Steve Young obit

 

Steve Young obituary

Singer and songwriter influential in country rock during the 1960s and 70s

He was not on the list.

The singer and songwriter Steve Young, who has died aged 73 from a head injury sustained after a fall, won the admiration of critics and fellow artists in a recording career spanning almost 50 years, while remaining little known outside a hard core of appreciative fans. Nonetheless, he was influential in the country-rock movement of the 1960s and 70s, and was closely allied with the outlaw country movement, which introduced a defiant rock’n’roll attitude into Nashville’s middle-of-the-road country music.

Young’s best-known song is Seven Bridges Road, which has been covered by numerous artists including Joan Baez, Rita Coolidge, Iain Matthews and Dolly Parton. The song gave Young his closest brush with stardom when the Eagles released their live recording of it as a single in 1980. Their version (extracted from the Eagles Live concert album) reached 21 on the Billboard Hot 100 and also became a hit on the country charts. Other Young songs made famous by big-name artists were Montgomery in the Rain, which was recorded by Hank Williams Jr in 1977, and Lonesome, On’ry and Mean, the title song of the 1973 album by Waylon Jennings which helped to establish Jennings’s “outlaw” credentials.

Young was born in Georgia and spent his early years moving around Georgia and Alabama as his half-Cherokee father struggled to find work. He regarded Gadsden, Alabama – where his maternal grandmother lived – as the nearest thing he had to a home town. “My father began sharecropping when he was 13 and his sister Eula, who worked with him, was 10,” Young recalled. “I was from a really dysfunctional family. My father would just disappear sometimes … He left us when I was very young.”

Nonetheless, both his mother and father had an interest in country and gospel music, and the young Steve developed an ambition to become a musician. His mother eventually bought him a Gibson electric guitar. She remarried and moved, with her son, to Beaumont, Texas, where Steve graduated from high school (he was in the same class as the aspiring blues guitarist Johnny Winter).

He played gigs in Texas before moving back to Alabama, but his fondness for playing politically charged folk songs, including some of Bob Dylan’s, made him unpopular in the reactionary Deep South. Having received threats from the Ku Klux Klan, he fled to California with two local folk musicians, Richard Lockmiller and Jim Connor, who had a deal with Capitol Records as Richard & Jim.

He played lead guitar in the Skip Battin Band (Battin would later join the Byrds) and joined Van Dyke Parks and Stephen Stills in the Gas Company. Then he was invited to join Stone Country, who recorded an album for RCA that brought Young to the notice of other record companies. He signed a solo deal with A&M and recorded his debut album, Rock Salt & Nails (1969); it comprised mostly cover versions, and featured two former member of the Byrds, Gene Clark and Gram Parsons, but also contained the first recording of Seven Bridges Road. Young’s evocative mix of country, gospel, folk and bluegrass styles was already forming.

 

The album failed to sell, and Young, already tired of the music business, moved to San Francisco with his new wife, the folk singer Terrye Newkirk. He opened a guitar shop in San Anselmo, where his customers included Jerry Garcia and Van Morrison. However, Reprise records lured him with a new deal, and sent him to Nashville to record the album Seven Bridges Road (1972). This too was a flop, despite some enthusiastic reviews.

 

Now with a young son, Young moved to Nashville, but lack of money and his escalating alcohol consumption prompted him to separate from Terrye in 1974 (they later divorced). In 1975-76, he was filmed for the documentary Heartworn Highways, alongside other upcoming “outlaw” performers including Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt and Steve Earle, but the film was not released until 1981. Young scuffled a living as a travelling troubadour, when the opportunity arose making albums, which included Honky Tonk Man (1975) and two critically acclaimed albums for RCA, Renegade Picker (1976) and No Place to Fall (1978). These did not sell, driving Young into a pit of alcoholic gloom that took him into rehab at Meharry hospital, Nashville.

After a reissue of Seven Bridges Road and a new album, To Satisfy You (1981), failed to ring the cash registers, Young was invited to tour Norway with the Jonas Fjeld Band, and made the album Look Homeward Angel (1986) for the Swedish label Mill Records. He moved to Austin, Texas and cut the album Solo/Live (1991) for Watermelon Records, followed by the studio album Switchblades of Love (1993), a collection of songs that proved Young was still potent creatively, if not financially.

After releasing Primal Young (2000), he concocted a plan to re-record his back catalogue, since his rights to his original recordings were entangled with various record labels. This resulted in Songlines Revisited, Vol 1 (2005). His latest release was the live album Stories Round the Horseshoe Bend (2007).

His son, Jubal Lee, survives him.