Reggie Young
Reggie Young was a guitarist who played lead in the Memphis Boys, the house band at Chips Moman’s American Sound Studio, and then spent decades as a Nashville session player. His records run from Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds” and Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man” to Waylon Jennings’s Honky Tonk Heroes, and the Musicians Hall of Fame inducted him twice, with the Memphis Boys and with the original Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section.
He was born in Caruthersville, Missouri, in December 1936. His father played Hawaiian lap-steel guitar, and the family moved to Memphis when Reggie was thirteen. A WSM radio program called “Two Guitars,” featuring Chet Atkins, drew him to the instrument. In 1955 he joined his first band, the rockabilly group Eddie Bond and the Stompers, who recorded for Mercury, had a 1956 hit with “Rockin’ Daddy” and toured with Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash. He also played with Johnny Horton, appearing with him on the Louisiana Hayride.
In 1964 he began working with the Bill Black Combo, which opened shows on the Beatles’ first American tour that year. At the same time he was playing sessions at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. From 1967 to 1972 he was the lead guitarist of the Memphis Boys at American Studios, where he sometimes played as many as twenty sessions a week. The band’s records with him include the Box Tops’ “The Letter,” Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man” and Presley’s “Suspicious Minds” and “In the Ghetto.”
After a short spell in Atlanta he moved to Nashville, where he worked behind Tanya Tucker, Eddie Rabbitt, Rodney Crowell, John Prine, Dolly Parton and many others, and played on Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away,” Kenny Rogers’s The Gambler and Guy Clark’s Old No. 1. He was one of the electric guitarists on the summer 1973 sessions at RCA’s Nashville studio for Jennings’s Honky Tonk Heroes, and in 1974 played lead guitar on Cal Smith’s MCA sessions at Bradley’s Barn, which produced “It’s Time to Pay the Fiddler.” His work with Jennings continued into the late 1980s: he played guitar on the June 1987 sessions at Sound Stage Studio for A Man Called Hoss and on the June 1988 sessions, produced by Jimmy Bowen, for Full Circle, which included “Grapes on the Vine.” He also played on George Strait’s Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind (1984) and Ocean Front Property (1987).
In the early 1990s he stepped back from studio work to tour with the Highwaymen, the group formed by Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson. In 2008 the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum honored him in its “Nashville Cats” series, and in 2017 he released a solo album, Forever Young.
Young died at his home in Leipers Fork, Tennessee, near Nashville, on January 17, 2019, at the age of 82. Days later the British label Ace Records issued Reggie Young: Session Guitar Star, a 24-track compilation of records he had played on. The Musicians Hall of Fame had inducted the Memphis Boys at its first ceremony in 2007, and in October 2019 it inducted him again, posthumously, as one of the “friends” of the original Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section.
