Obituary: Johnny PayCheck

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 aged 64.

Specialising 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 an album of that title which sold two million copies.

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.

He began capitalising the "c" in PayCheck in the mid-1990s. His 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.