By Golden Era Icons Staff · April 2026

David Allan Coe, the outlaw country legend whose irreverent anthem “You Never Even Called Me By My Name” was hailed as the perfect country and western song, died on April 29, 2026 at the age of 86, passing away in intensive care at approximately 5 p.m.The man who had lived more lives than most people could invent — sent to reform school at nine years old, spending the better part of two decades in and out of correctional facilities before moving to Nashville in 1967 and parking a hearse outside the Ryman Auditorium to busk his way into the music business  — slipped away quietly in a hospital bed, leaving behind a catalog of songs so deeply embedded in the DNA of American country music that most people who love them have never stopped to consider that one man wrote them all.

His widow Kimberly confirmed his passing to Rolling Stone, writing: “My husband, my friend, my confidant and my life for many years. I’ll never forget him and I don’t want anyone else to ever forget him either.”  Those words — not a press release, not a publicist’s statement, but a wife finding the simplest and most permanent language available to her for the loss of the man she loved — are the ones that have stopped David Allan Coe’s fans cold since they first appeared, a reminder that behind the Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy and the outlaw mythology and the decades of uncompromising music was a husband, a man, and a life that belonged most completely to the woman now saying goodbye to him through her tears.