-2010s, Coe ran into financial difficulties. In 2015, he pleaded guilty to obstructing and interfering with the work of the tax administration and was sentenced to three years probation – for tax evasion and with the requirement to pay almost a million dollars in back payments to the IRS. Even though it was a very different type of offense than in previous years, the verdict once again underscored Coe’s life as an outlaw.
In a 1975 film, part documentary, part concert film, part performance art, Coe visits the Marion Correctional Institution in Ohio, where he is interviewed in a cell about his experiences behind bars – and once again reveals what drove him: the hunger for notoriety.
“I’ve found my place in society. And it’s not in prison,” he said. “I don’t have to come back here anymore for everyone to know who David Allan Coe is; now everyone on the street knows me. So I still get that satisfaction of being someone.”