Montana Young: Page 1
Anyone concerned that traditional bluegrass and old time music may no longer resonate with today’s youth need only witness the masterful playing of Montana Young to allay these fears. At the tender age of 12, Montana has already been delighting audiences at fiddling conventions, festivals, and community jams for years, along the musically rich Crooked Road. Like many child prodigies, Montana attends to her craft with a maturity and artistry that belies her years. Unlike so many other child prodigies, she does so without losing her youthful exuberance or humble reverence to the masters that she has had the foresight to seek out.
Probably the single most important characteristic that has defined Montana’s early experiences in music is her relentless hunger to learn and expand her skills. She first became mesmerized by the fiddle at the age of four, when her parents took her to the Galax Old Time Fiddlers Convention.
“I saw this girl up on stage,” Montana remembers, “and she was playing and dancing around and the crowd was going wild. So from that point, all I wanted was a fiddle. I don’t think my mom and dad really took me seriously at first, but eventually they gave me one.”
Montana was raised in Bassett, Virginia, in Henry County, just east of the Crooked Road, where bluegrass music is not as prevalent as in neighboring counties to the west. It was difficult for her father to find Montana a violin teacher locally, but eventually he landed her with Jane Wong, a Roanoke-based classical violinist, and local bluegrass performer Timmy Martin. These two early instructors provided her with “the best of both worlds,” as her father likes to say. Montana has enjoyed tremendous success with classical violin, earning first chair in the Roanoke Junior Strings, but her true love has always been bluegrass: “I’ve met so many great people through bluegrass,” Montana told me, “and besides it’s just so much fun to play.”