Assessing country music singer/songwriter David Allan Coe is complicated.

He's written some of the genre's best and most interesting songs, including "Would You Lay With Me (In a Field of Stone)," "Take This Job and Shove It," "Mona Lisa Lost Her Smile" and "The Ride."

He also added now immortal lyrics to Steve Goodman's "You Never Even Call Me By My Name, aka the perfect country and western song."

But in the 1980s, he recorded songs with politically incorrect lyrics on two "X-rated" albums, "Underground" and "Nothing Sacred." Those records, which he sold via advertisements in Easyriders Magazine, stayed under the radar for years, until New York Times music critic Neil Strauss wrote about them in 2000, calling the music "among the most racist, misogynist, homophobic and obscene songs recorded by a popular songwriter."

Coe, who brings his band and his outlaw persona to Roanoke Performing Arts Theatre on Thursday, has long tried to distance himself from some of those songs.

"I've got a black drummer who's married to a white chick," Coe told the publication Country Standard Time. "I've got [black, former heavyweight boxing champion] Leon Spinks' pictures all over my bus, pictures he took with my family. My hair's in dreadlocks. I'm the farthest thing from a white supremacist that anybody could ever be. I'm really [ticked] off, ya know."

Still, he performed one of those songs, a rant about a white woman leaving her husband to marry a black man, as a documentarian's camera rolled in 2003, according to the North Carolina Triad area's Indyweek.com.

Whether or not he performs those songs in concert, the theater is prepared for whatever comes from Coe's mouth. It will admit only those 18 and older.

-- Tad Dickens