David Allan Coe Longhaired Redneck - Rides Again (CD)

1-CD with 40-page booklet, 21 tracks. Playing time approx. 63 mns.

Two long playing records, originally released on Columbia, "Longhaired Redneck" (1976), and "Rides Again" (1977), on one CD. Comes with extensive liner notes and many photos.

DAVID ALLAN COE LONGHAIRED REDNECK • RIDES AGAIN 

"A guy wrote a letter to my record company and said he heard me in concert one night and I acted like I'd invented country music. That I talked so much trash. It's not that I invented country music. It's that I have, in fifteen years, really made a hell of a mark in country music. And I have not been given credit for what I've done." 

David Allan Coe (to Michael Bane) 'Country Music Magazine' ca. 1985 

Even a brief study of the life and music of David Allan Coe leads one to the inevitable question of which comes first: the music or the image? And where would one be without the other? 

David Allan Coe is admittedly one of the most unique, roughcut, and controversial figures ever to swagger across modern country music's often smooth, placid landscape. This ex-convict, ex-motorcycle gangmember is a textbook case of man whose music and whose public persona have become almost inseparable in the listening public's imagination. 

Whether Coe laments the lack of critical and historical recognition he's been afforded or despairs over the fact that his music has seldom been measured outside the shadow of his heavily tattooed, long-haired, hellraising, larger-than-life and largely self-created image, he's got a point on both counts. After all, he is one of the few completely self-styled artists to ever claw, bluster, and brawl his way intact through the repressive and largely conformist Nashville studio system in the mid-1970s. Along the way, he did make a considerable mark for himself on the heels of Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and other prominent leaders of country music's long-gone 'Outlaw' movement. 

And —like Jennings and Nelson — Coe, 'The Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy,' never left Nashville, yet still managed to do it on his own terms: singing his own songs, sometimes recording with his own band, and always projecting a public image (or actually 'several' public images, for that matter) that were clearly of his own creation and no record company publicist's idle daydream. ('Who', after all, could have 'invented"The Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy' except Coe himself?) For Coe, his first taste of major-label success in the mid-1970s — records in the charts and the critical accolades —were reassurances that he'd finally arrived at a place he'd been trying to get to for years. 

Coe came to Nashville in the mid-1960s, fresh out of prison. But his musical aspirations dated back many years before that, back to his native state of Ohio where he'd done time in the Ohio Penitentiary and various other penal institutions and youth reformatories. 

"I grew up listening to all kinds of music and I've got a lot of different influences musically from the early fifties. (Everyone from black groups to Jimmie Rodgers and Lefty Frizzell and Hank Williams.) ... At one time I was playing clarinet and saxophone in a 27-piece orchestra, I was playing drums in a jazz band, I was playing guitar and piano in a country and western band, I was playing fiddle and mandolin in a bluegrass band, and I was doing all that at the same time. 

Then, when I got out of prison and started working in bars ... I had a band called Ely Radish, and we were based out of Cleveland, Ohio. We had hair down to our waist and were playing country music before it was real fashionable ... We were playing country and rock'n roll at the same time and that was long before the Byrds or any of those people came along ... We did an album called 'I Didn't Raise My Son To Be A Soldier,' which was probably the worst album in the world..." 

David Allan Coe (as told to Otto Kitsinger) June, 1987