I'm Retired! Now what?

While everyone on social media tends to complain about politics or post family photos, I usually tell people that my posts generally cover two main topics.  My posts tend to deal with either the glorious good times of the latest concert I’ve gone to or the morbid subject of celebrity deaths.  Okay, I think of them more as tributes, and even though some slip past me, I try to pay a few words of respect to those celebs that have left us.   Since my retirement of a month, I’ve only noticed one celebrity death, and that was the passing of David Allan Coe on April 29, 2026.

David Allan Coe is one of those guys I look at and think, “Wow!  He lived that long with his kind of lifestyle?  Maybe I shouldn’t have listened to my mother quite so much and had more fun when I was a kid.”  I always thought the guy looked like someone you’d want on your side during a bar fight, and somewhere I had learned that he stood at a commanding 6’4”!  However, when I asked Google about his height, it told me that Mr. Coe was no taller than 5’7” and then another site told me 6’2”.   Apparently, you can’t believe anything on the web, but I always liked the guy as a singer regardless of his height, and I got to see him play years ago in a small, local nightclub.

This nightclub had just opened, and I’m guessing that the David Allan Coe show was supposed to be their big hurrah.  Apparently, it wasn’t because the doors shut in less than a year.   For that night though, the place was packed, but I have to say that the most memorable part of the entire concert for me was how clean the restrooms in the club were.  Yes, that should say something about the concert right there.  Clean bathrooms aside, here’s my David Allan Coe post from FACEBOOK.

 I see we lost David Allen Coe this past week at the age of 86. Even folks that grew up in my day who claimed that they hated country music knew Coe’s big song YOU NEVER EVEN CALLED ME BY MY NAME. It’s the song that explains how a perfect country song required the mention of trains, momma, trucks, rain…and we all know how that song goes. It’s a favorite song at piano bars. Throughout my jr. high and high school days that was pretty much David Allan Coe for me. Back in those days, I didn’t even know that he wrote the Johnny Paycheck song, TAKE THIS JOB AND SHOVE IT. But then my first roommate in college played me Mr. Coe’s Greatest Hits album, and by the end of the semester I was singing all the words to DIVERS DO IT DEEPER, LONGHAIRED REDNECK, and WILLIE, WAYLON, AND ME.

One of the coolest David Allan Coe concert experiences I had wasn’t even a David Allan Coe concert. Back in the early 80’s I went to a Hank Williams Jr. concert and as all the lights went out before the concert started Coe’s song THE RIDE played out with the ending words, “You don’t have to call me mister, mister, The whole world calls me Hank!” Okay, different Hank, but it still worked.

Years ago, David Allan Coe actually came to a small club in Denison, Texas, and of all the shows I’ve been to, I can honestly say this was the only time I had seen a concert where the performer was way more messed up than the audience was. The guy faded from one song to the middle of another song to the beginning to another and then off to something else. I’m not sure he completed one entire song during that concert, and had someone asked him where he was, I doubt if he could have answered such a question.

The guy seemed to love playing guitars painted up like the Confederate flag, and during the song WILLIE, WAYLON, AND ME he barks out, “My name is David Allan Coe and I’m from Dallas, Texas!“ but the guy was actually from Ohio. However, Coe could have been from anywhere because his voice was pure country, and even though he sounded a little like Merl Haggard, he carried a look like no other. One of the first times I saw the guy on TV, his hair was so long it nearly touched the floor.

I’m not sure if any singer of any genre of music lived up to the title “outlaw” quite like David Allan Coe did. The guy was covered in tattoos, he’d belonged to biker gangs and spent a good portion of his youth in reform school and prison. In fact, it was in prison where he started writing songs with Screaming Jay Hawkins who was a bit of an outlaw in his own right!

Even though the song YOU NEVER EVEN CALLED ME BY MY NAME might have told us what words were needed for the perfect country song, the guy’s life would probably be a better example of the perfect country song. R.I.P. David Allan Coe.