One might call Jesse Colin Young a survivor, if only for the fact that he helped helm the Youngbloods, one of the most enduring folk/rock bands of the ‘60s and ‘70s (“Get Together,” “Darkness Darkness, Sugar Babe” et. al.) and managed to put together a viable solo career in its wake. But then there was the tragedy of losing his California home to a house fire in 1995, forcing his family’s retreat to Hawaii shortly thereafter and their eventual relocation to Aiken South Carolina, his wife’s hometown, in 2006.
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“When we moved to South Carolina, the kids and I were convinced it was not a good move,” Young recalls with a laugh. “I remember the first time I went into the bank here in Aiken with my Hawaii drivers license, the teller said, ‘What the hell are you doing here!?’ It’s grown on me though. My wife Connie has friends here that she went to grade school with, and her mother and sisters are here. It’s also full of polo players and fox hunters.”
Still, the biggest hurdle Young would face in his life and career was his 20-year bout with lyme disease, a crippling malady that brought his recording career to a halt for approximately 15 years, beginning in 2006 all the way until he reemerged last year with Dreamers, an album recorded with his son Tristan’s classmates from the Berklee College of Music. “After watching my son’s recital, I decided that I wanted a band like that,” he recalls. “I had been off the road seven or eight years due to lyme disease and unable to travel. I had made some videos during that time, but the room I made them in was only about 20 minutes from my studio, so that was as far as I could go. I was being treated by a wonderful doctor named Richard Horowitz, and Connie was kind enough to help me put it together and so we hooked up with seven of those brilliant young musicians and singers. We played together for about a year and made the record in Nashville. So that’s when I started the full circle.”
The project not only brought him back to recording once again, but also to embark on a video series he and his wife dubbed “Trippin’ on My Roots.” That in turn, led to the release of his new album, Highway Troubadour, a collection of Young classics spanning his first pre-Youngbloods solo album through his time with the band and thereafter, all recorded acoustically and on his own with only his voice and guitar.
“We were having coffee one morning and Connie said, ‘My God, Blind Willie McTell is buried 40 miles from here, so let’s have breakfast and go see his grave.’” Young explains. “So that was the first episode of ‘Trippin’ on my Roots,’ our video podcast. It was a solo effort, and I played on camera by myself, and then we did more episodes, including one with Taj Mahal and one with Jonathan Edwards. We jammed a little bit, and it felt good playing that way again. I really enjoyed it.”
Unfortunately, Young’s planned return to live performance was forestalled by the pandemic, causing him to alter his plans in the interim. “We were all set to go to South By Southwest last March. So I spent six weeks winding up for that, practicing, putting together arrangements of all the songs, mostly for one guy with minimal accompaniment,” Young says. “So I was working my way back to a solo show. But right after the shutdown and the cancellation and the stay at home order came about, I said to Connie, ‘My God, what are we going to do?’ And Connie suggested that we do a video of ‘Sugar Babe’ and stick it on Facebook and cheer everybody up. So that’s what we did. We started shooting one video at a time, and it became kind of full-time job for us. I’d spend two or four hours rehearsing a single song, arranging them for solo guitar and vocals, trying to figure out if I had to play a solo in the solo, because I didn’t do any of that in the live shows since I had all these wonderful young people soloing all over the place. (chuckles) So we did maybe 25 or 30 songs like that over the next few months, from early March til the end of May. And we got a really good response, maybe even 60 or 70 thousand views.”
That, in turn, led to the idea of recording an album entirely on his own. He credits his manager David Spero with coming up with the idea. “David said, ‘Jesse, it sounds like you could do a solo album after all those performances of these songs,’” Young recalls. “Of course, I didn’t expect them to be perfect. I had just worked out the arrangements. It was not an easy thing. It was a hard thing, but it was like, okay, let’s cheer ourselves up. So I made it in a studio which is close to my home, because I thought that would be reasonably safe. I’d go out there three or four times a week for three or four hours a day. I guess I got around 21 tunes, and once we started to mix it, it sounded pretty good!”
Young describes the process as something akin to going back to the future. “When we listened to it, we thought ‘This is good, let’s put it out,’” he explains. “So we picked eleven songs and our label, BMG, was very enthusiastic about it. It’s a terrible time we’re in now, but I had this gift, and I was able to make a bigger gift out of it, which is a record which allowed me to go back to where I began and use some of the picking skills that I hadn’t used in 30 years. They started to come back to me. We rediscovered the fingerpicking and open tunings when we did the first podcast around Willie McTell. We walked backwards into that. We did it with a phone in the beginning, but we eventually decided we needed camera equipment. And then we wrote a theme song, which became ‘Trippin’ On My Roots,’ which is the first song on the album, in which I used an open tuning, and then those chops started to come back. It was like a ghost, but a good ghost. It all flowed.”
In many ways then, the process felt like a catharsis, one that allowed Young to not only return to his roots courtesy of his classic songs — “Darkness, Darkness,” “Euphoria,” “Four in the Morning,” and “Quicksand,” among them — but also reconnect with his emotions he had about making music in the first place.
“I now have this recording that’s a history of my life,” Young muses. “The first time I started recording them during those sessions, I broke down in tears. There was some big wave of emotion from that time of my life, whether it was ‘Four in the Morning’ which came from my Soul of a City Boy album, which was my very first album, or ‘Quicksand’ which came from the Youngbloods album Elephant Mountain. They are my history and a most emotional part of my history. It caught me by surprise. I hadn’t sung ‘Quicksand’ in twenty years. Emotion just got me.”
Young’s new video finds him performing another classic song from the Youngbloods era, a track called “Sugar Babe.” Young describes it as “kind of a country song, country blues, like a lot of Willie McTell stuff. There’s this farm near here on Beach Island where they finally buried James Brown. That’s where his home was. It’s a little farm right next to this old plantation, which is now a park. We just did it there, and for some reason I was thinking about Lightning Hopkins. I put on this suit jacket and this old hat I used to wear when I was still living in the Village. I took it to a motorcycle race once on a Sunday and because it was a Sunday, I wore a suit jacket. I don’t know what I was doing. But for me, Lightning Hopkins was a hero and he still is. I put on this outfit, and I’m just kind of playing the song on different places on this beautiful farm.”
The video relays the rural image Young was looking for and conveys those down home designs with his expert aplomb, enhancing the mellower moos the music calls for at the same time. Watch it here: https://youtu.be/eoZtdIKWsF8
“It’s something I’ve been doing for the last year and a half,” Young says of his foray into making videos. “It’s still all new to me. Connie sort of pushed me into it. She said, ‘Go ahead, try it. If it sucks, we won’t put it out.’ So I’ve enjoyed it, and I’m learning to enjoy it even more.”
(In addition, Young will be performing a livestream concert on Thursday, November 19 at 7pm ET with a re-broadcast of the same performance scheduled for Saturday, November 21 at 4pm ET. Tickets for each event are $15, and can be purchased at http://jessecolinyoung.nocapshows.com/.)
