Steve Young

Seven Bridges Road

ACE. CD/LP Southern boy with a wide worldview: here are his Complete Recordings.

Run out of Alabama in the ’60s for the crime of an open mind, big-voiced Steve Young was an original headneck, carrying contradictions along with a finelypicked guitar. This second album from 1972 is his most musically hardcore country collection. But like songwriting peer Kris Kristofferson, Young juggles literary craft, drunken bravado and wry humour: in The White Trash Song, the protagonist’s “chaste woman” cheats on him with a gospel singer. A scribe’s scribe, some of Young’s classics are here, including Lonesome On’ry And Mean and Hank Williams tribute Montgomery In The Rain (covered by Waylon Jennings and Hank Jr respectively) and the title track (recorded by Dolly Parton and the Eagles, among others). Reissued repeatedly, all editions are collated here along with an obscure single produced by Ry Cooder.