Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young Songs - Teach Your Children Lyrics

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Teach Your Children

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Teach Your Children Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Déjà Vu
Released: 1970

Teach Your Children Lyrics

You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good-bye.
Teach Your Children well,
Their father's hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picks, the one you'll know by.
Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you will cry,
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you.

And you, of tender years,
Can't know the fears that your elders grew by,
And so please help them with your youth,
They seek the truth before they can die.

Teach your parents well,
Their children's hell will slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picks, the one you'll know by.

Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you will cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.

Writer/s: NASH, GRAHAM
Publisher: Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, SPIRIT MUSIC GROUP
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Teach Your Children

Graham Nash wrote this. The lyrics deal with the often difficult relationship he had with his father, who spent time in prison.

Jerry Garcia performs the pedal steel guitar part of this track. He had been playing steel guitar for only a short period of time. Garcia played on this album in exchange for harmony lessons for the Grateful Dead, who were at the time recording their acoustic albums Workingman's Dead and American Beauty. (thanks, Scott - Richmond, VA)

Graham Nash (from the liner notes of their 1991 boxed set): "The idea is that you write something so personal that every single person on the planet can relate to it. Once it's there on vinyl it unfolds, outwards, so that it applies to almost any situation. 'Teach' started out as a slightly funky English folk song but Stephen (Stills) put a country beat to it and turned it into a hit record."

Deja Vu was the first album the band recorded with Neil Young, but Young did not play on this.