By the summer of 1961 Donald Lytle of Greenfield, Ohio had been Donny Young for three years, had four Decca singles produced by Owen Bradley that nobody bought, and had been dropped. He was twenty-three, a Navy prison veteran with a temper, and a bass player with a high harmony voice that bandleaders wanted right up until they fired him. I’ve written about the Greenfield years and the Decca years. You can find that in my previous article.
This is what happened between the day Decca let him go and the day he had a hit record under a name he’d owned for about a year.
It’s the stretch of his life that almost nobody writes about carefully, and it’s the stretch that explains everything Little Darlin’ Records would sound like.
The sideman
The Associated Press obituary puts it plainly: after the solo career failed, he went to work in other people’s bands. He played bass and, occasionally, steel guitar, and he sang harmony. The employers were Porter Wagoner, Faron Young, and Ray Price, and then, for the longest stretch, George Jones. The order and the dates are loose in every source, because the jobs were. He was, by every account including his own, a man who would get hired for the voice, drink, fight the boss, and get fired, and then get hired again by somebody else because the voice was worth a month or two of trouble.
The Ray Price job is the one worth pausing on, because Price’s Cherokee Cowboys in the early sixties were the finest hard-country band in the world, the band that had already produced Roger Miller and Willie Nelson and would produce Johnny Bush, and Paycheck was in it. A man learns a shuffle in that band or he doesn’t last a week. The shuffles that Little Darlin’ would build its records on were learned there.
He was also, in these years, still trying to make records. George Jones got him a deal on Mercury, Jones’s own label, and two Donny Young singles came out in 1961 and 1962. Neither charted. That made two major labels and six singles with nothing to show. A seventh single appeared in early 1964 on Todd, a small label run on the side by Paul Cohen, the Decca executive who had first brought Owen Bradley into the company back in 1947. How it came about isn’t recorded. It sank like the others. It’s the last record with the name Donny Young on it.
Jones
Paycheck and George Jones worked together, on and off, through the first half of the sixties; the obituaries and Jones’s own biographers put him fronting the Jones Boys from 1962 to 1966. He played bass, occasionally steel, and sang the high harmony, on the road and in the studio, on Jones’s records for United Artists and then Musicor. He’s on “The Race Is On.” He’s on “Love Bug.” One count has him on fifteen Jones albums, uncredited, standing at the second microphone.
The two of them were made of the same material. Both short, both quick to fight, both drinkers who would take a swing at the man signing the checks and then make up the next morning. The partnership is described in every source as volatile and productive in equal measure, and nobody has ever suggested it was anything else. Years later they’d co-write “Once You’ve Had the Best,” which Jones took to number three in 1973, and in 1980 they’d make a duet album together.
Then there’s the question everyone eventually asks, which is who taught whom to sing. The claim, made in the Little Darlin’ reissue notes and repeated ever since, is that Jones’s mature style, the dips into the low register and the sudden climbs, the way he crawls up into a note, came from years of sharing a microphone with Paycheck. The evidence offered is chronology: Jones’s Starday and early Mercury records sound like a Hank Williams disciple, and the Jones we recognize shows up in the years Paycheck was singing beside him.
I’ll say what I said before. I don’t believe that as a one-way transfer, and Paycheck himself only ever claimed that they influenced each other. But the chronology is real, and it’s enough to say that whatever the George Jones voice is, a share of it was worked out in a two-man harmony on a bandstand in 1962, and the man on the other end of it was a bass player nobody could keep employed.
Jones paid for Paycheck’s grave in 2003 and had him buried at Woodlawn, near the plot he’d marked for himself. Whatever the truth of the singing, that’s the truth of the friendship.
The Bakersfield connection
Two things about these years are documented and usually skipped, and they explain a lot of what came later.
The first is that Paycheck’s closest songwriting partners and friends in the sixties were West Coast people. “Apartment #9,” the song that gave Tammy Wynette her first single in December 1966 and that the Academy of Country Music named song of the year, was written by Paycheck with Bobby Austin and Fuzzy Owen. Owen was Merle Haggard’s manager and the co-owner of Tally Records in Bakersfield, the label that put out Haggard’s first hits. Austin had been the bass player in Wynn Stewart’s house band at the Nashville Nevada club in Las Vegas, the chair Haggard took over in 1962. Paycheck and Haggard were friends for life; Haggard is on record naming him as an influence, and would sit beside a sober Paycheck on television decades later trying to find a story about him clean enough to tell on the air.
So whatever the exact itinerary was, and I can’t verify the one that gets repeated, the company Paycheck was keeping in the early sixties was Bakersfield company. He was writing with the people who were building the loudest, twangiest, least Nashville country music in America, at the moment Nashville was going the other way. He came out of those years a partisan.
The second thing is the song he’d have his first hit with. “A-11” was a Hank Cochran song that Buck Owens had cut as an album track in 1964. Paycheck heard Owens’s version and asked Cochran for it. When the Ohio kid finally broke through, it was with a Bakersfield record.
Mayhew
How Aubrey Mayhew found him isn’t reliably recorded. The one detailed account of their meeting rests on a source I’ve set aside, so I’ll tell you only what the record shows.
Mayhew was a New York record man, running the country side of Pickwick International and its budget imprint Hilltop, and by 1964 he was managing Paycheck. The songs from this period say the relationship was already working. “Touch My Heart,” which Paycheck wrote with Mayhew, was cut by Ray Price in August 1966 and went to number three. “Apartment #9” came from the same stretch.
And Mayhew gave him the name. Donny Young had been on seven singles across three labels and nobody could remember it. Mayhew went looking for something you couldn’t forget, and found it in a Chicago heavyweight called Johnny Paychek, who’d fought Joe Louis for the title in March 1940 and been knocked out in two rounds. Lytle added a “c” and changed it legally, in 1964 by most accounts, 1965 by others. It was not a joke about Johnny Cash. It was a joke about a man who got in the ring with the champion and got flattened, which, if you think about the previous six years, was about right.
Mayhew used Hilltop to launch the new name. The first single, “The Girl They Talk About,” came out of a March 1965 Nashville session and got a little airplay. Then, in August 1965, at RCA Victor’s studio in New York, they cut “A-11.” It was released in September and peaked at number 26 that fall. I hear that the backing band in the studio was The Jones Boys, but do not quote me on that.
Seven singles, seven years, three labels, four bandleaders, one naval prison. That’s what it took to get Johnny Paycheck to number 26. Everything after that, the label, the murder waltz, Lloyd Green’s steel guitar turned up past where Owen Bradley wanted it, is a story about what a man does with a second chance when he’s already used up his first several. I’ve told that story elsewhere.
But the voice was there the whole time. Do you remember “Shakin’ the Blues”? - Decca, Donny Young. It’s the same singer. Nashville just hadn’t found a reason to listen just yet. That’s how this town is.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
My name is Zachariah Malachi. I’m a full-time, self-employed honky tonk musician in Nashville, Tennessee. This Substack Publication was created for the purpose of sharpening my mind on more Nashville and Country Music history to share with the honky tonk patrons downtown during my shows—but I wanted more folks to benefit from the research, so it’s my gift to the country music fans of the world AND the people who WANT to be. Subscribe and come along for the ride.