Johnny Paycheck: The Soul & The Edge: The Best Of Johnny Paycheck : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

While rock & roll never forgets, country music has a long history of doing so. And Johnny Paycheck hasn't so much been forgotten, as remembered all wrong. Forever pegged for recording David Allan Coe's "Take This Job and Shove It" and turning it into a blue-collar anthem, Paycheck's career is deserving of far more notice than a single track. While The Real Mr. Heartache, released four years ago, captured the best of his early material, The Soul and the Edge features the breadth of Paycheck's Seventies output, a range that has been shamefully undersold. Some of the material feels close to the bone ("I'm the Only Hell [My Mama Ever Raised]"), other songs feel like they've dug their way straight into the marrow ("[Stay Away From] The Cocaine Train," "Me and the I.R.S."). But what truly gets lost in the bars across America, where suds turn your average Joe into a Paycheck, is that his voice was one hell of an instrument, and it came across best on the more vulnerable songs: "She's All I Got," "Slide Off of Your Satin Sheets," "Someone to Give My Love To." Country music has always been drawn to the novelty song; but it's the slower material where the cream of the genre joins the best of popular American music, and as this collection amply shows, Paycheck was right up there with his former boss, George Jones, as one of country's finest singers.

ANDREW DANSBY
(April 30, 2002)