Tattoo (David Allan Coe album)
Tattoo is an album released by country musician David Allan Coe, released in 1977 on Columbia Records. Recording After his previous outlaw movement-hitching concept album Rides Again (its opening track was titled “Willie, Waylon and Me” and was reprised halfway through the running order of crossfading songs), Coe returned to a straighter country approach on 1977’s Tattoo, the title a reference to Coe’s menacingly inked frame. The Ohio-born Coe often wrote songs remembering childhood and family set all over the south, such as “Texas Lullaby” and “I Still Sing the Old Songs,” and sang them with such conviction that many listeners assumed they were autobiographical, although his reputation for exaggerating aspects of his own past - such as claiming he’d done time on death row for murder, a boast eventually disproven – did not adhere him to some critics and fellow musicians, who viewed Coe’s creative liberties as exploitative. A converse view, on the other hand, would be that Coe’s ability to carry off these songs so authentically speaks to one of his greatest strengths as a vocalist. “Daddy Was a God Fearin’ Man,” which is set in Harlan, Kentucky, is another one of these compositions where the narrator recalls