David Allan Coe is Dead. I Don't Care.

by Julian Spivey
 
Singer-songwriter David Allan Coe died on Wednesday, April 29, at age 86, and I have to say, I don’t care.
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Many see him as a legendary performer; I’ve always seen a vile person. The reasons I’ve always been convinced of for both are the same.

I grew up in Northern Arkansas listening to a bit of everything the local radio stations played. I loved the oldies station and the classic rock station. At times, I would listen to the modern country station and the top-40 pop station.

In high school, I got really into classic country music and became a huge fan of Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard, so I was into the kind of stuff that would make one think I might also love David Allan Coe. But I hadn’t heard of him.

I don’t really know how the group of people I spent the most time with in high school developed. Looking back on it, I only really liked two or three of them, even at that time, but it was a sizeable group. I don’t know what you’d call us… We weren’t jocks. We weren’t popular. With the exception of maybe two of us, we weren’t all that smart or nerdy. But as it goes in high school lunchrooms, we all sat together every day at lunch.

Somehow, David Allan Coe would come up with this group – I don’t understand why that would happen in 2005-2006, but probably because a handful of us liked older country music. These idiots would cackle and giggle about his disgusting songs, many of them bigoted and racist, including slurs like the “N-word,” which these guys sitting near me would repeat, acting as if that sort of thing was cool.

These guys didn’t seem to care about the good songs Coe had written, like “Take This Job and Shove It” for Johnny Paycheck or “The Ride,” his own tribute to Hank Williams; they just liked that he used the “N-word” in his songs.

To these guys, Coe made racism and racist language cool, and he made it acceptable.

I was quiet, even more so than I am today, but I’ve always let it be known when I didn’t appreciate something, and I did with these guys, which just made it worse for me. It was a racist joke palooza after that, with me being too cowardly at the time to just walk away.

And that’s why, even though I know these songs only make up a small percentage of Coe’s discography, it’s the main reason I’ve always viewed him as a racist loser, and even worse, someone who made people like the ones I grew up with believe that it was just fine to be one, cool even.

David Allan Coe is dead. I hope his legacy goes with him.