Unchained

Unchained is an album released by country musician David Allan Coe, released in 1985 on Columbia Records. Recording Unchained was Coe's second album of 1985 and contains the minor hit “I’m Gonna Hurt Her on the Radio,” which got to #52 on the country singles chart. (Charley Pride did better with the more positively framed “I’m Gonna Love Her on the Radio," which hit #13 three years later.) This would be the first studio album Coe recorded for Columbia where he would contribute just one original song, with the songwriter becoming less prolific than he had been earlier in his career, but he scored two Top 5 singles in 1983 and 1984, with “The Ride” and “Mona Lisa Lost Her Smile” respectively, and just missed the Top 10 in 1986 with “She Used to Love Me a Lot.” While he was relying more on Nashville songwriters, the tunes he and producer Billy Sherrill chose to cover often sounded like they came from his own pen, such as “Ain’t Worth the Powder” and the gentle “Angels in Red,” the latter written by Raybon “Buzz” Rabin and sounding like a paean to prostitutes. (“Someone to listen was all that I wanted/A man can have too many things on his mind…”) Coe's own composition, “He Has to Pay (For What I Get for Free),” tells the story of a kept woman who belongs to a wealthy man but openly carries on an affair with the narrator, who proclaims “I know about him and he knows about me” and the “she comes to me for the things he don’t give her.” Other songs on the LP suggest Coe may have been trying to rehabilitate his image as a foul-mouthed drug-taking misogynist and racist. Bobby Braddock’s magnanimous “Would They Love Me Down in Shreveport” has a slight gospel flavor as Coe sings about brotherhood and turning the other cheek. He also covers Hoyt Axton’s “Snowblind Friend," an anti-drug song originally recorded by Steppenwolf in 1970 but quite timely in the cocaine-addled 1980s during Nancy Reagan’s War on Drugs campaign. The most curious cover on Unchained – and arguably of Coe’s career – is “Southern Man,” Neil Young’s furious indictment of prejudice and racial violence that appeared on his 1970 album After the Gold Rush. Charges of racism levied against Coe largely stem from lyrics contained on his second independent release of explicit material, Underground Album, which came out in 1982. Coe also included the line “Workin’ like a nigger” on “If That Ain’t Country (You Can kick My Ass)” on the 1977 Columbia LP Rides Again.