Outlaw Country: David Allan Coe & Guy Clark

Plus a playlist. "Feeling, as ever, like I belonged somewhere else..."

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Around 2005 my citified friends back in Oklahoma started adopting accents and frequenting, once they were old enough to get away with it, the bar at the American Legion hall south of town. When I was home they picked me up in a rag-top jeep with styrofoam cups full of tobacco-rich saliva in the cup-holders and we drove to a berm by a farm pond and drank Southern Comfort and smoked cigarettes and talked about the universe in slurred prairie drawls. In the time since I’d left for college, they’d switched their allegiance from punk and hardcore to country music, these young men with white-collar fathers and homes in the oil-town suburbs. The performance of some kind of authenticity had become important to them somewhere along the way. And the key inspiration and soundtrack for this transformation was David Allan Coe, possibly the most painfully self-crafted persona in the pantheon of outlaw country.

These friends of mine, with their sudden affection for flannel and boots, downloaded Coe from Limewire and passed his songs around on burned CDs like samizdat, with a peculiar hushed, sniggering attention paid to his use of the N-word and confederate iconography, apparently practicing a shibboleth to pass some sentry which at that point I only dimly perceived.