Touch My Heart: A Tribute to Johnny Paycheck

1	If I'm Gonna Sink (I Might as Well Go to the Bottom) / Neko Case 2:54
2	Someone to Give My Love To / Al Anderson 3:52
3	I'm Barely Hangin' On to Me / Marshall Crenshaw 2:51
4	Shakin' the Blues / Robbie Fulks 2:25
5	I Did the Right Thing / Dallas Wayne 4:36
6	(Don't Take Her) She's All I Got / George Jones 3:43
7	Touch My Heart / Mavis Staples 5:41
8	I'm the Only Hell My Mama Ever Raised / Hank Williams III 4:41
9	I Want You to Know / Jim Lauderdale 2:27
10	11 Months and 29 Days / Dave Alvin 3:40
11	Apartment #9 / Johnny Bush 2:26
12	The Lovin' Machine / Billy Yates 2:57
13	Motel Time Again / Bobby Bare Jr. 3:24
14	A Man That's Satisfied / Mike Ireland 3:04
15	Take This Job and Shove It / Jeff Tweedy 3:16
16	Old Violin / Larry Cordle 4:34

Barnes & Noble

However rough-and-tumble his life, Johnny Paycheck left behind an amazing body of work, and this tribute album does it proud. Produced by Robbie Fulks and featuring an ace band that includes Paycheck's own pedal steel virtuoso, Lloyd Green (lured out of retirement to play some dazzling licks), Touch My Heart surveys the Paycheck catalogue, from riveting early obscurities to smash hits from his prime with Epic and producer Billy Sherrill. "Take This Job and Shove It" brings Buck Owens back into the studio, with Bobby Bare, Radney Foster, and Jeff Tweedy, for a gritty, rambunctious take on an instant classic. The prison nightmare "11 Months and 29 Days" is transformed into a grinding, bluesy boogie by Dave Alvin, whose husky vocal strikes precisely the right degree of weariness with which to relate the details of the countdown in question. Paycheck's near-palpable guilt and remorse fueled his version of "I'm the Only Hell My Mama Ever Raised," but the foreboding ambiance of Hank Williams III's dark, spartan reading (with BR5-49's Don Herron on fiddle and mandolin) suggests more mayhem a-borning. His mountain voice at its expressive best, Jim Lauderdale does a beautiful job with the lilting love song, "I Want You to Know," and Paycheck's former boss, George Jones, offers up a warm treatment of another love testimonial, "She's All I Got." Neko Case ("If I'm Gonna Sink (I Might as Well Go to the Bottom)"), Marshall Crenshaw ("I'm Barely Hangin' On to Me"), and Mavis Staples (a magnificent gospel-tinged "Touch My Heart") do right by the borderline psychotic material in the canon. Would that Paycheck were here to enjoy this, because he would, and he deserved that much. David McGee

All Music Guide

Johnny Paycheck is best remembered as the likably ornery Nashville outlaw who scored a major crossover hit with David Allan Coe's "Take This Job and Shove it" and made the title a household phrase. Unfortunately, as is often the case, Paycheck's biggest hit also created a one-dimensional image that he was never able to escape, and did no justice to the full scope of his talent. Paycheck was a fine singer, a gifted songwriter, a respected journeyman musician who anchored road bands for George Jones and Porter Wagoner, and an artist whose work could be bitingly funny, heart-wrenching, intensely personal, or a little disturbing depending on which tune from which point of his career you chose to cue up. In short, the late Johnny Paycheck is a guy whose public profile could stand an overhaul, and thankfully ace songwriter and noted fan Robbie Fulks has been given the opportunity to do just that with Touch My Heart: A Tribute to Johnny Paycheck, in which 20 artists interpret songs that were either written or recorded by Paycheck during his nearly 40-year career in music. Fulks recorded most of these performances with the same core session band (including Redd Volkaert on guitar and the great Lloyd Green on pedal steel), giving the album a consistent and unified personality that makes this more than a collection of well-intentioned but scattershot single sides, and the "casting" is inspired, with all the performers ideal fits for their selections. George Jones captures the desperation amidst the bravado of "She's All I Got," Mavis Staples finds an almost spiritual devotion in "Touch My Heart," Neko Case's hard-edged honky tonk charge through "If I'm Gonna Sink (I Might as Well Go to the Bottom)" is breathless and a little bit scary, Mike Ireland's beautiful take on "A Man That's Satisfied" confirms he's one of the greatest unsung talents in country music, and Hank Williams III captures the dark and hopeless heart of "I'm the Only Hell My Mama Ever Raised" while calling up the spirit of his grandpa. Nearly every track on Touch My Heart dips into a slightly different shade of classic country music, and every song satisfies, while cohering into a thoroughly convincing and genuinely affecting argument for the diversity of Johnny Paycheck's talent. In short, this is a working model of how a tribute album should be done, and one imagines that, somewhere in that great honky tonk in the sky, Paycheck is tipping his hat to Robbie Fulks and his many talented friends -- they've truly done right by his work and his memory. Points added for David Cantwell's superb liner notes. Mark Deming