David Allan Coe died Thursday at 86. [1] He wrote "Take This Job and Shove It," which Johnny Paycheck took to number one on the country chart in 1977, and "You Never Even Called Me by My Name," which Steve Goodman wrote and Coe made into the perfect country song by adding the verse about mama, trains, trucks, prison, and gettin' drunk. [2] He served time in Ohio prisons before the Nashville career; he wrote about it without apology for the next fifty years.

The catalog is what survives. "Take This Job and Shove It" became the soundtrack of the late-1970s American resignation — a country song about the dignity of walking away that found its second life every time the unemployment rate ticked up. "You Never Even Called Me by My Name" survived as the ironic ur-text of country itself, the song that contains the joke about country songs and the country song the joke is about.

The late career was harder. Coe self-released two albums in the 1980s under the title "Underground" with material — racial slurs, sexual material — that radio could not play and that he refused to disavow. [3] The mainstream catalog kept selling. The underground records did too. He toured into his late seventies on a bus he owned outright.

He was the country outlaw who never got rehabilitated. Country music after Coe will sound, for a while, like country music that does not quite know what to do with him.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles