In 1971, two virtually unknown, broke Chicago folk singers named Steve Goodman and John Prine had just scored their first big recording contracts in New York City. Their new manager was pop icon Paul Anka.

Because Anka was a massive star performing at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, the venue gave him a sprawling, palatial luxury suite. Anka already lived in the city, so he casually handed the keys to the two scruffy folk singers.

One night, John Prine went out partying in Greenwich Village. He stumbled back into the Waldorf-Astoria suite at 1:00 AM to find Steve Goodman sitting under a single lamp, intensely hunched over a notepad. Goodman was fighting a secret, tragic battle—he had been diagnosed with leukemia in his early twenties and used songwriting to process the weight of his mortality. He was trying to write a devastatingly sad, serious song about personal erasure and emotional isolation. The opening lines were heavy:

"It was all that I could do to keep from crying / Sometimes it seemed so useless to remain..."

Prine, who was riding a heavy alcohol buzz, looked over Goodman's shoulder, read the bleak lyrics, and decided his friend needed to be cheered up.

Prine jumped onto the center of the giant, luxurious master bed. Tucking an imaginary fiddle under his chin, he began prancing around, mockingly shouting in a thick, exaggerated country drawl: "Oh Stevie! You're writing a real weeper! You don't have to call me darling, darling, but you never even call me by my name!"

Goodman burst out laughing. The spell of sadness broke. The two young songwriters proceeded to raid Paul Anka’s incredibly expensive wet bar. They mixed a chaotic cocktail punch right in the bathroom sink—pouring in Dom Pérignon, Wild Turkey, Jack Daniel's, vodka, gin, and a splash of 7-Up. Completely intoxicated, they spent the rest of the night intentionally trying to write the most ridiculous, melodramatic country song they could think of to mock the rigid formulas of the Nashville music industry. <br

Why John Prine Refused the Credit

Goodman recorded it first, but it didn't do much. A few years later, the infamous outlaw country singer David Allan Coe got ahold of it. Coe told Goodman the song was great, but it wasn't actually the "perfect country song" because it failed to mention five mandatory country tropes:

Mama
Trains
Trucks
Prison
Getting drunk

Goodman took that critique and penned the legendary spoken-word final verse that perfectly tied every single cliché together into a masterpiece of dark comedy:

"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 runned over by a damned old train."

When Coe's version became a massive Top 10 hit, it generated substantial royalty checks. However, John Prine strictly refused to have his name put on the writer credits.

Prine genuinely worried that the song was such a goofy, unhinged parody that it would deeply offend traditional country music icons he respected, like Merle Haggard and Charley Pride. He walked away from all official credit and every single cent of the royalties because he just viewed it as a private, funny moment shared with his best friend.

Goodman felt so guilty about keeping all the money from a song born on a Waldorf-Astoria bed that he eventually used his early royalty payouts to buy Prine an enormous, fully stocked vintage jukebox as a thank-you gift.

It is a rare piece of music history: a track written out of deep emotional exhaustion, flipped into a classic joke by a friend jumping on a bed, fueled by an accidental sink-cocktail, and preserved through total artistic humility.