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Christopher T. Murry
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He learned quickly, that by taking the right steps, he could make a living performing on the local level. He played with bands and duos at various times, but realized that splitting a paycheck with one or more other people wasn’t going to put dinner on the table. He managed well while out on his own, raising three children – Michelle, 37, Mark, 29, and Angie, 27 – with his wife, Lois.
Mark took his father’s passion for music and ran with it, joining the military to pursue a musical career. He’s well versed in a handful of instruments and even knows how to read music.
It was inevitable that one of the Young children would take an interest in music. While Dad played night gigs, Mark and Angie would camp out in the family truckster in the establishment’s parking lot. It’s just the way a musical family lives. Music lives in their blood.
It was that desire and love of song that compelled Mr. Young to drive to Nashville once to meet songwriter Merle Kilgore, in hopes of working with the established artist. It never panned out, but he certainly tried.
Another time, Mr. Young and his cohorts caught wind that “King of the Road” singer Roger Miller would be in town. The group rehearsed some of his numbers and later jammed with the country-western legend.
Mr. Young recalls one instance when he wished he’d begun playing the guitar a little earlier in life. The great Johnny Cash (about whom Mr. Young speaks with great respect) was in Byron Center on a pheasant-hunting trip. When he stopped in a local watering hole, the barkeep immediately jumped on the phone and began calling every guitarist in town for an impromptu performance. By the time Mr. Cash had finished his brews, the bartender was out of options and had to let the singer leave without so much as a single song. Had the circumstances been a little different, it could have been Young and Cash on stage that evening.
Although he says he’ll miss Northeastern Pennsylvania, Mr. Young’s looking forward to returning home. He’ll have new businesses and new owners to sell his show to, but he’s ready for it. “My family keeps saying when they run into people, they want to know when I’m coming back,” he said.
He describes Michigan as a lot like Pennsylvania, only with “a little more snow, and a little colder.” “I’m kind of happy wherever I am,” he said. “I’m going to miss the people I’ve met over the years. The Honesdale people have been really good to me. I’m going to miss my friends at the Fireside (Restaurant).”
He won’t miss them for long, though. Mr. Young plans on sweeping back through the Keystone State this summer, with scheduled stops at the Wayne County and Greene-Dreher-Sterling fairs. That way, Wayne County won’t really have to miss Tiny Young.
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Tiny Young is about as Wayne County as the fair.
Since his arrival in the mid-80s, he’s been entertaining countless crowds at fairs and bars with his one-man music show. This month, though, he’ll say goodbye — but not for good — to the community that’s accepted him as one of their own.
Mr. Young will close out his Wayne County stint with Jan. 8, 15, 22 and 29 gigs at the Fireside Restaurant in Honesdale.
Born and bred in a little farming community called Byron Center in Michigan, Mr. Young felt quite at home in 1986 when he moved to Godeffroy, NY on a business endeavor with his brother. The pair specialized in repairing fiberglass bathtubs, damaged by contractors in newly framed homes.
Later in that decade, though, the building industry lost some of its steam and the brothers Young found themselves without enough work to carry on, so they called it quits.
With a fairly young family and no work, Mr. Young returned to a life that he’d once left in Michigan — the life of a full-time musician. “It was just a desire of my own,” he said, reflecting on the rebirth of his music career. In Michigan, he’d spent years gigging at various fairs and public functions, and making a decent buck at it, too.
The career was put on the back burner for a few years while he and his brother made their run in the fiberglass industry, but by 1990, The Big Tiny Young Show was back.
Inspired by a family of singers, Mr. Young didn’t pick up an instrument until he’d reached his early 20s. Instead, growing up, he used the only instrument he’d known — his voice.
Armed with an acoustic guitar, his father would strum two-chord songs while the rest of the family sang along. “He had a really good ear for pitch,” Mr. Young said of his father, “and he passed that down to me. None of us studied music. My father just had a good ear.”
To this day, the lumbering, bearded man of well over six 6 feet still doesn’t read sheet music. “You have to do more than that,” he said. “You have to feel it and reproduce it.”
Mr. Young is a polished musician with a song sheet a mile long. He plays hits made famous by the great country-western artists, in addition to a laundry list of rock and roll songs from throughout the last five decades. “Gospel and country music is where my heart is. That’s what’s in my inner being,” he said.
In his early musical years, Mr. Young was never quite sure if he could handle the lifestyle. “It goes from imagining you could go in front of an audience to you might get paid for this someday,” he said, with a little chuckle.
He not only got paid for it, he made a living off it. His first steady paycheck came from a bar owner in Michigan who paid the young man $50 a night on the weekends to practice in the bar. |
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