David Allan Coe died Wednesday, April 30, in an intensive care unit at age 86, his widow Kimberly Hastings Coe confirmed to Rolling Stone. [1] His manager David Wade told CBS News the singer died around 5 p.m.; the cause was not disclosed. [2] He wrote "Take This Job and Shove It," recorded in 1977 by Johnny Paycheck and a No. 1 country hit, and "You Never Even Called Me By My Name," recorded by David Allan Coe himself in 1975. Both songs entered the American working-class catalog and stayed there.

The May 1 timing is editorial, not coincidental. Coe's quitting anthem has been circulating on the May Day Strong rally tapes that organizers built for Friday's "Workers Over Billionaires" mass strike — the largest U.S. May Day mobilization since the 1990s. [3] The most-covered American song about telling the boss off arrives on the day labor walks out. The biographical arc will fight its own coverage. Born 1939 in Akron; spent youth in correctional institutions; built an outlaw-country career on the margin Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson opened; later released racially offensive "underground" albums that kept him out of the Country Music Hall of Fame and away from much of mainstream radio.

The Rolling Stone obituary names "the perfect country and western song" — Coe's 1975 recitation in "You Never Even Called Me By My Name" of the verse Steve Goodman wrote for him, the one about mama, trains, trucks, prison, and getting drunk. [1] That song remains a karaoke standard and a country-radio rotation piece. It is the line a generation of bar regulars remember, and it is what most of Coe's obit writers will lead with.

What survives him is a songwriter's catalog, not the man's late-career provocations. The anthem about quitting your job survives him by the loudest possible margin Friday afternoon.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles