Johnny PayCheck, 64; Sang “Take This Job’

Johnny PayCheck, the hard-living country singer best known for his 1977 workingman’s anthem “Take This Job and Shove It,” has died. He was 64.

PayCheck, who had been bedridden with emphysema and asthma, died Tuesday at a nursing home in Nashville, a Grand Ole Opry spokeswoman said.

Specializing in earthy, plain-spoken songs, PayCheck recorded 70 albums and had more than two dozen hit singles. “Take This Job and Shove It,” his biggest hit, 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), “Slide Off Your Satin Sheets,” “Old Violin” and “You Can Have Her.”

“My music’s always been about life. And situations. Situation comedies, situation life,” he said in 1997.

PayCheck was born Donald Eugene Lytle on May 31, 1938, in Greenfield, Ohio. In the mid-1960s, he took the name Johnny Paycheck from a heavyweight boxer who was once knocked out by Joe Louis. He began capitalizing the C in PayCheck in the mid-1990s.

PayCheck was playing the guitar by age 6 and singing professionally by 15. After a stint in the Navy in the mid-1950s, he found work in Nashville as a bass player for Porter Wagoner, Ray Price, Faron Young and George Jones.

He recorded for Decca and Mercury records as Donny Young until he renamed himself and had success as a songwriter and then as a singer.

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.

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. That 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 that when people came to hear him play, they 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.

“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.

PayCheck and his wife, Sharon, were married more than 30 years. They had one son.