There will never be another like him.
Outlaw country legend David Allan Coe passed away back on April 29 at the age of 86, after living one of the most colorful lives in country music history.
Coe famously spent much of his early life incarcerated before moving to Nashville in hopes of pursuing a career in music. He was discovered while living in a hearse outside of the Ryman Auditorium, signing to an independent label and launching his music career.
His career really began to take off in 1973, when Tanya Tucker had a #1 hit with Coe’s “Would You Lay With Me (In a Field of Stone),” which led to Coe signing with a major label.
While he never had a #1 hit as an artist, he wrote two songs that would eventually top the charts for other artists including “Tennessee Whiskey,” and was integral to the rise of the outlaw country movement alongside artists like Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard.
But Coe may have never had the mainstream success as those other guys because he refused to compromise his language or his lifestyle in exchange for radio play or industry praise. And he apparently wasn’t worried about what the IRS thought of him either…
Back in 1985, Coe lost the publishing rights to his music after his catalog was sold in a bankruptcy proceeding to pay off his debt to the IRS. But by 2015, he once again found himself behind on his taxes, and the IRS came knocking at his door once again.
He apparently wasn’t too worried about it though…
During a recent conversation with Coe’s longtime friend and co-manager David Wade, he recalled to Whiskey Riff the hilarious reaction from Coe when he got a letter from the agency threatening him with prison time over unpaid taxes:
“My favorite all-time David Allan Coe story was us sitting at his house in the Indian Hill area of Cincinnati, and he got the letter from the IRS that said, basically, you owe a million dollars, what’s going on, are you paying this off, you didn’t file taxes for this many years and all of these problems from the past.
And I’m reading this letter and reading, you know, you’re going to go to prison and blah blah blah.
Then I get to the bottom and the last couple lines say, ‘If you’ve already handled this matter, please disregard.’ And of course, David, you know, hadn’t handled the matter, hadn’t thought about it, hadn’t done anything.
He’s like, ‘Well, just read the last line of that letter again.’ I said, ‘Well, David, it says, if you’ve already handled…’ He said, ‘No, no, no.’ He said, ‘Just the last line.’ I said, ‘Please disregard?’ He said, ‘You’re motherf–king right.’ And he grabbed the paper and he crumbled it up and he threw it in the trash can.”
Well unsurprisingly, disregarding the letter didn’t turn out great for Coe. In 2015, he pled guilty to one count of impeding and obstructing the IRS, and was ordered to pay nearly a million dollars in unpaid taxes and penalties. But as Wade recalled, his reaction
“This didn’t turn out well for him either, but that was his thing.
And to me, I was sh–ting in my pants. I had nothing to do with his finances, but it was like, if I got a letter from the IRS saying, ‘Well, we’re probably going to put you in a cage for five years and we’re going to take a million dollars from you,’ I’d be responding to the letter and pleading for mercy and whatever.
David was like, ‘Motherf–kers, I know.'”
One of a kind.
His trouble with the IRS ultimately inspired what would become the title track to his final album, A Million Reasons, which was released last month. And just yesterday, we brought you an exclusive first look at the music video to the song, which saw Coe returning to the prison where he was once incarcerated.
If you haven’t watched it yet, check it out:
