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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.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Woodstock

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Woodstock Youtube Music Videos and Lyrics

Album: Déjà Vu
Released: 1970

Woodstock Lyrics

Well, I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, Tell me, where are you going
This he told me

Said, I'm going down to Yasgur's Farm
Gonna join in a rock and roll band
Got to get back to the land and set my soul free

We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

Well, then can I roam beside you?
I have come to lose the smog,
And I feel myself a cog in somethin' turning
And maybe it's the time of year
Yes and maybe it's the time of man
And I don't know who I am
But life is for learning

We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere was a song and a celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bomber death planes
Riding shotgun in the sky,
Turning into butterflies
Above our nation

We are stardust, we are golden
We are caught in the devils bargain
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

Writer/s: MITCHELL, JONI
Publisher: Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Crazy Crow Music / Siquomb Music Publishing
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Woodstock Song Chart

This song is about the famous music festival in 1969. Mitchell was scheduled to perform at the festival, but backed out on the advice of her manager David Geffen, who was concerned that she would miss a scheduled appearance on The Dick Cavett Show. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young did appear, playing an acoustic set followed by an electric set. They took the stage around 3 a.m. Monday morning - the festival was scheduled to end at midnight, but it ran long, culminating with a legendary Jimi Hendrix set that most people didn't stay to see.

That Tuesday, Mitchell, David Crosby and Stephen Stills all appeared on The Dick Cavett Show. Crosby has said that he and Stills were talking about the festival, and Mitchell wrote the song based on their experience there. Mitchell, however, claimed that she wrote the song before the band returned.

Joni Mitchell's no-show at Woodstock was sometimes reported as being caused by "transportation problems." A persistent rumor was that James Taylor was supposed to give her a lift up the New York Thruway from her hotel in New York City, but Taylor was in a bad motorcycle accident on Martha's Vineyard, breaking both arms and keeping him out from behind the wheel and away from the guitar for months. That was it for Joni's trip to Woodstock. (thanks, Joel - Toms River, NJ)

Joni Mitchell released this the same year on Ladies of the Canyon. It was also the B-side to her song "Big Yellow Taxi." Her version is much more basic than the CSN&Y release.

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's performance at Woodstock was only their second show together. Before forming the band, Crosby had been a member of The Byrds, Nash was with The Hollies, Stills and Young were members of Buffalo Springfield. Neil Young played with the group for only part of the set.

Without Neil Young, Crosby, Stills & Nash returned to play Woodstock '94. Other acts that played both festivals include Joe Cocker, The Band, and Santana.

Neil Young is not seen in the Woodstock movie even though he was there for part of the set. He strongly disagreed with the idea of the movie, so he declined to appear in it. If he were to play any songs in the movie, he'd have to be cropped out of frame. (thanks, Jeff - Kendall Park, NJ)

The opening lyrics are a reference to the book of Matthew in which it says, "Blessed are those who try to make peace for they will be called children of God." (thanks, Mike - New London, NH)

In the UK the best known version is the more country-rock flavored recording by Matthews' Southern Comfort, which topped the British singles and peaked at #23 in the US. Ian Matthews had been the lead singer with Fairport Convention, leaving in 1969 to form Matthews' Southern Comfort. He recalled in 1000 UK #1 Hits by Jon Kutner & Spencer Leigh: "I had bought Joni Mitchell's album and we had to do four songs on a BBC lunchtime show. We worked up an arrangement for 'Woodstock' and the response was so good that we put it out as a single. Crosby, Stills & Nash's record had just come out and so we waited to see what happened to that first." In 1978 Matthews had a #13 hit in the US as a solo artist with "Shake It."

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Ohio

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Ohio Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Four Way Street
Released: 1970

Ohio Lyrics

Ohio Song Chart

This song is about the events of May 4, 1970, when the US National Guard shot four unarmed students at Kent State University in Ohio. Neil Young wrote it shortly after seeing a news report on the tragedy. It was released 10 days after the shootings.

The Kent State shootings had a profound effect on some of the students who later became prominent musicians. Chrissie Hynde was a student at the time, and eventually formed The Pretenders. Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale were also on campus, and after the shootings, they developed the band Devo based on the concept of "De-Evolution," meaning the human race was regressing. Said Casale, "It refocused me entirely. I don't think I would have done Devo without it. It was the deciding factor that made me live and breathe this idea and make it happen. In Chrissie Hynde's case, I'm sure it was a very powerful single event that was traumatic enough to form her sensibility and account for a lot of her anger." Mothersbaugh added, "It was the first time I'd heard a song about something I'd been a participant in. It effected us. It was part of our life." (thanks to Jerry and Mark for their help with this)

