A legend has passed on, but this is no time for a moment of silence.

A more appropriate tribute might be to kick over a chair and throw a beer bottle at the jukebox. Most of us would never do anything like that, but most of us have felt like it a time or two.

That’s why we could relate to David Allan Coe — his songs let us channel our inner outlaw. This salute is about a week late, but that’s also kind of appropriate. Coe was used to being overlooked.

Nashville tried to ignore him, Texas didn’t know what to do with him, he irritated some of his fellow singers, scared a lot of people and offended even more of them. And yet most of the people I know can sing along to at least one of his songs and just about everybody can call him by his name.

Not bad for a kid who was in a correctional institution at the age of 9 and then in and out of prison for 20 years. As country folk might put it, “he had a rough row to hoe.”

That kind of upbringing might not make you the kind of dinner guest that socialites like to sit next to, but it tends to make your poetry sound like somebody lived it and gives your music an edge.

Coe sure had one. In “Long-haired Red Neck,” he’s singing about playing in a dive bar where the bikers stare at cowboys who are laughing at the hippies who are hoping they get out of there alive. The best line is:

The loud mouth in the corner’s gettin’ to me, talking ‘bout my earrings and my hair

I guess he ain’t read the signs that say I been to prison, someone ought to warn him ‘fore I knock him off his chair

That’s got some anger in it. So do a lot of people who like Coe’s music, many of whom know what it’s like to be looked down on, to not quite be able to follow society’s rules, to be seen as worthless even though they’re doing the best they could with what they had to work with.

Coe spoke to a lot of people nobody else wanted to talk to, and he spoke their truth. If other artists were cornbread and Mountain Dew, Coe was red meat and hard liquor.

And even if you don’t care for the music, you have to admire the boy’s grit.

He went off to Nashville with no real prospects, lived in a hearse that he parked outside the Grand Ole Opry. He would stand on the vehicle and play music to call attention to himself and acted like he was a member. He very much wasn’t. The Opry wouldn’t touch him with a stick.

Between shows, Opry performers would go next door to Tootsie’s for refreshment. The story goes that Coe would dress up in a rhinestone suit, run back and forth in the alley between the theater and the lounge to work up a sweat. Then he would walk in with the show people, trying to make people think he was a star.

Fake it ‘til you make it. The man simply refused to be forgotten. He tried everything and eventually some of it worked. It’s an inspirational story about what can be done if you hang in there, but it’s also kind of ironic.

All that pretending he had to do and he was the real deal.

Adios, DAC. You will be fondly remembered by some of us and not easily forgotten by anybody.