A legend in country music, David Allan Coe, died Wednesday (4/29) after 86 years of epitomizing outlaw music. Someone upstairs seems to have given him time off for bad behavior.
Coe led one of the most colorful and controversial lives in all of music and embodied the rebellious genre in some ways more accurately than his peers Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and Merle Haggard.
Born in Ohio in 1939, his sad childhood was mostly spent behind bars or in juvenile detention. He was first sent to reform school at just nine years old and for the next two decades ended up on the wrong side of the law, and ultimately convinced himself he was indeed a menace to the public.
“There were a lot of times when I would actually be in the county jail after being busted,” he said in a 1975 documentary, “and I’d wake up the next morning and say to myself, ‘Oh I’m glad it’s over; I’m glad I’m going back to prison now, where I know I’ll be safe, where I’ll be out of society.’”
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