Jesse Colin Young, whose sincere tenor vocals for the Youngbloods graced one of the most loving anthems of the hippie era, “Get Together,” a Top Five hit in 1969, before he went on to pursue a solo career that lasted more than five decades, died on Sunday at his home in Aiken, S.C. He was 83.
His death was announced by his publicist, Michael Jensen, who did not specify a cause.
Mr. Young didn’t write “Get Together.” It was composed by the folk singer Dino Valenti, later a member of the band Quicksilver Messenger Service, under the pseudonym Chet Powers. But Mr. Young’s voice idealized it, and the chorus he sang — “Come on people now/Smile on your brother/Everybody get together/Try to love one another right now” — became one of the best-known refrains of the 1960s.
“The lyrics are just to die for,” Mr. Young told the website The Arts Fuse in 2018. “To this day, it gives me a thrill to play it.”
He composed many other key pieces of the Youngbloods’ repertoire during their prime in the late 1960s, including the brooding “Darkness, Darkness,” which reflected the terror he imagined American soldiers were experiencing during the Vietnam War; “Sunlight,” a ravishing ode to passionate love; and “Ride the Wind,” a jazzy paean to freedom.
The lyrics to many of Mr. Young’s songs celebrated the gifts nature gives, from the dreamy play of sunlight on skin to the unfettered sweep of wind in the hair.
“Love of the natural world is as much a theme in my music as romantic love,” he told the website Music Aficionado in 2016. “I get more out of walking over the ridgetop in Marin and looking out at the national seashore than any drugs I ever did” — a reference to the Northern California county where he lived for much of his career.
Mr. Young’s voice was as sensuous as his words. Blessed with a boyishly high pitch, and with the ability to bend a lyric with the ease that a great dancer uses to navigate a delicate move, he balanced his innocent character with a sophisticated musicality. His phrasing, like his composing, drew from a wealth of genres, including folk, jug band music, psychedelia, R&B and jazz, both traditional and modern. The same sources informed his solo work, notably a string of successful albums he released in the mid-1970s, including “Light Shine” and “Songbird,” each of which broke Billboard’s Top 40.
Though the Youngbloods’ albums never enjoyed as much chart success, their songs proved popular on FM stations of the era and inspired covers by several major artists, including Robert Plant, whose take on “Darkness, Darkness” earned a Grammy nomination for best male rock performance in 2002. It has also been interpreted by more than a dozen others, including Mott the Hoople, Richie Havens and Eric Burdon.
While the legacy of “Get Together” highlighted the careers of both Mr. Young and the Youngbloods, they weren’t the first act to record it. Mr. Valenti cut his own version in 1963, although it wasn’t issued until three years later, by which time renditions had appeared by the Folkswingers (as an instrumental), the Kingston Trio and Jefferson Airplane, who featured it on their debut album. After the Youngbloods’ hit, the song was rendered by many other artists, including Joni Mitchell and Nancy Wilson of Heart. Nirvana sarcastically included some of its words in the 1991 song “Territorial Pissings.”
The Youngbloods’ version later appeared on the “Forrest Gump” soundtrack and was even covered by Lisa Simpson in an episode of “The Simpsons.”
Oddly, the song didn’t become a hit the first time the Youngbloods released it on their debut album in 1967. Only after it was featured in a major public service announcement by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and pushed by an ambitious A&R person at RCA Victor, the band’s record company, did it reach the charts in 1969.
Jesse Colin Young was born Perry Miller on Nov. 22, 1941, in Queens to Fredrick Miller, an accountant, and Doryce (Vansciver) Miller, a violinist and singer. He chose his Western-sounding stage name in the early 1960s by melding the monikers of the outlaws Jesse James and Cole Younger, as well as the Formula One designer and engineer Colin Chapman.
Encouraged by his parents, he studied piano as a child and as a teenager won a scholarship to attend Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. He studied classical guitar there, though he preferred playing Everly Brothers songs.
He later enrolled in Ohio State University, where he lived behind a record store, which exposed him to the music of blues artists like T-Bone Walker and B.B. King. After transferring to New York University, he became entranced by the thriving Greenwich Village folk scene and quit school to play music full time.
Soon after that, he met the jazz pianist and songwriter Bobby Scott. Mr. Scott connected him to Capitol Records, which released Mr. Young’s first album in 1964: “The Soul of a City Boy,” a raw acoustic collection of folk and blues songs. His follow-up, “Young Blood,” had a similar sound.
While playing in Cambridge, Mass., he met the guitarist Jerry Corbitt, and the two formed the Youngbloods, rounded out by the pianist and guitarist Lowell Levinger, known as Banana, and the drummer Joe Bauer. Because there were two other guitarists in the band, Mr. Young had switched to bass by the time the Youngbloods became the house band at the Café Au Go Go in the Village.
That exposure helped earn them a contract with RCA, which released their debut album. The contract allowed them to choose their own producer, and they chose Felix Pappalardi, who was well known in folk circles but who would soon become better known for producing albums by Cream and for being a member of the hard-rock band Mountain.
On the Youngbloods’ albums, Mr. Young dominated the lead vocals, though some were handled by Mr. Corbitt or Mr. Levinger, both of whom also wrote some of the group’s songs. Mr. Young discovered “Get Together” after hearing Buzzy Linhart play it at a club in the Village. “The heavens opened and my life changed,” he told Goldmine magazine in 2021. “I knew that song was my path forward.”
By the group’s third album, Mr. Corbitt has developed a fear of flying and left. (He died in 2014.) By that time the group had relocated to California, inspired by the temperate weather and generous West Coast radio play that made them more popular there than they had been in New York. Their 1969 album, “Elephant Mountain,” produced by the country-rocker Charlie Daniels, focused more squarely on Mr. Young’s talents and is widely regarded as the group’s finest work.
A live album released in 1971, “Ride the Wind,” captured the band at its instrumental peak. But the next two studio albums watered down the band’s sound, leading Mr. Young to break it up and revive his solo career with the album “Together” in 1972.
By then he was living in Marin County, whose rolling landscape and broad vistas found reflection not only in his lyrics but also in his breezy, increasingly jazz-oriented music. By the 1990s, Mr. Young’s albums were no longer selling well, but he continued to release them independently at a steady clip. He quit performing in 2012 while battling chronic Lyme disease, but he returned to form four years later. His final album, “Dreamers,” appeared in 2019.
Mr. Young is survived by his wife and manager, Connie Darden-Young; their son, Tristan Young, and daughter, Jazzie Young; and two children from his first marriage, Juli and Cheyenne Young.
Throughout his life, Mr. Young treasured the hopeful message of “Get Together” and felt that it finally needed to be fulfilled. “It’s like the finishing of a circle,” he told the Maryland publication The Beacon in 2018. “It’s time to not just try to love one another, because we know the difference between trying and doing. It’s time to do.”
