Jerry Stembridge, better known to Nashville as Chip Young, died in 2014, but the thumb-style guitar work he brought to Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” still reaches listeners every time the song comes on. He was 75 when he died, and by then he had spent decades as one of Music City’s most trusted session hands, a guitarist, producer and engineer whose playing showed up on records by Charley Pride and Kris Kristofferson as well as Parton.
That is why the name matters today, even years after his death. Born in Atlanta on May 19, 1938, Young started in the late 1950s playing alongside Jerry Reed and Joe South, then signed with Lowery Music in Atlanta after touring extensively with them. Felton Jarvis helped launch his career as an engineer in 1960, and after Army service that ended in 1963, Young moved to Nashville and went back on the road with Reed. From there, he became one of the most in-demand pickers in Music City, cutting behind Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, George Jones and Reed, and joining Elvis Presley’s studio band for the first sessions on the 1966 album “How Great Thou Art,” which won a Grammy.
Young did not stop at session work. In 1968 he bought a farm outside Nashville and opened Young ‘Un Sound, one of the first 16-track studios in the area, where he oversaw sessions for Joe Ely, Michael Martin Murphey and Mickey Newbury. The move gave him another kind of control over the music business: not just the guitar line that carried a song, but the room where the recording was made. By 1974, he was producing and engineering Billy Swan’s “I Can Help,” whose title track topped the Hot Country Songs and Hot 100 charts in the United States and reached No. 1 in multiple countries, including Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and New Zealand.
The tension in Young’s career is the same one that defines so many behind-the-scenes Nashville figures: the work was everywhere, but the face was not. Bobby Bare Jr. captured that with a blunt tribute, saying, “Just try to imagine Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’ without Chip Young’s thumb.” He added, “It’s impossible,” and called Young “one of the best, hardest-working session pickers/producers/engineers Nashville has ever seen.”
That is the answer to the question his life poses. Chip Young was not just a talented sideman who passed through country music’s golden years; he was part of the machinery that made those records last. His thumb is on some of the best-known songs in the genre, and the credit belongs to him.
