David Allan Coe Biography

David Allan Coe (born September 6, 1939 in Akron, Ohio) is an American outlaw country music singer who achieved his greatest popularity in the 1970s. He has written and performed over 280 original songs throughout his long career.

Known for his outlaw persona, Coe,supposedly spent most of his youth in various prisons until releasing his debut album, Penitentiary Blues in 1968 and touring with Grand Funk Railroad. His concerts were wild and unpredictable, as Coe began calling himself the Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy and he wore a rhinestone costume and Lone Ranger mask, riding into concerts on a motorcycle.
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He was not able to expand beyond a cult following, however, and other artists found more success than him with his songs. Tanya Tucker, Billie Jo Spears, George Jones, Tammy Wynette and Willie Nelson all recorded Coe compositions. Johnny Paycheck even made a short acting career out of Coe's "Take This Job and Shove It."

Coe finally hit the Top Ten with "You Never Even Called Me By My Name" in 1975. The song, written in conjunction with Steve Goodman, is known as "the perfect country and western song". It includes a narrative in which Coe explains that the perfect country and western song has to mention "Mama, or trains, or trucks, or prison, or gettin' drunk", whereupon he sings the last verse:

Well, I was drunk the day my Mom got out of prison,
And I went to pick her up in the rain,
But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck,
She got runned over by a damned old train.

His songs are known for strong rock arrangements, often with a Caribbean touch ("Divers Do It Deeper"), a tough band with tough guitar solos ("Longhaired Redneck"), a personal touch ("Willie, Waylon, and Me"), and verbal facility.

Coe is also known for his humorous, X-rated and unabashedly offensive songs of the 1970s (co-written with children's author Shel Silverstein) such as "I'd Like To Fuck the Shit Out of You", "Fuck Anita Bryant," "Finger Fucking Sally" and "The Three Biggest Lies In the World." Coe is often considered a racist by critics, who use his song "Nigger Fucker" as evidence. Coe claims that he is not racist. For a short time Coe had a black drummer, who was in fact married to a white woman. (He can be seen on Coe's Live At Billy Bob's Texas DVD in 2002). Various other "joke" racist songs exist as bootlegs and rehearsals, and have been incorrectly attributed to Coe. The most likely source of the false racist material is Johnny Rebel, the famous racist songwriter whose music is usually released and spread in single and bootleg form. Coe has also been accused of being Rebel himself, though Rebel's recording career began several years before Coe's.

He is also known for his top country hit, "The Ride", which chronicles a driver picking up an Alabama hitch-hiker. The driver turns out to be the ghost of Hank Williams.

Coe's long career has included 26 LPs, with 1987's Matter of Life... and Death being one of the most successful and critically acclaimed. He even put out a concept album, Compass Point that threads his autobiography (or that of his persona) through an encounter with the famous Caribbean studio for which it was named and where it was recorded.

Tax trouble contributed to his career's instability, though Coe has continued touring throughout the 1980s and '90s, also doing some writing and acting work. He played a crooked bounty hunter in the movie, "Buckstone County Prison".

After Paycheck's brief and strife-filled career ended, Coe made fun of him in his sequel, "You Can Take This Job and Shove It Too" with the line, "Paycheck you may be a thing of the past". He also made fun of Glen Campbell's singing a song called "Rhinestone Cowboy" with the line: "I've been the rhinestone cowboy for so long I can't remember."

Coe's concerts, particularly in the '70s and early '80s, often attracted a rough and rowdy crowd, and Coe seemed to feed off the energy of his fans: a mixture of bikers, cowboys, and hippies.

In concert, he frequently said after one of his hard-rocking numbers, "Take that, Bill Monroe!" Monroe is a country traditionalist, but so is Coe in his own way: "I can sing you every song Hank Williams ever wrote, and I can sing all them songs about Texas...".

Coe has been lionized in the past couple of decades by punk rock and heavy metal artists. Dead Kennedys covered "Take This Job And Shove It" on their final studio album Bedtime For Democracy in 1987, while GG Allin transformed Coe's "Longhaired Redneck" into his own "Outlaw Scumfuc" on his 1988 album Freaks, Faggots, Drunks and Junkies. In the early 2000's Coe met and befriended Pantera/Damageplan members and brothers Dimebag Darrell and Vinnie Paul; the trio recorded a project that has been tenatively titled Rebel Meets Rebel. The album is set to be released on Vinnie Paul's record label "Big Vin Records", in March 2005.

DAVID ALLAN COE PICTURES

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DAVID ALLAN COE BIOGRAPHY