In Memoriam: Jesse Colin Young (November 22, 1941 – March 16, 2025)

In these dark and fractious days, the voice of Jesse Colin Young rings clearly, encouraging unity, peace, justice, and love: “You know the world is dark with fear/People scared to let you near/They need you to shine on/Shine on all day.” Young’s shimmering tenor on “Light Shine” illuminates a path for us, claims the power of joy and courage, and urges us to let our lights shine “all night and day.”

Jesse Colin Young, who died on March 16, 2025, was a kind, generous, and gracious man who experienced his own personal darkness—contracting Lyme disease in 2009, losing his California home to a fire, struggling with songwriting for several years—but he always returned to the lights at the center of his life—his family and his music.

During the pandemic, he and his wife Connie produced a video series called “One Song at a Time,” and in each of the videos he performed his older and some of his newer songs, telling the stories behind them. In one of my last conversations with him, in 2019, he talked about the need to speak out for love, and he was conscious of his own calling to supply that voice in his songs. “I feel like my country needs me to speak up. Every voice that speaks for love should come out and speak,” he said in words that resonate loudly today.

After a hiatus of almost a decade, Young released a new album, Dreamers, in 2019, in part because he wanted the chance to play with his son, Tristan, in a band. In 2016, Jesse and Connie traveled to Boston for Tristan’s graduation from the Berklee College of Music, where they watched Tristan and his band perform their senior recital. Over the next two years, Young and Tristan and his band worked on the album that became Dreamers, and they traveled to a handful of cities where they played to packed houses. Young often opened the shows with an acoustic set of his songs such as “Light Shine,” and the second set would feature the entire band.

Young’s final album, Highway Troubadour (2020), grew out of his video series, and included newly recorded versions of his early songs like “Four in the Morning” and more recent songs such as “Cast a Stone.” “Each of the songs tell stories and contain messages from that part of my life. I ended up in tears as I was singing and playing some of them. They’re a slower than the originals, but that felt right to me. I feel things slower because I am older,” he laughed. Although the song for which Young may be the best known—his version of “Get Together” with the Youngbloods—didn’t make it onto the album, he promised that it would be on a future collection.

Jesse Colin Young started performing in Greenwich Village in 1961, releasing his first album, The Soul of a City Boy, in 1964. In the mid-Sixties, Young and Jerry Corbitt formed a duo and toured as the Youngbloods. Eventually, Lowell “Banana” Levinger and Joe Bauer joined the group, and they became the house band at the Café Au Go Go in the Village. The group’s 1967 eponymous album contained the song “Get Together,” which didn’t receive much attention at the time. Two years later, in 1969, when the Youngbloods’ version of “Get Together” appeared in a public service announcement for the National Council of Christians and Jews, the Youngbloods’ song took off and became the anthem of a generation advocating for love, peace, and justice. After the Youngbloods broke up in 1972, Young embarked on a solo career, releasing eighteen albums from the early 1970s through his most recent in 2020, including, among others, Song for Juli (1973), Light Shine (1974), Songbird (1975), and The Perfect Stranger (1982).

Jesse Colin Young continued to produce new music and support young musicians until a few weeks before his death. In the summer of 2024, Young and the label Future Youth Records launched The Perfect Stranger Songwriting Contest, a collaboration with Taylor Guitars and Sound & Vision Magazine. Open to 18- to 24-year-old songwriters, the contest, built around the reissue of Young’s album The Perfect Stranger, honored a song that “unites us and contributes to making the world a better place.” Singer-songwriter Syante’s song “A Little Sunshine” was selected, and Syante recorded the song alongside Young.

Jesse Colin Young’s warm vocals, his cascading fingerpicking, and his deep passion for making the world a better place by bringing people together will continue to fill our hearts and souls, shining a light for us to follow.

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Below are some of our Jesse Colin Young favorites.

“Light Shine”

“Songbird”

“Song for Juli”

“Four in the Morning”

“Get Together”

“Shape Shifters”