"I've written songs about things that nobody else has ever written about"
About this Quote
A boast like that doubles as a mission statement. It signals a writers hunger to pry open subjects polite radio would rather ignore and to stake out territory beyond the fences of genre convention. In the 1970s, when the outlaw country movement was pushing back against Nashvilles polish, David Allan Coe fashioned himself as the most ungovernable of the bunch. He wrote from prison yards, biker bars, and backroads America, and he cultivated the image of someone who would not flinch from taboo. That ethos produced not only provocative, mail-order-only records full of explicit material, but also songs that bent country imagery into fresher shapes.
Consider the range. The stark tenderness of "Would You Lay With Me (In a Field of Stone)" imagines love through graveyard imagery unusual for mainstream country at the time. "Take This Job and Shove It", which he wrote and Johnny Paycheck made a hit, distilled working-class fury into a phrase that became national shorthand. "The Ride" turned a hitchhiked encounter with the ghost of Hank Williams into a meditation on price and destiny. Even when he was working with familiar themes, the angle and details felt idiosyncratic, abrasive, or eerily poetic.
The claim to absolute novelty is part bravado, part branding. Country music has long chronicled heartbreak, poverty, crime, and sin; others have sung about the rough edges of American life. What Coe asserted was a willingness to go further, to write the scenes and slurs, desires and confessions that the industry either sanitized or refused to touch. That choice won him a cult following and heavy criticism, with controversies over offensive language sometimes eclipsing the craft. Yet the posture matters. It tells you how he understood the job: not merely to echo tradition, but to test it, to expand its map by dragging the forbidden into song.
Whether literally true or not, the line captures an outlaw writers self-understanding: originality as nerve, subject matter as a frontier, and a career built on daring the audience and the gatekeepers alike.
Consider the range. The stark tenderness of "Would You Lay With Me (In a Field of Stone)" imagines love through graveyard imagery unusual for mainstream country at the time. "Take This Job and Shove It", which he wrote and Johnny Paycheck made a hit, distilled working-class fury into a phrase that became national shorthand. "The Ride" turned a hitchhiked encounter with the ghost of Hank Williams into a meditation on price and destiny. Even when he was working with familiar themes, the angle and details felt idiosyncratic, abrasive, or eerily poetic.
The claim to absolute novelty is part bravado, part branding. Country music has long chronicled heartbreak, poverty, crime, and sin; others have sung about the rough edges of American life. What Coe asserted was a willingness to go further, to write the scenes and slurs, desires and confessions that the industry either sanitized or refused to touch. That choice won him a cult following and heavy criticism, with controversies over offensive language sometimes eclipsing the craft. Yet the posture matters. It tells you how he understood the job: not merely to echo tradition, but to test it, to expand its map by dragging the forbidden into song.
Whether literally true or not, the line captures an outlaw writers self-understanding: originality as nerve, subject matter as a frontier, and a career built on daring the audience and the gatekeepers alike.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|
More Quotes by David
Add to List
