David Allan Coe, the country singer whose outlandish exploits, prison tales and obscenity-laden performances earned him notoriety as a transgressive exponent of the outlaw country movement of the 1970s and ’80s, died on Wednesday. He was 86.
Mr. Coe’s death was confirmed by David Wade, his booking agent, who said he had died in the hospital but did not specify a cause.
A pair of mid-1970s singles announced Mr. Coe’s arrival as a Nashville outsider in the mold of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings — an original with an offbeat sense of humor, a deep baritone and a fierce resolve to be different.
The first of those recordings, “You Never Even Called Me by My Name,” a droll send-up of honky-tonk clichés written by the folk singers Steve Goodman and John Prine, reached the country Top 10 in 1975.
“I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison/And I went to pick her up in the rain,” Mr. Coe sang on the record’s final chorus, backed by a weeping dobro and a nimble country rhythm section. “But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck/She got runned over by a damned ol’ train.”
Mr. Coe’s other breakthrough hit, “Longhaired Redneck” (1976), found him doing spot-on impersonations of country forebears like Ernest Tubb and Merle Haggard while painting a surreal clash of cultures among cowboys, hippies and bikers at a dive bar.
Mr. Coe wrote or co-wrote most of his material but had his greatest success with songs he wrote for others, notably Tanya Tucker’s “Would You Lay With Me (In a Field of Stone)” (1973) and Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It” (1977). Both records were No. 1 country singles, and “Take This Job and Shove It” inspired a 1981 movie in which Mr. Coe had a minor role. He also wrote for the Dead Kennedys and Johnny Cash.
“I can write at the drop of a hat,” Mr. Coe said in a 2003 interview with Review magazine. “If someone tells me they will give me $10,000 to write six songs about peanut butter, they would have them in 15 minutes.”
Unlike Mr. Cash, who only sang about prisons and performed in them, Mr. Coe was the genuine article. Incarcerated for crimes ranging from auto theft and the possession of tools to commit burglary, he spent three years in the 1960s in the Ohio State Penitentiary, where he claimed to have killed another inmate who tried to rape him.
That story, later debunked by the news media, was typical of the outlaw aura that surrounded Mr. Coe and often obscured his gifts as a singer, songwriter and performer.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mr. Coe released two albums — “Nothing Sacred” and “Underground Album” — that were later reissued as a compilation called “18 X-Rated Hits.” In 2000, a New York Times reporter described the album’s material as “among the most racist, misogynist, homophobic and obscene songs recorded by a popular songwriter.”
“Many of Mr. Coe’s “X-Rated Hits” even make Eminem’s heavily attacked recent album seem tenderhearted,” wrote the reporter, Neil Strauss. He was referring to Eminem’s “The Marshall Mathers LP,” a record that was criticized for its violent and homophobic lyrics.
For years, Mr. Coe distanced himself from those songs.
“Anyone that would look at me and say I was a racist would have to be out of their mind,” he insisted in a 2004 interview with swampland.com.
A full obituary will be published later.
Jin Yu Young and Alex Marshall contributed reporting.
