The Lost & Found – Finders’ keepers
The result is a sound that is blindingly distinctive, yoking together a repertoire of country hits from long (and not so long) ago, Mills originals, bluegrass standards, and often gently self-denigrating humorous vehicles. The group’s warm, relaxed vocals and instrumental approach of brilliant economy and startling wit has served as a model for some of the leading lights of the music’s next generation.
“I’ve told Dempsey many times that he’s the reason I play the mandolin,” says Adam Steffey, one of the past decade’s most admired stylists for his work with Alison Krauss & Union Station. “The first group and mandolin player that I ever listened to that just caught my ear was the Lost & Found and Dempsey Young.
“When we were recording Every Time You Say Goodbye, I started thinking, well, I’m playing awfully busy. And then I started thinking, what would Dempsey play? You might be able to play a big flurry of notes, and come off the top ropes and body slam a solo, but does it need that? Do you have to play that many notes to make it work?”
Steffey, now a member of Mountain Heart, recalls a recent appearance by the Lost & Found at a West Virginia festival. “We were sitting at Blue Highway’s table, and Dempsey was up onstage for their last show of the evening, and he was just absolutely mashing it. Every note was like something you’d never heard before — he would play something and we would start laughing. It’s just so inventive and over the top, but everything he did fit. To me, he ought to already be in the gallery of greats as far as bluegrass mandolin players go. He’s as inventive as Grisman or Bush or anybody.”
Young appreciates the compliments, but offers a typically dry account of his creativity. “A lot of mandolin players and other musicians, they ask me, ‘How did you develop this?’ And I’ve never really had a good answer to that. I knew that I was different, and about ten years ago I was talking to John Hartford one day — and John has always been unique to me, so I thought, I’m going to ask John this question. I said, ‘You’ve got this different thing, why is that? Where does that come from?’ And he didn’t waste two seconds, he looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Lack of talent.’ And you know, I laughed when he said it, but I walked off with that in my mind, and I swear, it sounds funny, but to me that is the answer.
“There are a lot of songs in this music that are similar. I went through a period of making up these licks to fill these spaces in time, and what I found out is that with the songs being so similar, if you do this same lick over and over in four different songs, the breaks that you do come out sounding almost the same. That’s when the melody became more and more and more important; the beauty of some of these songs is in the melody. That’s what you remember.
“And you can’t focus all your playing toward the musicians in the audience. Because another thing that gets said to me a lot, people come up to me and they talk about this player, and they’ll say, ‘Everybody tells me this guy is so great, but I can’t figure out, what he’s doing doesn’t make sense to me, and what you’re playing, I understood it, it went like the song goes.’ And they’re talking about the melody. So I found that from the audience’s standpoint, it’s also important to them, and doing this for a living, that’s something that’s been important to me, too, is to play something that they appreciate.”
It’s About Time, the Lost & Found’s new CD on Rebel Records, gives listeners a lot to appreciate. New members Ronald Smith (banjo) and Scottie Sparks (guitar) are well-schooled in the band’s sound, and the quartet sounds as good as it ever has. Like its predecessors, the album is composed of a savvy assortment of new songs and old that erase whatever gap might exist between country and bluegrass.
Gene Watson’s 1981 hit “Fourteen Carat Mind” opens the set with Young’s deft adaptation of the original record’s piano and guitar kickoff; Sparks’ weary vocal echoes Watson’s gritty performance without imitating it. Mills recalls Jim Eanes with “Log Cabin In The Lane” (an Eanes favorite from the late ’50s); offers homespun patriotism on Mel Street’s “Country Pride”; reins in the Stanley Brothers’ sound-effects-enhanced version of Fairley Holden’s “Keep Them Cold Icy Fingers Off Me”; and even takes on the chestnut “Wreck Of The Old 97”, injecting a faint yet discernible hint of regional familiarity to remind the listener that the most famous of train wrecks occurred near his hometown of Danville.
It’s a set that’s sure to please their fans — and that, Mills says with the wisdom of one whose roots go back to the music’s golden era, is the point.
“The further you go, the more important the fans are,” Mills gently yet pointedly offers. “They’re really the bottom line. You can pick and choose material that you think is good, but if the fans don’t like it, you’ve lost them. You can experiment and do some certain things, but you know pretty basically about some of this stuff that they want to hear, and try to give them something new and refreshing.
“We felt always that we were handicapped because we couldn’t play the Stanleys and Monroe music, so we had to do what we were doing, but we’ve enjoyed it and we’re thankful that the fans continue to see us and let us do what we have to do. And I’m most grateful to them, to the disc jockeys that have played our music, and to the fans that have supported us over the years.”
ND contributing editor Jon Weisberger lives and writes in Kenyon County, Kentucky.