R.I.P.: Reggie Young, Guitarist Played On Scores of Major Hits

Reggie Young

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 from heart failuree on Thursday at his home in Leipers Fork, Tenn., just outside Nashville.

He was 82, according to The NYTimes.

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 No. 1 pop singles in the late ’60s, and Neil Diamond’s 1969 Top 10 hit “Sweet Caroline.”

Young also played the funky chicken-scratch guitar lick on “Skinny Legs and All,” the soul singer Joe Tex’s 1967 Top 10 pop hit. He contributed the reverberating fills and swells that punctuate James Carr’s timeless soul ballad “The Dark End of the Street,” also from 1967. And his bluesy riffing buttressed the sultry, throbbing groove on “Son of a Preacher Man,” a Top 10 single for the British pop singer Dusty Springfield in 1968.

Young 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 the producer Chips Moman’s American Sound Studio.

In addition to playing guitar, Mr. Young added the psychedelic accents of the electric sitar to a handful of influential recordings, among them the Box Tops’ “Cry Like a Baby” and B. J. Thomas’s “Hooked on a Feeling,” both of which reached the Top 10 in 1968.

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.”

Young’s Nashville session credits also include Billy Swan’s “I Can Help,” which topped both the country and pop charts in 1974.


Young made an indelible contribution, especially during his years in Memphis, to the Southernization of pop music in the 1960s and early ’70s. This influence was felt not just by the number of records made in the South that were played on AM radio throughout the nation.