Country Performer Johnny Paycheck Dies at 64
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (Reuters) – Johnny Paycheck, the carousing country music singer best remembered for his blue-collar anthem “Take This Job and Shove It,” has died, the Grand Ole Opry said on Wednesday.
Paycheck, 64, died on Tuesday in a Georgia nursing home after a long battle with emphysema and related respiratory ailments, the NBC television station in Nashville reported.
His 1977 hit about a factory worker bent on revenge against his boss still resonates with listeners and continues to get radio play, especially on Friday afternoons.
But Paycheck’s success was short-lived as he continued to wrestle with drugs and the law until he was imprisoned for two years in 1989 for wounding a man in a barroom fight.
After keeping a promise to clean up while in prison, Paycheck was finally offered membership in the Grand Ole Opry in 1997 and made a few appearances at the Nashville fixture before becoming too ill to perform.
“People still come to see me because they still remember me as that crazy, good-time-Charley honky-tonker. And I don’t tell ’em any different,” he said in a 1997 interview with the Nashville Tennessean newspaper.
He admitted to a lifetime of drug-taking and alcohol abuse in another interview with the newspaper.
Paycheck had nearly three-dozen hits, beginning with the hard-driving 1965 song “A-11.” He earned two Grammy nominations during his career, the first in 1971 for the single “She’s All I Got” and the second in 1978 for “Take This Job and Shove It.”
He had a powerful, expressive voice, distinctive inflection and a knack for delivering solid country emotion.
His hits included “I’m the Only Hell My Mama Ever Raised,” “He’s in a Hurry (To Get Home to My Wife),” “and “If I’m Gonna Sink (I Might as Well Go to the Bottom),” which was the tentative title of his unfinished autobiography.
Born Donald Eugene Lytle in Greenfield, Ohio, he picked up a guitar at age 6, and was performing and traveling on his own by age 15.
He joined the Navy while underage, but was court-martialed and imprisoned for fracturing an officer’s skull, the first of several tussles with the law.
He was fined for slandering an airline attendant and pleaded no contest to the sexual assault of a 12-year-old girl — though he later denied the assault ever happened.
He launched his career as a sideman to such stars as George Jones and Faron Young. He adopted the name Paycheck from a boxer.
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