Country Singer Johnny PayCheck Dies at 64 <BR>The Associated Press <BR>Feb 19 2003 5:14PM <P>NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - Country singer Johnny PayCheck, the hard-drinking hell-raiser best known for his 1977 working man's anthem ``Take This Job and Shove It,'' has died at 64. <BR>PayCheck had been bedridden in a nursing home with emphysema and asthma. He died Tuesday, Grand Ole Opry spokeswoman Jessie Schmidt said. <P>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. <P>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.'' <P>``My music's always been about life. And situations. Situation comedies, situation life,'' he said in 1997. <P>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. <P>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. <P>He and another ex-convict, country star Merle Haggard, performed at the Chillicothe Correctional Institute in Ohio while PayCheck was imprisoned there. <P>``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.'' <P>Ohio Gov. Richard Celeste commuted PayCheck's seven-to-nine-year sentence for aggravated assault, and the singer returned to his career. <P>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. <P>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. <P>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. <P>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. <P>``They still remember me as that crazy, good-time-Charlie honky-tonker, and I don't tell 'em any different,'' he said after his Opry induction. <P>PayCheck was playing the guitar by age 6 and singing professionally by age 15. After a stint in the Navy in the mid-1950s, he moved to Nashville and found work as a bass player for Porter Wagoner, Ray Price, Faron Young and George Jones. <P>He recorded for Decca and Mercury records as Donny Young until he renamed himself and built success first as a songwriter and then as a singer. <P>One of his early compositions was ``Apartment 9,'' recorded in 1966 by Tammy Wynette. <P>In 2002, a PayCheck compilation album, ``The Soul & the Edge: The Best of Johnny PayCheck,'' was released. <P>PayCheck and his wife, Sharon, were married more than 30 years. They had one son. <P>
