Aaron Young

December 6, 2007




Clinton grad survives streets, keeps singing dream alive as urban 'Artist of the Month'

By Gary Pettus
gpettus@clarionledger.com



Special to The Clarion-Ledger

Bolton native Aaron Young endured homelessness as he pursued his dream of becoming a recording artist.



AT A GLANCE


Name: Aaron Young.


Hometown: Bolton.


Age: 30.


Education: Clinton High School, attended Hinds Community College and Jackson State University.


Parents: Stella Harvey, George Young.


Career: Recording artist, record producer, playwright, screenwriter.


Recording: They Call Me AY (APOS Entertainment label), MP3 price: $13.99 on cdbaby.com/cd/aaronyoung.


Musical influences: Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, Alicia Keys.


Career developments: Urban "Artist of the Month" for Coca-Cola's MyCoke.com Web site (available for free download until Dec. 15); musical producer for the theatrical production Glass Slipper Blues.


Web sites: http://www.mycoke.com/ (www.mytracks.com/artist525 61.aspx), http://www.aaronyoungmusic.com/.




He had met the man on the streets of San Francisco, where they both lived - a broken-down doctor who smoked crack and exhaled failure.

"I found out what not to do from him," Aaron Young says. "There are a lot of things you give up on, but you ain't got to give up on the one you believe in."

Young believed in music, even though it had lured him from Mississippi to California, then left him without a job or a home. But not without hope.

Today, a few years after his descent into the homeless life, music is his friend again: The Bolton native has been named the Urban "Artist of the Month" on MyCoke.com.

With more than 7 million registered pairs of ears and eyes, Coca-Cola's interactive, music-focused Web site could offer Young the kind of exposure he has craved since he sang Oh, It Is Jesus, solo, at a Baptist convention when he was 5.

His debut recording They Call Me AY has been available for free downloads since Nov. 15. The 14 tracks will be up another nine days, until Dec. 15.

"Being on mycoke.com gives us the leverage to show that the music has been accepted," says Young, 30, talking by phone from San Francisco's Bay Area.

"It's such a task to get attention.

"But if Coke can submit my face and name on their Web site without ruining their own name, I think radio stations ought to be able to do the same."

At least one Jackson station is doing something: "The young brother's got talent," says Charles "Ragman" Johnson, a disc jockey for WMPR-90.1 FM.

"He knows how to take direction, and he can sing. He can go a long way in the music industry.

"Listeners want to know who AY is," says Johnson, who has put on his playlist Money or Fame - Young's tribute to Mississippi.

Here, in his home state, Young was weaned on "hustle."

"We had a pecan orchard on our land," says Young, who was brought up in Bolton by his mother Stella Harvey, his grandparents and aunts and uncles.

"We sold pecans when I was growing up. I gathered every pecan I could find and sold them to every kid I could find in Clinton who would buy them. That was our Christmas money.

"So it's the fight, the hustle of wanting it."

What he wanted most of all was to sing. He started his solo career in Mt. Olive Baptist Church in Bolton.

If the church taught him how to sing, his grandfather taught him to live, he says.

"Walter Harvey Sr. He passed this year. He taught me that there's nothing but good fruit on the end of the tree. But, he told me, people are too afraid to reach out; they're afraid they're going to fall. But that's the risk you got to take.

"I want my fruit fresh; I want to pick it. I don't want to find mine on the ground."

It was at Clinton High School that Young began reaching in earnest.

He joined the school's nationally competitive Attache Show Choir and became one of its lead singers and dancers.

"The thing that set him apart, in my mind, was his determination," says Steven Nixon, now a Clinton attorney who, along with Young, performed with Attache in the mid-'90s.

"There are lots of talented performers out there. The difference is that success comes to those who don't give up. Who work in spite of setbacks.

"That's what Aaron has done."

At first, it seemed that Young had nothing but luck. After high school, he helped concoct Mixtur, a singing group that performed around Jackson.

When one of the members happened to be visiting his folks in San Francisco, he also happened to run into a record producer. He also happened to have a demo tape with him.

"We got a record deal," Young says. "Then we made some noise, paid our dues. We even opened for Brian McKnight.

"Then we lost our contract. The record label folded. The limo rides and VIP passes had been great. But when that left, all the people around us left, too.

"We had been staying at the apartment of a record company guy. I could have gone back home to Mississippi. But I decided to stay. By staying, it made me a homeless guy."

He slept on the streets, he says, and wrote a lot of songs.

He now has at least 300 - 10 for every year of his life.

They include Dreams and another autobiographical work Waiting So Long: "That song is the truth," he says. "I've been chewed up, spit out, locked out and locked up. It talks about the real situation. About AY."

The songs are on Young's new album They Call Me AY - a creation made possible when someone came across him on the streets he had been wandering for three months.

"He was one of the investors in the defunct record company," Young says. "He said, 'Man what is up with you?'

"I said, "I'm just trying to hang on.' Then he took me to his house. I stayed there two months. The next thing I know he got me a record deal."

His deal now is with Apos Entertainment. The music, for now, is available only online.

"Oh, man, our family plays it 24/7," says Linda Harvey of Bolton, one of Young's aunts.

"One of my favorite songs is Waiting So Long. About how long he had to wait out there for his check. For his dream. A lot of people would have given up."

Young and his occasional backup quartet, including former Ohio Players keyboardist Billy Beck, have club dates in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas. Young has helped produce music for gospel, rap and R&B groups. He produced the music for a local hit play Glass Slipper Blues.

"The last few years it's been really good, having a record label that believes in my dream of reaching everybody that music can possibly reach," he says.

He wants to reach even more one day with his idea for a summer music camp near Bolton.

"It would give kids who have the desire the kind of structure Attache gave me," he says. "How to put on a show, how to go on the road."

As it is, Young is on the road back to Bolton as often as possible, he says. "When I think about home, I think about warmth.

"It's that feeling of having eaten a nice, big Sunday dinner, and right after you're done you feel like you have to get down on the couch in front of the TV and see who's winning the game."

And maybe crack open a pecan or two, for old time's sake.


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To comment on this story, call Gary Pettus at (601) 961-7037.
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