David Allan Coe @ Harold's Cave Creek Corral

No outlaw-country music singer has labored harder to prove his outlaw bona fides than David Allan Coe. A few years ago, the Akron, Ohio, native led a Dallas TV crew through the Ohio prison where he was incarcerated in the 1960s, showing them the spot where he supposedly killed a...

By Craig Outhier

October 7, 2010

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No outlaw-country music singer has labored harder to prove his outlaw bona fides than David Allan Coe. A few years ago, the Akron, Ohio, native led a Dallas TV crew through the Ohio prison where he was incarcerated in the 1960s, showing them the spot where he supposedly killed a fellow inmate who demanded oral sex. (The producers couldn't verify the claim.) When Rolling Stone magazine called bullshit, the "Take This Job and Shove It" songwriter was put in the unique position of having to prove his own guilt. Other disputed details on his would-be rap sheet: membership in the Outlaws one-percenter motorcycle gang and racist malevolence typified by two epithet-laden "X-rated" albums he cut back in the late '70s and early '80s. (Coe dismisses the albums as "bawdy fun.") Now a long-tressed 71-year-old with a five-decade stash of original country and country-metal songwriting, Coe tours tirelessly (this is his second Valley show in as many years) and is, by all accounts, law abiding. Just don't ask him for oral sex.

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