Mourners Recall Singer Johnny PayCheck - AP Online

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Dateline: NASHVILLE, Tenn.[image omitted]

Country singer Johnny PayCheck was eulogized Tuesday as a man who battled hardships and addictions but found peace in the final years of his life.

PayCheck, known for the blue-collar anthem "Take This Job and Shove It," died last week at a Nashville hospital after a lengthy battle with emphysema and asthma. He was 64.

More than 200 mourners, including singers George Jones and Little Jimmy Dickens, and a small contingent of the Hell's Angels motorcycle club, attended the public funeral where PayCheck's recordings of "Old Violin" and "Amazing Grace" were played.

Glenn Weekley, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Hendersonville, said PayCheck made mistakes in his life but had "made peace with the Lord."

"I hope you remember him not only for the great music and singing, but as a man who had turned his life around toward God's grace," Weekley said. "I'm glad that Johnny experienced that grace and mercy in his life."

Dickens, a longtime member of the Grand Ole Opry, said, "country music has lost a great entertainer. We're all going to miss him very, very much."

PayCheck supposedly died broke and his funeral was paid for by his friends, including Jones, who also bought PayCheck a burial plot next to his.

"I first met him in Columbus, Ohio," Jones recalled as he stood beside PayCheck's grave site. "He wanted to come on the road with me and work. I couldn't leave town without him."

PayCheck recorded 70 albums and had more than two dozen hit singles, including "Don't Take Her, She's All I Got" (which was revived in 1996 by Tracy Byrd), "I'm the Only Hell Mama Ever Raised," "Slide Off Your Satin Sheets," and "You Can Have Her."

But his biggest single was 1977's "Take This Job and Shove It," a song written by David Allan Coe that inspired a 1981 movie with the same title.

Paycheck, whose career was marred by violence, drugs and alcohol, was friends with Hell's Angel icon Ralph "Sonny" Barger and other members of the motorcycle club.

"He went out of his way to make sure we got in wherever he was playing," said Eddie McCollum of Winston-Salem, N.C., who wore his black leather jacket with the Hell's Angels emblem on it to the funeral.

Born Donald Eugene Lytle on May 31, 1938, in Greenfield, Ohio, PayCheck began playing guitar as a child. He left home as a teenager and eventually joined the Navy

In the 1950s, after he was court-martialed and imprisoned for two years for slugging an officer, PayCheck moved to Nashville to start a music career. Using the name Donny Young, he played for Jones, Faron Young, Porter Wagoner and Ray Price.

He changed his name to Johnny Paycheck in the 1960s, taking the name from a boxer, and started capitalizing the "C" in the 1990s.

PayCheck's career all but disappeared in the late '60s as he sank into his drug and alcohol addictions. Tracked down by a record company executive in Los Angeles, he went into rehabilitation and made a comeback on Epic Records, aided by producer Billy Sherrill.

"I think my best times were in the '70s, when I made the comeback," PayCheck told The Associated Press in an interview last year.

His addictions and related health problems caused his career to fade again in the 1980s. He was sued by the Internal Revenue Service in 1982 for back taxes and struggled with bankruptcy. He also spent a couple years in prison for shooting a man in the head in an Ohio bar in 1985.

After his prison release, PayCheck seemed to straighten up again. He gave anti-drug talks to young people and became a regular member of the Grand Ole Opry cast in 1997.

His poor health, however, caught up with him and he spent the past few years bedridden in a Nashville nursing home.

Image Caption: Nancy Jones, left, wife of country music legend George Jones, center, is greeted by an unidentified man at the graveside service for singer Johnny PayCheck in Nashville, Tenn., Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2003. PayCheck, known for the blue-collar anthem "Take This Job and Shove It," died last week in a Nashville hospital after a lengthy battle with emphysema and asthma. He was 64. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)