Obituary

Johnny Paycheck

Country singer in tune with his music's rural, working-class roots

Despite the efforts of many producers and publicists, country music has resisted being severed from its roots in southern US working-class life. An artist who vigorously reaffirmed that heritage was Johnny Paycheck, who has died aged 64. In 1977, he recorded Take This Job And Shove It, which became an anthem for the men Woody Guthrie called "poor working stiffs - truckers, miners, construction workers, blue-collar guys who have had enough".

It was also the most successful record of Paycheck's career, which had begun some 20 years earlier. Under his first professional name, Donny Young, he put himself about Nashville as a singer, songwriter, bass player and stage sidekick, working with such respected figures on the honkytonk side of country music as Ray Price, Faron Young and, for four years, George Jones.

He acquired a manager, Aubrey Mayhew, who gave him his new name, and the two founded the Little Darlin' record label in 1966, which was briefly successful, thanks to hits like Paycheck's Lovin' Machine and Juke Box Charlie. "Johnny's songs then," according to country music critic John Morthland, "were a monument to the honkytonks, their neon and jukeboxes, fast women and whisky." By the end of the decade, however, illness and alcohol and drug abuse had virtually put Pay- check out of the business.

None the less, his Nashville friends recognised his potential as a direct, virile singer, and one of them, the producer Billy Sherrill, got him cleaned up and signed to Epic Records. During the 1970s he had numerous hits, including 11 Months And 29 Days and Friend, Lover, Wife (both co-written with Sherrill), as well as She's All I Got and Slide Off Of Your Satin Sheets.

Paycheck also had an unexpected admirer in the free jazz guitarist Eugene Chadbourne, who departed from his usual style of striking his instrument with bunches of keys to give relatively straightforward readings of Take This Job And Shove It and another of Paycheck's signature numbers, I'm The Only Hell (Mama Ever Raised). The latter could hardly have been written for a more suitable artist.

A barge worker's son from Greenfield, Ohio, Paycheck joined the US navy in the early 1950s, spent a couple of years in a military prison for assaulting an officer, and maintained a reputation as a hard fighter and drinker. At Christmas 1985, he was arrested after a bar room fight, during which he shot a man in the head, reportedly during an argument about the merits of turtle and deer meat.

The following summer, I was with a film crew making the Channel 4 series Hank Wangford's A To Z Of C & W, and Paycheck, out on bail, agreed to be interviewed. It was one of the edgier moments of the shoot. The producer, aiming for poor-white credibility, had chosen a location on a federal housing project - to the disgust of Paycheck's minders, watchful men with sidearms and a conservative position on welfare. Wangford was especially respectful to the terse, flinty-eyed man opposite him. The subject of southern cuisine was not raised.

Paycheck eventually served two years of a four-year sentence, was conditionally discharged in 1991 and, thereafter, kept out of trouble. In 1997, he joined the cast of the Grand Ole Opry. Married three times, he is survived by a son and two daughters.

· Johnny Paycheck (Donald Eugene Lytle), singer, born May 31 1938; died February 18 2003

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