Ahh... sweet, crazy David Allan Coe, a mystic and a criminal, part of that last generation of pre-ZZ Top's Eliminator bikers that lived when outlaws could be outside of the law without the 0s and 1s of digital law enforcement cornering them like rats just bound to get their neck snapped when they lick at the peanut butter one time too many. I grew up listening to dudes like this, who mix what happened with them with what happened with people they rolled with with what happened to things they heard someone tell an emphatic story about around a kitchen table somewhere with a screen door or window or both or a picnic table or something. He is a national treasure, both for the regular America as well as the twisted southern America. This song was the first of a pair that I heard that introduced me to the world of pre-Ten Years: For The Record David Allan Coe. This along with "Mississippi Woman" were the tail-end songs on a hodgepodge DAC LP my old roommate had after we weren't roommates. If he had this album while we lived together, I would've confiscated it for sure, on that whole retarded principal of "I deserve it more than he does, even if it is his shit". After I didn't live with that dude anymore, I would show up from time to time, as I still worked in Richmond, and we would abuse nitrous or crank or something or other and play video games and catch up on months of nothingness and listen to music. One night we dug this album out his stack and there was a letter tucked inside, to another friend, from some dude who shot up a bunch of people on New Year's Eve and went to jail for life. We, being of ill repute, read the letter, which was a sad thick slice of insight into some dude who liked vampires and slipped down a globbery slope into shooting a bunch of motherfuckers and going into the prison of prison for the rest of his living life. It depressed the fuck out of both of us. So we tucked it back into the album with this song.
The song itself is straight up exaggerated braggadacio - standard David Allan Coe perfection. If ever there was a country singer who lived, looked, and wrote lyrics like a rapper, it would be David Allan Coe. The lyrics of this song would make the perfect first two verses for a great song by an obscure country assed small southern city rapper, no bigger than 250,000 metropolitan area style, where a guy could live outside the radar long enough to build a cult following before being exploited by the record industry, yet international enough to become known. West Virginia itself is like this song - great as fuck, yet hardly respected. Shit, it's not like I've travelled a billion miles in my life or anything, but I can tell you in my limited but wide circled travels, I'd gladly trade about 18 American states for West Virginia alone.
STEAL “West Virginia Man”
NEXT UP: Obscure hipsterism, in the house!
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