Lost and Found

Mills, born on 4 November 1937, came to Danville, Virginia, in 1959 after service in the Navy and took up music there, first on a mandolin and then on the bass. He was playing in a country band in Danville when, as Parker recalled it, Parker suggested that the two of them find players for bluegrass. Parker contacted Young, whom he had seen at a fiddlers’ convention at Ferrum College, and Young brought in Handy, who had been playing with him. Mills proposed the name, because the four had all been in other bands without playing together.

Mills kept a day job doing auto body work while the band built its following. Its three albums for Outlet were First Time Around (1975), Second Time Around (1976) and Third Time Around (1978). The first two list Handy, Parker, Young and Mills, with Gene Elders on fiddle on some tracks of the second, and the first included Mills’s “Love of the Mountains” and “If Today Was the Last Day.”

Mills took the band’s first album for Rebel to Dave Freeman himself, and Freeman accepted it. The Lost & Found (Rebel, 1980) had Bubba Chandler on guitar in place of Handy. Endless Highway (1982) included “Love of the Mountains” again, along with Mills’s “Wild Mountain Flowers for Mary,” which he began writing after asking the driver to pull over by the side of the road on a trip to a show. Rebel followed with Sun’s Gonna Shine (1985), with Steve Wilson on guitar and Steve Thomas on fiddle, then The Deal (1987), Hymn Time (1988) and New Day (1989), on which Ronnie Bowman played guitar and Jody King banjo. Parker had left by the end of the decade; he recalled getting out in 1987 or 1988.

Barry Berrier on guitar and Lynwood Lunsford on banjo are on January Rain (1992), and James Price played fiddle on A Ride Through the Country (1995). Ronald Smith, a member since 1999, plays banjo on It’s About Time (2002), where Scottie Sparks and Berrier share the guitar work and Junior Sisk is credited on three tracks. “Johnston’s Grocery Store” from that album reached number one on the Bluegrass Unlimited song chart.

Young was the band’s mandolinist from the first album until his death in 2006. Scott Napier then took the mandolin chair, and Love, Lost and Found (Rebel, 2009) includes Young’s final recordings. In all, fourteen releases are associated with Rebel, among them the compilation Down on Sawmill Road, which marked thirty years with the label. Outside the band, Mills was present at the first organizational meetings of the International Bluegrass Music Association in 1985, and he received its Distinguished Achievement Award in 2019.

Back problems ended Mills’s touring. In late 2013 the band, with Napier, Smith and the guitarist Dan Wells, recorded at Mountain Fever Studio, and those sessions were issued in May 2023 as Final Chapter, which closes with “Put It Off Until Tomorrow,” an earlier recording featuring Young and Sparks. Mills died on 18 August 2026 at the age of 88.