I suppose Satan stopped worrying that David Allen Coe would take over, because the cantankerous country singer and songwriter finally got to meet Old Nick last week when he – Coe, not Satan – died at age 86.
Coe’s career contains a curious quirk – he wrote songs that topped the charts for other artists, while his own best-performing records were covers. He wrote “Take This Job and Shove It,” Johnny Paycheck’s No. 1 country hit and signature song (much to Coe’s easily-aroused annoyance, many people assumed Paycheck wrote it). Meanwhile, Coe’s biggest hit as a singer was “You Never Even Called Me By My Name.” It only reached No. 8 on the country chart, his sole effort to reach the Top 10, but will forever grace dive-bar jukeboxes. Only the inattentive would think Coe wrote what he calls the perfect country and western song – he names Steve Goodman in the spoken interlude before the third verse (an uncredited John Prine contributed the title line).
Despite his frequent paeans to the South, Coe was born and raised in Akron, Ohio. He was a troubled youth and spent time in reform schools and jails, but he self-aggrandized those experiences into a tall tale about killing another inmate. By his own admission, he craved attention and would do just about anything to get it. His breakthrough as a performer was his 1974 LP “The Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy,” playing off his stage gimmick at the time – he would appear in a rhinestone-studded suit (given to him by Mel Tillis) and a Lone Ranger mask. This was more than a year before Glen Campbell had a hit with “Rhinestone Cowboy.”
That album was part of the nascent Outlaw Country movement that turned Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings into major stars, and it helped make Coe’s next album, “Once Upon a Rhyme,” featuring “You Never Even Called Me By My Name,” the best-selling of his career. The LP also contained his own rendition of the tune that broke him as a songwriter, “Would You Lay With Me (In a Field of Stone),” a country chart-topper for Tanya Tucker.
Unfortunately, Coe leaned much harder into his outlaw image than his sensitive side. He maintained a strong cult following, but his career took a hit around the turn of the millennium, when file-sharing services resurrected a couple of X-rated albums whose songs were so sexist and racist that Coe had to release them privately (one through ads in the back of a biker magazine). In later years Coe said they were intended as comedy in the spirit of his friend Shel Silverstein.
Coe wasn’t an easy guy to get along with. He famously feuded with Jimmy Buffett after the Margaritaville singer accused him, accurately, of ripping off “Changes in Attitudes, Changes in Attitudes” for the song “Divers Do It Deeper.” Coe responded with this riposte on 1978’s “Nothing Sacred,” an album that also contained a cover of “Cum Stains on the Pillow (Where Your Sweet Head Used to Be).”
