Johnny Paycheck Dies at 64

Johnny Paycheck, best known for “Take This Job and Shove It,” bedridden with emphysema and asthma, passed away Tuesday. He was an old, old man:

Specializing in earthy, plainspoken songs, Paycheck recorded 70 albums and had more than two dozen hit singles. His biggest hit was “Take This Job and Shove It,” which inspired a movie by that name, and a title album that sold 2 million copies.

His other hits included “Don’t Take Her, She’s All I Got,” (which was revived 25 years later in 1996 by Tracy Byrd), “I’m the Only Hell Mama Ever Raised,” “Slide Off Your Satin Sheets,” “Old Violin” and “You Can Have Her.”

….Born Donald Eugene Lytle on May 31, 1938, in Greenfield, Ohio, he took the name Johnny Paycheck in the mid-1960s about a decade after moving to Nashville to build a country music career. He began capitalizing the “c” in PayCheck in the mid-1990s.

Paycheck’s career was interrupted from 1989 to 1991 when he served two years in prison for shooting a man in the head in an Ohio bar in 1985.

He and another ex-convict, country star Merle Haggard, performed at the Chillicothe Correctional Institute in Ohio while PayCheck was imprisoned there.

“I heard from fans constantly throughout the entire two years,” Paycheck said after his release. “The letters never stopped, from throughout the world. I looked forward to mail call every day.”

Ohio Gov. Richard Celeste commuted Paycheck’s seven-to-nine-year sentence for aggravated assault, and the singer returned to his career.

His brush with the law wasn’t his first. He was court-martialed and imprisoned for two years in the 1950s for slugging a naval officer.

He was sued by the Internal Revenue Service in 1982 for $103,000 in back taxes. This landed him in bankruptcy in 1990, when he listed debts of more than $1.6 million, most of it owed to the IRS.

After his prison release, he seemed to put his life in order. He gave anti-drug talks to young people and became a regular member of the Grand Ole Opry cast in 1997.

Still, Paycheck said when people came to hear him play, they still expected to see the whiskey-drinking, cocaine-using, wild-eyed performer with unkempt hair and a surly frown – a reputation he built early in his career. [AP]

The serious shitkickers – hard men with prison under their belts – are dying off. No one in heavy rotation on CMT is going to replace them.