Leaving behind a complicated legacy.
Outlaw country legend David Allan Coe passed away yesterday afternoon at the age of 86, following years of health problems including a long battle with COVID back in 2021.
Since his death, many have shared tributes to the “You Never Even Called Me By My Name” singer, but of course you can’t talk about David Allan Coe without talking about his controversial legacy either.
I’m not going to get into it all here, but suffice it to say that Coe was always controversial and often had strained relationships even with his friends.
His fellow outlaw country legend Waylon Jennings once spoke about their relationship after he accused Coe of “taking pot shots” at some of his fellow artists:
“He wrote a song called “Waylon, Willie, and Me” at the same time he started taking pot shots at us in interviews, saying that Willie and Kris had sold out, that I was running around wearing white buck shoes, and none of us was really an Outlaw. He was the only Outlaw in Nashville. …
I saw him in Fort Worth, and I put my finger right up to his chest. ‘You gotta knock that shit off’, I told him. ‘I ain’t never done anything to you.’ He protested, ‘They just set us up…you know I love you, Waylon.” …
He could drive me crazy, but there was something about David that pulled at my heartstrings.”
But there’s nobody who understood just how difficult he could be to love than Coe’s son, Tyler Mahan Coe.
Tyler played in his father’s band when he was just a teenager, but became estranged from his dad later in life. Their relationship appeared to fall apart around 2013, two years after David Allan Coe was in a serious car accident. When he returned to the stage two years later, Coe announced to the audience that he had a brand new band because “everybody quit” him except for his wife.
His son, whoever, deeply disputed his father’s characterization, revealing that their last communication was a text exchange from the younger Coe assuring his dad that he would help make sure he had a band when he was ready to get back on the road. And according to Tyler at the time, his father then stopped answering his calls altogether:
“My feelings were deeply hurt when I learned that he was announcing onstage that his entire band had quit him and everyone had ‘abandoned’ him when this was not the case. It became clear that my attempts to contact him were being deliberately ignored and I have no idea why.”
Tyler Mahan Coe would go on to build his own name in the country music world, launching the massively successful Cocaine & Rhinestones podcast on country music history (which is worth the listen, if you somehow haven’t already listened to it). But he remained estranged from his father after 2013, confirming back in 2021 during an interview with GQ that they hadn’t spoken since those text messages about getting a band back together.
There’s no doubt that his father’s death stirs up a lot of emotions, many of which I’m sure are conflicting given their relationship. But after the news of his passing, Tyler took to his Patreon page to reflect on the complicated man – and father – that was David Allen Coe:
“I had made a whole different regular post for this month that was ready to go, but then I was informed that my father has died and I’m certain the news will be public by the time this goes out. I feel like I should probably talk about that instead, even though I don’t think I really have a lot to say right now.”
Tyler admits that even after they became estranged, he never stopped caring about his father:
“David Allen Coe was always a difficult person to be close with, a difficult person to care about for several reasons. Nobody who ever knew him would disagree with that statement. But I did always care about him, even after it became clear that he and I were never going to speak to each other again. I never wanted anything bad to happen to him.”
And he also reflected on the choices that he made in both his life and his career, and how that’s going to impact his legacy:
“I do hate the choices he made for how to spend the final decade or so of his life, but I didn’t hate him. And those were his choices to make. Anyone who knows anything about that man knows how useless it would be to try to get him to make different choices.
If that were possible, his career would have gone way differently and his legacy would probably be a lot better than whatever it’s going to end up being now. Presumably some kind of eternally confused and confusing mess.”
Tyler says that his father felt “misunderstood” as an artist, something that always bothered him, but that he was also complex because he wanted to ensure that his music captured every part of himself:
“Aside from him being an actually insane individual, one of the things that makes it so difficult is there’s not one album or even one period of his career you can hold up as an example of who he really was as an artist, because no one album or period of his career is the entire picture.
In fact, this is a phrase he constantly used when describing his approach to making music. He was trying to use songs to paint a picture for the audience. And I think the schizophrenic nature of his discography is partly a product of him trying not to leave out any part of the picture he saw. Trying to paint the entire thing, even though the very nature of individual human existence meant he was the only one who could see it.”
But he perfectly sums up his father and the unique – although at times controversial and clearly frustrating to those who knew him – individual that he was:
“At a certain point, the only explanation you can offer is one I have given many, many times in my life. That’s just DAC.”
What a perfect tribute to a complex, controversial, and often times misunderstood, individual like David Allan Coe.
