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Jesse Colin Young, whose sincere tenor vocals for the Youngbloods graced one of the most loving anthems of the hippie era, \u201cGet Together,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
His death was announced by his publicist, Michael Jensen, who did not specify a cause.<\/p>\n
Mr. Young didn\u2019t write \u201cGet Together.\u201d<\/a> 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\u2019s voice idealized it, and the chorus he sang \u2014 \u201cCome on people now\/Smile on your brother\/Everybody get together\/Try to love one another right now\u201d \u2014 became one of the best-known refrains of the 1960s.<\/p>\n \u201cThe lyrics are just to die for,\u201d Mr. Young told the website The Arts Fuse in 2018. \u201cTo this day, it gives me a thrill to play it.\u201d<\/p>\n He composed many other key pieces of the Youngbloods\u2019 repertoire during their prime in the late 1960s, including the brooding \u201cDarkness, Darkness,\u201d<\/a> which reflected the terror he imagined American soldiers were experiencing during the Vietnam War; \u201cSunlight,\u201d<\/a> a ravishing ode to passionate love; and \u201cRide the Wind,\u201d<\/a> a jazzy paean to freedom.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The lyrics to many of Mr. Young\u2019s songs celebrated the gifts nature gives, from the dreamy play of sunlight on skin to the unfettered sweep of wind in the hair.<\/p>\n \u201cLove of the natural world is as much a theme in my music as romantic love,\u201d he told the website Music Aficionado in 2016. \u201cI get more out of walking over the ridgetop in Marin and looking out at the national seashore than any drugs I ever did\u201d \u2014 a reference to the Northern California county where he lived for much of his career.<\/p>\n Mr. Young\u2019s 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 \u201cLight Shine\u201d and \u201cSongbird,\u201d each of which broke Billboard\u2019s Top 40.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Though the Youngbloods\u2019 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 \u201cDarkness, Darkness\u201d<\/a> 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<\/a> and Eric Burdon.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n While the legacy of \u201cGet Together\u201d highlighted the careers of both Mr. Young and the Youngbloods, they weren\u2019t the first act to record it. Mr. Valenti cut his own version in 1963, although it wasn\u2019t 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\u2019 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 \u201cTerritorial Pissings.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n The Youngbloods\u2019 version later appeared on the \u201cForrest Gump\u201d soundtrack and was even covered by Lisa Simpson in an episode of \u201cThe Simpsons.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Oddly, the song didn\u2019t 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\u2019s record company, did it reach the charts in 1969.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n 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.<\/p>\n Soon after that, he met the jazz pianist and songwriter Bobby Scott. Mr. Scott connected him to Capitol Records, which released Mr. Young\u2019s first album in 1964: \u201cThe Soul of a City Boy,\u201d a raw acoustic collection of folk and blues songs. His follow-up, \u201cYoung Blood,\u201d had a similar sound.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n 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 Caf\u00e9 Au Go Go in the Village.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n On the Youngbloods\u2019 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\u2019s songs. Mr. Young discovered \u201cGet Together\u201d after hearing Buzzy Linhart<\/a> play it at a club in the Village. \u201cThe heavens opened and my life changed,\u201d he told Goldmine magazine in 2021. \u201cI knew that song was my path forward.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n By the group’s third album, Mr. Corbitt has developed a fear of flying and left. (He died in 2014.)<\/a> 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, \u201cElephant Mountain,\u201d produced by the country-rocker Charlie Daniels<\/a>, focused more squarely on Mr. Young\u2019s talents and is widely regarded as the group\u2019s finest work.<\/p>\n A live album released in 1971, \u201cRide the Wind,\u201d captured the band at its instrumental peak. But the next two studio albums watered down the band\u2019s sound, leading Mr. Young to break it up and revive his solo career with the album \u201cTogether\u201d in 1972.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n 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\u2019s 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, \u201cDreamers,\u201d appeared in 2019.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Throughout his life, Mr. Young treasured the hopeful message of \u201cGet Together\u201d and felt that it finally needed to be fulfilled. \u201cIt\u2019s like the finishing of a circle,\u201d he told the Maryland publication The Beacon in 2018. \u201cIt\u2019s time to not just try <\/em>to love one another, because we know the difference between trying and doing. It\u2019s time to do.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n