50 Years Ago: David Allan Coe Records the “Perfect Country & Western Song”

History 29 Comments


We all know what the perfect country & western song is, because David Allan Coe told us what it is. He also told us why it was the perfect country & western song, and who wrote it. There’s no reason to debate what the perfect country & western song is. Well, you can, and maybe will. But you’ll be wrong. At least according to David Allan Coe.

50 years ago today—August 20th, 1974—David Allan Coe walked into Columbia Studio A in Nashville and recorded “You Never Even Called Me By My Name.” It would ultimately become part of his album Once Upon a Rhyme released in June of 1975, and would be the third single released from the album. It would also become Coe’s first Top 10 single, and arguably put Coe on the national map.

The musicians who played on the song that day were some of the best that country music has ever seen, including Country Music Hall of Famer’s Pete Drake on dobro and steel guitar, and Hargus “Pig” Robbins on piano. But it’s really the songwriters that tell the deeper story of the song that would go on to help define David Allan Coe’s career, country music of the ’70s, and country music at large.

As fellow songwriters who emerged from the Chicago folk scene, John Prine and Steve Goodman were good buds, and at times, co-writers. That was the case for “You Never Even Called Me By My Name.” Steve Goodman included a version of the song on his 1971 self-titled album, but neither Goodman’s version nor David Allan Coe’s included John Prine in the writing credits.

“You Never Even Called Me By My Name” was written in a luxury suite at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City—not exactly where you would expect the “perfect country & western song” to be written. As budding songwriters, neither John Prine nor Steve Goodman had any business being in a Waldorf suite, but they had just been signed by the same people who were managing singer Paul Anka at the time, and Anka was playing a show at the Waldorf in New York on the day Prine and Goodman happened to be in the city finalizing their contracts.

“They gave Paul this grand suite that everybody that plays there gets at the Waldorf Astoria as a dressing room,” Prine explained in a 1987 interview on WNEW-FM. “So Paul didn’t need it because he resided in New York City at the time. So he said, ‘Why don’t you and Stevie use it if you want to write or something?’”

Goodman retired to the suite, but Prine decided he wanted to go down to Greenwich Village for a while, hitting up a couple of bars and clubs, and returned to find Goodman working on a song.

“I look over his shoulder and he’s got two lines down: ‘Well, it was all that I could do to keep from crying. Sometimes it seems so useless to remain.’ And I felt kind of goofy so I got up and started jumping up and down on the bed and started playing an imaginary fiddle. I said ‘Steve, oh you’re right, a real weeper.’ I started getting on his case. So we started laughing. And since it was a dressing room for Paul Anka, they had a full bar set up. So me and Goodman took a bunch of different liquors and poured them in the sink with the plug in the sink, and we mixed a special cocktail punch … I said to Stevie, ‘We got to make this a funny song.’”

As funny as it turned out, a sober John Prine decided later that he did not want to sign his John Hancock to the composition. “I wouldn’t put my name on it ’cause I thought it sucked,” Prine remarked in his 2016 picture and lyric book, Beyond Words. “Then it went to number one! That’s how I found out what a number one song is.”

Well, “You Never Even Called Me By My Name” didn’t quite make it to #1. It officially hit #8 in country. But it did make Steve Goodman a healthy chunk of cash. David Allan Coe also dropped Steve Goodman’s name in the iconic final verse of the song where it’s officially made “perfect” by naming off “Mama, trains, trucks, prison, and gettin’ drunk.” This also gave Steve Goodman quite a boost in name recognition, at least among country music fans.

All of this left Steve Goodman feeling guilty for not cutting John Prine into the credits. So in lieu of royalty payments, Goodman bought Prine a top-of-the-line Wurlitzer jukebox. For many years it sat in the Butcher Shoppe recording studio in Nashville that Prine opened with famed producer David Ferguson.

Steve Goodman, John Prine, and the Wurlitzer Jukebox


An official post from John Prine in early 2017 further clarified that Prine “…didn’t want offend the country community, so he refused a writer’s credit,” speaking to the character of Prine, and his respect for the country music community that he never quite fit in perfectly as more of a folk-oriented songwriter, but still found plenty of positive reception from throughout his career.

In October of 2023, John Prine’s family donated the legendary Wurlitzer jukebox to the Country Music Hall of Fame where it will be preserved forevermore as a physical representation of the success of David Allan Coe’s version of “You Never Even Called Me By My Name,” and of the friendship between two legendary songwriters, John Prine and Steve Goodman.

Meanwhile, here 50 years later after its release, “You Never Even Called Me By My Name” remains one of the most recognized and beloved songs in country music history. It symbolizes country music’s ability to make fun of itself, and to embrace it’s clichés. But it also symbolizes how country music speaks to the everyday lives of rural Americans, their triumphs, their struggles, their heartbreaks, and of course, mama.

© 2024 Saving Country Music

, , , ,