A new Hank Williams III song has been released, as he has shared a cover of David Allan Coe’s 1975 classic “You Never Even Called Me By My Name.” It was originally written by Steve Goodman and John Prine in 1971, but Prine took his name off of it because he reportedly thought it was just a “goofy, novelty song” and was afraid it might “offend the country music community.”
The song was only uploaded to YouTube as “Hank3 does an Outlaw Classic Country Cover”, recorded in real-time without editing. Williams kept Coe’s iconic spoken part about how Goodman jokingly told Coe that it was the “perfect country & western song,” and how Coe had disagreed since it didn’t have anything to do with “Mama, or trains, or trucks, or prison, or getting drunk.”
At that point, Goodman historically added a final verse which made Coe agree that it was in fact the “perfect country & western song.” The verse goes, “Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison/And I went to pick her up in the rain/But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck/She got run over by a damned old train.”
Williams’ rendition of the song is his first new release since the 2015 compilation Take As Needed for Pain, which opened with a David Allan Coe tune that Hank3 had been featured on, called “Get Outta My Life.” He had also collaborated with Coe on their seven-minute-long 2013 single, “The Outlaw Ways.”
