Take This Job And Shove It

"Take This Job And Shove It" fulfills every worker's fantasy of telling their boss off and quitting in dramatic fashion. The character in the song works in a factory. He's recently lost the woman that was the only reason he worked to begin with, so he tells his boss to "shove" the job and walks away. Despite the narrative, the appeal of "Take This Job And Shove It" has always been the universal job-quitting dream we all entertain every now and then, especially when the boss gets on our nerves.

Released in August 1977, "Take This Job And Shove It" was the first #1 Country hit of 1978, staying at the top the first two weeks of January. It introduced the title phrase into the lexicon, which stuck around so long there are now people who say it that don't even know it's a song.

Johnny Paycheck recorded the original and definitive version of this song, but David Allan Coe wrote it. At the time, Coe was in a strange position in an all-around strange career. Along with Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and Waylon Jennings, he'd been one of the founding fathers of the outlaw country movement but had failed to break through to a general audience the way the other men had. He had some hits and was widely recognized as one of the best country performers and songwriters of his era, but his idiosyncratic personality and vulgar (some said racist) lyrics kept him an outsider to polite society and his peers. Coe also started a feud with fellow outlaw country stars by publicly questioning their street cred, claiming he was the only true outlaw in the bunch. The claim was offensive as it was untrue, according to Jennings, who wrote in his self-titled autobiography in 1996 that the biggest crime Coe ever committed was "double-parking on Music Row." Starting with an early, invalidated claim that he killed a man in prison, Coe had long been dealing with a reputation for being a liar. This all contributed to Coe taking a break from the music industry at the time he wrote the song.