Jesse Colin Young, who sang one of the signature songs of the 1960s counterculture, the Youngbloods “Get Together,” before moving into a solo career in the ’70s, has died at age 83.

His wife and manager, Connie Young, announced that her husband had died at home in Aiken, South Carolina on Sunday afternoon. No cause of death was given.

Young was a founding member of the Youngbloods, whose “Get Together” reached No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1969, when it was re-released two years after it appeared on the band’s self-titled debut album. None of the group’s other songs made a significant chart impact, and after releasing five albums between 1967-72, they broke up. He recorded seven albums over the subsequent decade — five for Warner Bros. Records, two for Elektra — before moving on to independent labels.

Young did not write “Get Together,” but he had a hand in penning much of the Youngbloods’ other catalog songs, like “Darkness Darkness” (which was covered by Robert Plant, decades later, on his 2016 “Dreamland” album), “Sugar Babe” and “Quicksand.”

He revisited some of those early songs when he recorded his final album, 2021’s “Highway Troubadour,” which also included ““Tripping on My Roots,” a theme song for his podcast.

Young said he was diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease in 2009, for the better part of 20 years, after he’d “probably had it for 20 years before that. I had to take some time off and get better and it was a slow process.” The condition impacted his life and career until the mid-2010s, when he found a treatment that allowed him to become symptom-free.

The singer-songwriter toured actively, including an opening spot on the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young reunion tour in stadiums in 1974. He continued to do dates through October 2023, when he made an appearance at L.A.’s Grammy Museum.

Jesse Colin Young attends Reel To Reel: Jesse Colin Young at GRAMMY Museum L.A. Live on October 18, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Timothy Norris/Getty Images for The Recording Academy) Getty Images for The Recording A

Prior to the Youngbloods’ version, “Get Together” had been recorded by the Kingston Trio and Jefferson Airplane, but Young remembered the serendipitous moment when it first came onto his radar, being sung by Buzzy Linhart at the Cafe Au Go Go in New York. “I went down the second flight of stairs and there was Buzzy Linhart and he was singing ‘Get Together,’ and just like in those movies about the Bible, the heavens opened and my life changed,” he said in a 2021 interview with Goldmine. “I knew that song was my path forward, not only as a musician, but as a human being. So I rushed backstage and got the lyrics from Buzzy after introducing myself, and he was glad to give them to me. I took them into rehearsal the next day with the Youngbloods and my manager said, ‘What are you doing singing a song like that? You have this angry young man thing going on.’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. This is it! This was the future.’”

“There was no pressure to make a hit out of that,” he additionally told Songwriting magazine. “Nobody had any idea that that would be so big. They left us alone to make a piece of audio art and we got lucky. It never would have become a hit if the country hadn’t have been going through what it went through — it was the right time and the right song.”

Although it took more than two years after it first came out for “Get Together” to become a top 10 hit, Young recalled the impact of hearing it played as an album track on the radio the summer after it came out, in 1967. “We were living in New York, and that’s where we got our record deal, but we had no idea what was happening on the west coast,” he told Acoustic Storm in a 2017 interview. “We flew in and checked in to this cheap motel. I’ll never forget it. I turned on this little funny-looking radio that was built into the formica between two beds, and there was ‘Get Together’ on the radio. Later that night, we walked into the Avalon Ballroom, and instead of 40 people, there were probably 400 there, with psychedelic lights I had never seen. The people were so into the music and the love coming off the crowd was just blowing us away. We thought, we found a home for our music and our families, and this is it.” After finishing their next album in New York, the band packed up and moved to the Point Reyes-Inverness area north of San Francisco. “We just decided we wanted to live in the country, and we fell in love with the countryside in Marin. It was an amazing, life-changing move.”

Young’s solo career started in earnest when the Youngbloods broke up in 1972 (although he had recorded under his own name briefly in the early ’60s). In an interview with Jeff Tamarkin for Best Classic Bands, he said that “Song for Juli” was his most popular solo album. He had been listening to jazz more, at the time, and the songs on the album were mostly “about living in the country and having young children.”

In 1995 his house in Marin County burned down, causing him to move his family out of California for the first time since the late ’60s and resettle in Hawaii, where he became a coffee farmer. Later, he and his wife moved to South Carolina.

In 2010, Young stopped touring and considered his career over, but had a turnaround in 2016 that made him take up music again.

“I really had no intention of going back; I was just burned out on it and I thought well, 50 years is probably enough,” he said. “Then in the spring of 2016, my son Tristan was graduating from Berklee College of Music, and I went to hear his senior recital. These young people he had assembled in a band, they just blew me away with their energy and their talent. In a moment, I went from being done with that to thinking, ‘Wow, I want to play music with young people like this. I want them to play my music and I want to be in the middle of it.’ … It’s some exposure (for the younger band members) playing with me, and it’s wonderful for me because it lifts me up in an incredible way, that I’ve never experienced before.”

Speaking about “Get Together” in 2019, Young said, “The power of that song has never diminished. Sometimes I think it’s why I came out of my quasi-retirement. I didn’t know whether I was physically ready for this or not, but I felt like I had to do it. I wanted to play with these young people, and then I realized I wanted to record with them and sing ‘Get Together’ again, along with all this great new material.”