Dempsey Young
Dempsey Young was the mandolin player of Lost & Found, the Virginia band he started in 1973 with Allen Mills, Gene Parker and Roger Handy, and he played with it for thirty-three years, until his death in December 2006. With Mills he was the band’s constant through many changes of guitarist and banjo player, and his swing-tinged mandolin and harmony singing were as much a part of its sound as Mills’s voice.
He first made money playing guitar in a rock and roll band, and he could play the banjo as well. When the fiddler in a local group, the New Grass Express, asked him whether he could play mandolin, he started learning on a small Harmony mandolin his aunt had bought; about a month later, knowing just one piece and with only a bass behind him, he won first place in the mandolin contest at the fiddlers’ convention in Galax, Virginia. The win made him a local name, he later said, before he could play much, and he set about practicing.
In 1973 Parker, a banjo player who had worked with Jim Eanes, and Mills, who had been playing in a country band in Danville, were meeting for weekly jam sessions, and Parker, who had seen Young at a fiddlers’ convention at Ferrum College, brought him in; Young was 18 and still learning. Parker and Mills drilled him on numbers such as “Red Apple Rag,” and when Mills lined up a weekly show on Martinsville’s new cable television station, Young’s New Grass Express bandmate Roger Handy came in on guitar. As Lost & Found the four made their debut on the show in October 1973 and played it every week for about eighteen months. Young recalled that the program used up material so fast that he learned to improvise breaks on the spot. He took ideas from the twin guitars of the Allman Brothers and worked out ways to twin his mandolin with Parker’s banjo, and he came up with many of the band’s introductions and endings.
On the first two albums, First Time Around (Outlet, 1975) and Second Time Around (1976), he played mandolin and sang baritone, and on the second he also played lead guitar on one track. By the third, Third Time Around (1978), Lost & Found had become a full-time band, and in 1980 it signed with Rebel. Young played mandolin and sang harmony on all of its Rebel albums: The Lost & Found (1980), Endless Highway (1982), Sun’s Gonna Shine (1985), The Deal (1987), Hymn Time (1988), New Day (1989), January Rain (1992), A Ride Through the Country (1995) and It’s About Time (2002). On a 1982 recording of “Ida Red” made at Threshold Recording in Roanoke he switched to lead guitar and sang tenor. For Copper Creek the band made an all-instrumental album, Just Pickin’ (1994), recorded at Eastwood Studio in Cana, Virginia, with Barry Berrier, Lynwood Lunsford and Mills, on which Young played fiddle as well as mandolin on fifteen pieces including “Struttin’ to Ferrum,” “Ragtime Annie” and “Chicken Reel.”
He died on 10 December 2006, while the band was recording its next album. Scott Napier, who had played with Larry Sparks, filled in for the band’s first shows without him and then took over the mandolin. On Love, Lost and Found (Rebel, 2009) Young and Napier each play on half the tracks, and Young sings lead on “A Daisy a Day,” a song he had performed with the band for years; Napier recalled Young telling him to play his own way. An earlier recording of Dolly Parton’s “Put It Off Until Tomorrow,” with Young on mandolin and Scottie Sparks singing lead, closes the band’s last album, Final Chapter (Mountain Fever, 2023). Mills recalled that the young Young put every lick he knew into the first line of a solo and later learned that less is more. Lost & Found, with Young among its four founders, was named to the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2026.
