Jess Young

Music was a second career for Jess Young.  Born in Alabama in October 23, 1883, as a boy, Young moved with his family up into the Sequatchie Valley town of Whitwell, in Marion County, Tennessee. Like most young men in the region in the boom-days of coal at the turn of the century, Young worked as a coal miner for twenty years until his health deteriorated due to Black Lung disease. In his late thirties, he decided to give up mining and make music his career. He organized a band with his guitar-playing nephew and a banjo-pickin' neighbor from the Bledsoe County town of Pikeville: Homer Davenport, who innovated the three-finger picking style. Together they made some of the earliest recordings of a working string band. He broke new cultural ground for music by bringing the identifiable styling's of Black string band music to new listeners.

Jess Young's activity as a fiddler and as a performer influenced and inspired other area musicians, including Bob Douglas, the Allen Brothers, and The Gibbs Brothers.  Some of his original signature tunes are now old time and bluegrass standards: Sweet Bunch of Daisies, Maybelle Rag, Bill Bailey, Smoke Behind the Clouds, and Are You From Dixie?

Young stopped recording at the very beginning of music recording history, in 1929, but he continued to play for the many dances, radio programs, and stage performances in and around Chattanooga. The growing interest in fiddle contests is due, in part, to the excitement generated by regional competitions between such fiddlers as Jess Young and Bob Douglas, Curly Fox, and "Natchee the Indian." Young often won regional fiddle championships, defeating some of the best players in the South -- Gid Tanner, Y.Z. Hamilton, A. A. Gray, and Clayton McMichen--  and set the barre high for semi-professional fiddlers to try to meet.

Jess Young was on the verge of getting a contract to play regularly for the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville when his health failed him, and he died on December 31, 1938.

Young recorded hot fiddle tunes for both Gennett and Columbia records, and he innovated in music distribution, by making his records for sale at his performances, a practice that is carried on by old time and bluegrass performers even today. His first record, that included the new tunes, Bill Bailey and Are You From Dixie? sold over 30,000 copies. In addition, Young interpreted and made 19th century parlor songs accessible to, and meaningful to, country audiences; one example is Irving Berlin's Ragtime Violin, that Young restyled and reworked as Fiddle Up.

In addition to bringing sophisticated tunes to country audiences, Young was an important conduit of the black and white string band music of the Sequatchie Valley and Chattanooga area into the world of commercial country music as it was starting to form in the 1920s.  His musical styles are heard in the work of professional fiddlers, Curly Fox and Bert Layne, active semi-professional musicians, Bob Douglas, Wally Bryson, and Fletcher Bright.