Posted on 01/30/2019 2:49:27 AM PST by smalltownslick
NASHVILLE — Reggie Young, a prolific studio guitarist who appeared on landmark recordings by Elvis Presley and many others and played a prominent role in shaping the sound of Southern popular music in the 1960s and ’70s, died on Thursday at his home in Leipers Fork, Tenn., just outside Nashville. He was 82. His wife, Jenny Young, said the cause was heart failure.
Young played guitar on hundreds of hit recordings in a career that spanned more than six decades. Among his best-known credits are the Box Tops’ “The Letter” and Presley’s “Suspicious Minds,” both #1 singles in the late ’60s, and Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline.” He played the funky chicken-scratch guitar lick on “Skinny Legs & All,” on Joe Tex’s 1967 Top 10 hit. He contributed the reverberating fills and swells that punctuate James Carr’s timeless “The Dark End of the Street.” And his bluesy riffing buttressed the sultry, throbbing groove on “Son of a Preacher Man,” a Top 10 single for Dusty Springfield in 1968. He appeared on all these recordings, including those associated with Presley’s late-60s return to the limelight, as a member of the Memphis Boys, the renowned house band for producer Chips Moman’s American Sound Studio.
Living and working in Memphis, where there had long been a fertile cross-pollinization between country and blues, was critical to the development of Young’s down-home style of playing, a muscular yet relaxed mix of rhythmic and melodic instincts. “In Memphis, it’s sort of in between Nashville and the Southern Delta down in Mississippi, so I’m kind of a cross between B. B. King and Chet Atkins,” Young said in an interview published on Soul and Jazz and Funk in 2017. “Most of the soul music back then was in Memphis,” he added. “That’s where I came from.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
“Cause I was drunk
I wasn’t knee crawlin’, slip slidin’, Reggie Youngin’
Commode huggin’ drunk”........
He was the tastiest of the tasty. Watch some YouTube videos of him playing and discussing the licks he created. He’s as humble as he is talented...some of them sound like someone sitting around, bored and noodling. Until you realize they are some of the most famous riffs ever.
Have to admit that lyric sprang to mind also.
He was okay. But the studio musician who played the guitar runs in Marty Robbins’ El Paso is my all time favorite, Grady Martin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfKfo6mpD-Q
‘...After American Sound Studio closed in 1972, Mr. Young moved to Nashville, where his soulful less-is-more approach graced hits like Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away,” Waylon Jennings’s “Luckenbach, Texas” and Willie Nelson’s “Always on My Mind”...’
‘Luckenbach Texas’ (1977)
from the album ‘Ol Waylon’
Songwriters: Bobby Emmons, Chips Moman
Producer: Chips Moman
Vocals: Waylon Jennings & Willie Nelson
https://bit.ly/2qQxSmc
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