Jerry Casale gave us this account of the shootings:
"I was a student, I was a member of SDS - an antiwar group called Students for a Democratic Society, trying to restore Democracy at a time when LBJ and Nixon were running roughshod over it. There were several antiwar groups. That protest that day where everybody got shot was a protest against the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. It was a secret expansion, Nixon had done it the night before and we found out about it the next day - the whole nation did. They did it without an act of congress, without passing any new law or having any meetings. It was completely unconstitutional, so we're out there at noon, about 3,500 students at Kent State were out there. The governor, who certainly was a pro-war kind of guy, Governor Rhodes, he had placed the National Guard inside the heating plant of the school the night before anticipating what would happen when the students found out about Cambodia. Not only did he do that, but he waited until about 9 am on May 4th to declare Martial Law, which suspends all first amendment rights of The Constitution, meaning that any assembly is automatically illegal, you're automatically committing a crime. These National Guardsmen poured out of the heating plant, surrounded the protesters, and with a bullhorn announced that Martial Law had been declared and that we were all going to jail. Everybody starts chanting and screaming and they start shooting tear gas and some of the more ballsy protesters, while they're coughing and choking and puking are trying to throw it back, but most of the kids were anywhere from 50 to 100 yards away from these lines of National Guardsmen with guns. Nobody believed that the guns were actually loaded with live ammo. They just suddenly formed a row. The first one knelt and the second one stood, and they just shot right into the crowd, shot at all of us, down the hill at all of us. The worst thing about it is that 2 of the 4 students killed weren't part of the demonstration, weren't part of an antiwar group. They'd just come out of class from the journalism building at that time and come out on their way to their next class and were looking at the protest, just seeing what the hell's going on, and they got killed. The bullets just went everywhere, it was like a scatter-gun approach, like shooting geese. A lot of the bullets went over the heads of the protesters and kept going straight down the hill. One of the kids that's paralyzed for life was getting into his car to leave campus after his class, and they shot him in the back. He was at least 200 yards away and wanted nothing to do with what was going on. It was shocking. It pretty much knocked any hippie that I had left in me right out of me that day.
I had been a member of the honors college and the only way I went to school was with a scholarship. My family was poor and I got a scholarship to go to school. What I had to do every year to earn my scholarship was work 3 months in the summer for the university admitting new students to the honors college, the incoming freshman, and helping them arrange their curriculum, taking them through the registration process. The summer before May 4th, I had befriended Jeffery Miller and Allison Krause, 2 honor students, and they turn out to be 2 of the 4 killed on May 4th. So I'd known both of them 9 months before this happened, and so when I realized that this girl on her stomach with a huge exit wound in her back with blood running down the sidewalk was Allison, I nearly passed out. I sat down on the grass and kind of swooned around and lied down. I was in shock, I couldn't move.
The government and the press tried to lie about what happened as well as they could. The fact that anybody knows what happened is amazing because they did such a good job of muddying it up and lying, it was amazing. The final chapter there was that the parents of the students who were shot and killed banded together and went on a class action suit against Governor Rhodes and the state of Ohio and the National Guard, and summarily lost across the board. These kids that were shot were 18 and 19 years old. 2 of them were 18 and 2 of them were 19. They lost because by law, no one was allowed to be having a protest once Martial Law was declared, and they threw it out of the court system. I don't think anyone wants to know the truth. It ruins the myth of freedom in America to find out how easily it can be gone." (check out our Devo interview)

Young considers this the best song he wrote with CSN&Y. He included this on his 1977 Greatest Hits album Decade.

This became a protest anthem as Americans became fed up with the war in Vietnam. Providing a firsthand account of the shootings and the effect of this song, Alan Canfora told us: "On May 4, 1970, I was waving a black protest flag as a symbol of my anger and despair 10 days after I attended the funeral of my 19 year old friend killed in Vietnam. I was about 250 feet away from the kneeling, aiming guardsmen from Troop G - the death squad - minutes before they marched away up a hillside. They fired 67 shots from the hilltop during 13 seconds of deadly gunfire, mostly from powerful M1 rifles. I was shot through my right wrist. I survived because I jumped behind the only tree in the direct line of gunfire. About a week later, I was riding in the Ohio countryside with other Kent State massacre survivors when WMMS radio played the song 'Ohio' for the first time. We were deeply moved and inspired by that great anti-war anthem."

This was released as a single, but the song did not appear on an album until Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young included it on their live album Four Way Street a year later.

Young is Canadian. He was a vocal critic of American foreign policy throughout the Vietnam War and became a voice of dissent during the George W. Bush administration, when songs like "Let's Impeach The President" spoke out against the president and his war in Iraq.

Devo recorded this for the 2002 album When Pigs Fly, Songs You Never Thought You'd Hear. The album was a collection of unlikely covers by various artists. Cevin Soling, who put the album together, met Mark Mothersbaugh's girlfriend at a film festival, who told Mark about the project and got Devo involved. Says Soling:
"I knew about the history, I was nervous about them thinking I was being exploitative of their tie to the tragedy. So I really tried to do that gingerly. That took a little while to get off the ground. They did "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini," which I guess they had started working on at one point. And I guess it was just sort of difficult getting everyone together and recording. But then they called me back and they said they listened to it and they didn't think it was good. So at some point in time, they finally all got motivated and got together. I guess Mark was very nervous about putting out something that might not up to Devo quality, and I think he's finally let the seer of his legacy kind of loom over doing new stuff." (Check out our interview with Cevin Soling.)