Curtis Young
Curtis Young is a Nashville harmony singer, bassist and guitarist, often credited as Curtis “Mr. Harmony” Young, who by the late 1990s had sung on more than eighty top-ten country albums and who joined the Jordanaires in 2000. His session credits include George Strait’s albums of the 1980s and 1990s and Waylon Jennings’s Full Circle (1988).
He was born Curtis E. Holbert in East Tennessee on January 9, 1943. He began his professional career on the Tennessee Barn Dance in Knoxville with his high school friend Delmar Loveday. From 1962 to 1969 he worked as a cameraman and projectionist at WATE-TV in Knoxville, while singing on three television shows a week and playing weekends as lead singer of the Kountry Kings.
In 1969 the songwriter L. E. White told him of an opening for a bass player and singer with Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper, and he moved to Nashville and became a regular in their band. He was soon working sessions, playing bass and rhythm guitar and singing harmony, and recording radio and television commercials. In 1973 a demo he cut of a film theme led to his singing the theme for the movie Jory. After about three years with the Coopers he played bass and sang for Chet Atkins on weekend dates. In 1979 he went to work with Vic Willis of the Willis Brothers, and after Guy Willis’s death he became lead singer of the Vic Willis Trio, staying for six years. In 1984 he was cast as the lead guitarist in Patsy Cline’s road band in the film Sweet Dreams.
Among his session credits are backing vocals on George Strait’s Strait from the Heart (1982) and Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind (1984), and on harmony vocals on Ocean Front Property (1987). In June 1988 he sang on Waylon Jennings’s sessions for Full Circle, produced by Jimmy Bowen, which included “Grapes on the Vine.” Music Row magazine’s “Top Ten Album All Stars” ranked him its number-one vocalist in 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1996 and 1998, for singing on more than eighty top-ten albums.
When Neal Matthews died in April 2000, the Jordanaires asked Young to join as second tenor and lead singer. He was a member when the group was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in October 2001 and when it won a Grammy in 2002 for a tribute album to James Blackwood. The Jordanaires were formally dissolved after Gordon Stoker’s death in 2013.
