David Allan Coe, “A Million Reasons”
I edited the music video for the title track of David Allan Coe’s final album, released after his death. Whiskey Riff premiered it on 4 November 2026.
The song
David Allan Coe died on 29 April 2026, at 89. His last album, A Million Reasons, was recorded in 2017 and then sat on a shelf for the better part of a decade, until his former co-manager Ken Madson acquired the recordings in 2022 and finished it. Eleven tracks. The title track, written by Jim “Moose” Brown, Shane Grove, David Wade and Erik Westfall, grew out of Coe’s 2015 tax case, roughly a million dollars of it.
The footage
There was no new shoot, because there couldn’t be. What existed was unreleased footage of Coe walking back into his old cell at the Mansfield Reformatory in Ohio, where he was locked up from 1963 to 1967. It had been shot for a Moonshine Bandits video, and this one is built out of what was left over.
The first plan was different. Still photos of Coe were all I thought we had, so I was going to animate them with AI. The finished video doesn’t use any of that. There is no AI in it. The footage is all real.
Where it ran
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Whiskey Riff · by Aaron Ryan · 4 November 2026The premiere. The article doesn’t list the video’s credits.
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YouTube · David Allan Coe
Related
The other long run of cutting other people’s music is Presleys’ Country Jubilee, 142 episodes of it.
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