David Allan Coe, the outlaw country music singer known for his unrepentant, confrontational image and songs such as “You Never Even Called Me by My Name” and “The Ride,” has died. He was 86.
Coe’s wife, Kimberly Hastings Coe, confirmed the singer’s death to Rolling Stone. “One of the best singers, songwriters, and performers of our time [and] never to be forgotten,” Kimberly wrote to Rolling Stone. “My husband, my friend, my confidant and my life for many years. I’ll never forget him and I don’t want anyone else to ever forget him either.” A cause of death was not immediately available.
Coe was one of country music’s most complex figures. A walking tall tale who boasted about past exploits in prison and on the road, he was the author of his own mythology. Coe wrote mainstream hits for Tanya Tucker and Johnny Paycheck — “Take This Job and Shove It” was entirely his creation — and recorded country songs that still appear on multiple playlists and in radio rotation (countless jukeboxes include “You Never Even Called Me by My Name”). Still, a period of offensive, racist songs that Coe claimed were parodies make many bristle to this day.
Born September 6, 1939, in Akron, Ohio, Coe spent much of his early years in and out of reformatories and prisons, serving time for charges ranging from grand theft auto to possession of burglary tools. During one period of incarceration in the fall of 1963, he claimed to have killed a fellow inmate with a mop bucket after the man threatened him in the prison showers. In a 1975 interview, Coe said he once felt like he belonged in the penal system. “There were a lot of times when I would actually be in the county jail after being busted and I’d wake up the next morning and say to myself, ‘Oh I’m glad it’s over; I’m glad I’m going back to prison now, where I know I’ll be safe, where I’ll be out of society,’” he said.
The claim was a dubious one. “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 we promoted it in that manner.”
Although Coe was wont to embellish details, he lived the type of unapologetic life that other outlaw country figures only sang about. He was a wildly eccentric character, eager to try any number of tactics to stand out in the music industry: he drove a hearse, wore a Lone Ranger mask, and, according to one report, would work himself into a sweat outside of Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium to appear to have just performed on the hallowed stage. Then he’d sign autographs for tourists.
But Coe, who arrived in Nashville in 1967, didn’t have to fake being a star. After Tanya Tucker turned Coe’s song “Would You Lay With Me (In a Field of Stone)” into a Number One country hit in 1973, he became an in-demand — if still eccentric — singer-songwriter. He signed with Columbia Records and released his major-label debut (and first country album, after a pair of blues LPs) with 1974’s The Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy. The follow-up, 1975’s Once Upon a Rhyme, featured Coe’s recording of “Would You Lay With Me” and the perennial jukebox number “You Never Even Called Me by My Name,” with its spoken-word interlude about it being the “perfect country and western song.”
Written by Steve Goodman and an uncredited John Prine, “You Never Even Called Me by My Name” was the ideal vehicle for Coe — a chance to both poke fun at and honor country music, do spot-on impersonations of stars at the time Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard, and weave in his own mythologized legacy. “The only time I know, I’ll hear ‘David Allan Coe,’” Coe sang in his own verse, “is when Jesus has his final judgment day.”
Coe would call upon that knack for the self-referential throughout his career. In 1976’s blustering rocker “Longhaired Redneck,” he sang, “They tell me I look like Merle Haggard/and I sound a lot like David Allan Coe.” He inserted himself into the Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings friendship story in 1977’s “Willie, Waylon and Me,” introducing the second verse with the swaggering declaration, “My name is David Allan Coe and I’m from Dallas, Texas!” (He hailed from Ohio.) And in 1986’s “Son of the South,” he dropped a laundry list of artists whose records he’d play “as loud as they will go,” including Hank Williams Jr., Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers, and “David Allan Coe.”
While Coe had some success as a singer in the Seventies, his biggest victory that decade came as a songwriter. In 1977, Johnny Paycheck, another hard-living outlaw singer, recorded Coe’s song “Take This Job and Shove It,” scoring a Number One country hit and adding a catchphrase about sticking it to The Man into the lexicon. Coe recorded his own version a year later for 1978’s Family Album, an LP that also included the tropical vibes of “Divers Do It Deeper” (“divers do it deeper, jockeys do it shorter…sailors do it wetter, soldiers do it better,” went the chorus).
A fairly innocent tune, “Divers Do It Deeper” nonetheless hinted at what was to come from Coe. He went on to independently release and sell via mail order two off-color albums with outrageous songs about sex and race. Known as the “X-rated” albums, 1978’s Nothing Sacred and 1982’s Underground Album drew criticism for their use of racial slurs and misogynistic language. Coe has said they were written as parody after listening to Dr. Hook’s 1972 album of Shel Silverstein songs, Freakin’ at the Freakers Ball.
Coe returned to more conventional songs in the Eighties, staging a comeback with the 1983 album Castles in the Sand, which cracked the Top 10 of the country albums chart on the strength of the single “The Ride.” Written by Gary Gentry and J.B. Detterline Jr., the song details a hitchhiker’s encounter with the ghost of Hank Williams. Unable to resist another name-check, Coe added an outro verse in which Hank praises the new class of country singers, from Waylon Jennings and Billy Joe Shaver to David Allan Coe.
Coe continued to release new albums, live records, spoken-word projects, and compilations well into the 2000s. Between 1999 and 2003, he recorded a series of songs with members of heavy metal band Pantera for the 2005 album Rebel Meets Rebel. He also befriended and began to collaborate with Kid Rock, who enlisted Coe to open one of his tours and recorded his song “Single Father.”
Onstage in later years, Coe was a striking, intimidating figure with long hair and a braided beard. He would perform hunched over his guitar — one was decorated with a Confederate flag motif — and sing into a headset mic, offering his own hits and covers by artists from Kid Rock to Merle Haggard. He was an especially popular draw 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.
Coe faced financial struggles in the mid-2010s. He pleaded guilty to impeding and obstructing the administration of tax laws in 2015 and was sentenced to three years probation for tax evasion and ordered to pay close to $1 million in back taxes to the IRS. While it was far different from the type of misdeeds he faced charges for earlier in his life, the crime underscored Coe’s life as an outlaw.
In a 1975 movie that is part documentary, part concert film, and part performance art, Coe visits Ohio’s Marion Correctional Institution, where he’s interviewed in a cell about his experiences behind bars and yet again reveals what drove him: the pursuit of notoriety.
“I’ve found my place in society. And it’s not in a prison,” he said. “I no longer have to come back here and have everybody knowing who David Allan Coe is; now everybody on the street knows who I am. So I still get that satisfaction of being somebody.”