David Allan Coe, the outlaw country music legend and pioneer songwriter behind hits such as “You Never Even Called Me by My Name” and “The Ride,” has died at 86 years old.
Coe died in an intensive care unit at around 5 p.m. on Wednesday, his representative confirmed to Rolling Stone.
“David is a musical treasure,” the representative said. “Even in his years of declining health, David appreciated all of the fans.”
A cause of death has not yet been confirmed.
“One of the best singers, songwriters, and performers of our time [and] never to be forgotten,” his wife Kimberly Hastings Coe told 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.”
The “Longhaired Redneck” singer had faced a declining health battle over the last decade.
In 2013, at 73, Coe survived a harrowing crash when a semi-truck broadsided his Suburban at a Florida intersection after he ran a red light at 1:30 a.m., according to the Ocala Star Banner.
Rescuers spent two hours cutting him out of the wreckage. He walked away with broken ribs, bruised kidneys and 48 stitches in his head.
In 2021, Coe, then 81, was hospitalized for a month after he tested positive for COVID.
Coe is remembered as one of the pillars of the outlaw country movement and helped propel the genre into the fringes of the mainstream country music industry with his songwriting and lifestyle.
Coe was born in Akron, Ohio, on Sept. 6, 1939, and spent his younger years serving stints in reformatories and prisons, including the Ohio State Penitentiary, serving time for a range of charges, including grand theft auto and possession of burglary tools.
Coe long insisted he killed a man in prison in 1963, beating him with a mop bucket after a shower confrontation, but later research suggested the tale was more legend than fact, despite his well-documented criminal record.
Fresh out of prison in 1967, Coe made his way to Nashville in a hearse, parking outside the Ryman Auditorium and performing on the street before Grand Ole Opry shows wearing a mask and a rhinestone suit as he chased his musical ambitions, his son, Tyler Mahan Coe, told GQ in 2021.
Coe’s street-corner hustle eventually landed him a record deal with Plantation Records, releasing his blues-rooted debut album, “Penitentiary Blues,” in 1970 and “Requiem for a Harlequin” in 1973, but his career began to skyrocket after writing Tanya Tucker’s 1973 country chart hit “Would You Lay With Me (In a Field of Stone).”
Coe then signed with Columbia Records, releasing his first true country album, “The Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy,” in 1974, then broke through the following year with “Once Upon a Rhyme” and his first country Top 10 single, “You Never Even Called Me by My Name.”
In 1976, Coe released “Longhaired Redneck,” with the album’s title track serving as a pointed nod to the outlaw country genre, and his 1977 No. 1 hit song “Take This Job and Shove It,” recorded by fellow outlaw Johnny Paycheck, became one of working-class America’s most beloved anthems.
His run continued well into the next decade, with 1983’s “The Ride” giving way to his highest-charting single, “Mona Lisa Lost Her Smile,” which peaked at No. 2 in 1984.
The country music icon released 42 studio albums over a career spanning nearly six decades.
Outside the music business, Coe lived up to his reputation.
He was a former member of an Outlaws Motorcycle Club chapter in Louisville, Kentucky, joining up after having cousins who were already members, he said in a 2003 interview.
The country music outlaw was married six times, with his last marriage to wife Kimberly at the Little White Wedding Chapel in 2010 being attended by country star Toby Keith, who served as an official witness, according to The Boot.
Coe leaves behind his wife Kimberly, son Tyler Mahan Coe, and daughter Tanya Coe.
