Johnny PayCheck
Country singer
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He recorded 70 albums. "Take This Job and Shove It" inspired a movie by that name. Title album sold 2 million copies.
Other hits among his plain-spoken repertoire aimed at the blue-collar crowd include "Don't Take Her, She's All I Got," "I'm the Only Hell Mama Ever Raised," "Slide Off Your Satin Sheets," "Old Violin" and "You Can Have Her."
Born Donald Eugene Lytle in Greenfield, Ohio, he was playing the guitar by age 6 and singing professionally by age 15. After a stint in the Navy in the mid-1950s (during which he was court-martialed and imprisoned for two years for slugging a Navy officer), he moved in the 1960s to Nashville and found work as a bass player for George Jones, Porter Wagoner, Ray Price and Faron Young.
As Donny Young, he recorded for Decca and Mercury records until he renamed himself Johnny Paycheck (he began capitalizing the "c" in PayCheck in the mid-1990s) and became a success as a songwriter and then as a singer. One of his early compositions was "Apartment A9," recorded in 1966 by Tammy Wynette. Jones and he later recorded the album "Double Trouble."
Trouble was pretty much his middle name: In addition to bopping the Navy officer, he:
- Used hard drugs and alcohol recklessly;
- Shot a man in the head in 1985 at an Ohio bar and served two years in prison for aggravated assault (Ohio Gov. Richard Celeste commuted his seven-to-nine-year sentence in 1991); and
- Was sued by the Internal Revenue Service in 1982 for $103,000 in back taxes, landing him in bankruptcy in 1990, when he listed debts of more than $1.6 million, most of it owed to the IRS.
He mellowed over time and was inducted as a regular member of the Grand Ole Opry cast in 1997.
Still, people expected to see the persona he cultivated for much of his career: a whiskey-drinking, cocaine-using, wild-eyed performer with unkempt hair and a surly frown -- "and I don't tell 'em any different," he said after his Opry induction.
In 2002, a PayCheck compilation album, "The Soul & the Edge: The Best of Johnny PayCheck," was released.
He and wife Sharon, were married more than 30 years and had one son.
