Young was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and played in string bands in Mississippi in the 1930s. He also claimed to have worked with Sleepy John Estes in Tennessee before moving to Chicago in 1940. By 1943, he was working with John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson and Muddy Waters. In the late 1940s he became a regular player on Maxwell Street, often with his cousin, the guitarist Johnny Williams, and in clubs with Williams and Little Walter. His first recording was made in 1947 for the Ora Nelle label, featuring Young singing "Money Taking Woman" on the A-side, accompanied by Williams, who sang "Worried Man Blues" on the B-side. For a second session in late 1948, Young and Williams were joined by Snooky Pryor on harmonica and recorded a single for the Planet label, released under the name Man Young. A later session, for J.O.B. Records, was unissued. Young played guitar behind Snooky Pryor in a session for Vee-Jay, but after that he retired from performance in the 1950s. With the rise of interest in blues among white audiences in the early 1960s, Young emerged from retirement in 1963 and recorded for several labels, including Vanguard, Testament, Arhoolie and Blue Horizon, in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Young died of a heart attack, in Chicago, in 1974, and is buried in Lincoln Cemetery, in Urbana, Illinois.
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By Barry Lee Pearson
Although the mandolin is not an instrument commonly associated with Chicago blues, it has been used by Chicago-based string bands or on Chicago-made recordings by artists such as Carl Martin, Charles and Joe McCoy, and Yank Rachell. However, the only artist to use it successfully in the later electric blues format was Mississippi-born bluesman Johnny Young.
An important figure in blues history, Young loved the rough-and-tumble string band tradition of the Delta, a style that readily co-existed with blues.
Young's initial 1947 Chicago classic, "Money Taking Women," exhibits the same exuberant down-home sound, fusing blues with the older country breakdown traditions. The string band ensemble sound suited street performance as well, whether in Memphis or in Chicago's open air Maxwell Street Market, where Young and his cronies were brought in off the streets to record. Over the years, Young's mandolin activity declined as Chicago's African-American blues audience demanded a more modern and urban sound. Since Young was also a skilled guitarist and a fine vocalist, he easily weathered the transition.
During the late '60s, an emerging white blues-revival audience proved eager for Young's mandolin styling. Unlike Yank Rachell, whose mandolin playing retained an older string band feel, Young's style was firmly grounded in a more contemporary postwar blues idiom, and he interacted well with other electric blues artists. Throughout his life, he had worked with the major figures of blues history, including Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters, Walter Horton, and Otis Spann. He was, he insisted, born to be a musician. When interviewed shortly before he died, he said he had struggled all his life trying to make it in the music business. An emotional man, he hoped he would live long enough to make enough money to buy a house. He never made it.