The 1970s File Feature
Teach Your Children
The Making of "Teach Your Children" by Crosby, Stills, Nash Young "Teach Your Children" was written by Graham Nash and recorded for the second Crosby, Stills…
01 The Story
The Making of "Teach Your Children" by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
"Teach Your Children" was written by Graham Nash and recorded for the second Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young studio album Deja Vu, released on Atlantic Records in March 1970. Nash had actually written the song before CSNY formed, intending it originally for The Hollies. When that band rejected the composition, Nash held onto it and eventually brought it to the new supergroup that he had formed with David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Neil Young after the commercial and artistic success of the 1969 debut album Crosby, Stills and Nash.
The recording of Deja Vu was famously contentious. The four musicians had strong and often conflicting musical personalities, and their collaborative process was complicated by interpersonal tensions and the logistical challenges of coordinating four significant solo careers simultaneously. Despite these difficulties, the sessions at Wally Heider's studio in San Francisco produced one of the defining albums of the early 1970s. Dallas Taylor played drums on most of the album's tracks, and the steel guitar on "Teach Your Children" was played by Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, who was a friend of the group and whose presence in the studio added a distinctive country-inflected texture to the recording.
Garcia's pedal steel contribution to "Teach Your Children" is one of the most noted cameo performances in the album's production history. His playing brought a warm, country-influenced dimension to the track that differentiated it from the more rock-oriented material elsewhere on Deja Vu and positioned the song within the country rock tradition that was developing in California at the same time. The Byrds had been central to this development, and Garcia's presence on the track connected it, however tangentially, to that broader musical evolution.
The single was released in May 1970, debuting on the Billboard Hot 100 on June 6, 1970, at number 85. It climbed steadily through the summer, reaching its peak of number 16 during the week of July 25, 1970, and spending 11 weeks on the chart in total. The single performed consistently with CSNY's commercial status at the time: the band was enormously popular, and Deja Vu was one of the best-selling albums of 1970, but individual singles from the album did not necessarily reach the very top of the Hot 100.
"Ohio," released as a single in 1970 after the Kent State shootings, and "Our House" (which reached number 30) were the other singles drawn from the CSNY catalog in this period. "Teach Your Children" occupied a different emotional register from "Ohio," which was an explicit political protest, and its gentler, more reflective tone found a different kind of audience response. Radio play for the track was substantial throughout the summer of 1970, and the record's relatively modest peak position understates its saturation on AM radio during that period.
Deja Vu itself reached number 1 on the Billboard 200, remaining at the top position for one week and spending many months on the chart. The album's commercial success was matched by its cultural impact: it was one of the most discussed albums of 1970, and its mixture of country influences, extended vocal harmonies, and politically engaged lyrics defined a certain strain of the California rock sound of the period. The CSNY combination of talented individual singer-songwriters with collectively arranged vocal harmonies proved enormously influential on the subsequent development of American rock.
The song has remained one of the most performed tracks in Graham Nash's solo concerts, and it has been used in numerous films, television programs, and educational contexts since its original release. Its cultural longevity reflects the broad resonance of its intergenerational theme, which has proved relevant to successive generations of parents and children regardless of the specific historical moment of reception.
02 Song Meaning
The Meaning and Philosophy of "Teach Your Children"
"Teach Your Children" engages with one of the most enduring themes in human culture: the transmission of values, wisdom, and ways of understanding the world from one generation to the next. Graham Nash's lyric approaches this theme with structural balance, alternating between the perspective of parents addressing their children and the perspective of children addressing their parents, acknowledging that the relationship of teaching and learning runs in both directions across generations.
The lyric's central philosophical position is that the psychological wounds and limitations of one generation need not be inherited by the next, but that this outcome requires conscious effort and awareness. Nash wrote the song in the late 1960s, a period of acute intergenerational conflict in Western societies, when the question of what older generations had created and what younger generations were inheriting was a dominant social preoccupation. The song does not place blame for this conflict on either side but instead proposes a model of mutual respect and honest communication as the path forward.
The phrase "feed them on your dreams" is among the most frequently cited lines in the lyric, and it captures a particular dimension of Nash's message. He is not advocating for parents to transmit their ideological positions or their practical knowledge alone, but specifically their aspirational inner life, their most generous and expansive hopes for human possibility. This is an unusual thing to suggest as the primary content of intergenerational transmission, and it reflects the idealism of the late-1960s counterculture in which the song was incubated.
The musical setting, with Jerry Garcia's pedal steel guitar, reinforces the song's gentle, non-confrontational emotional register. The country-influenced sound carries associations with tradition, home, and continuity that support the lyric's affirmative, forward-looking stance. Unlike the more explicitly political CSNY material from the same period, "Teach Your Children" is not a song of protest but of hope, and the musical texture reflects this distinction clearly.
The song's structural choice to include both the parental and the filial perspective in the same composition is itself meaningful. Most popular songs of any era adopt a single consistent perspective, and Nash's decision to include both creates a dialogue within the song that enacts its own argument. The song models the mutual respect and listening it advocates; by giving voice to both perspectives, it demonstrates that intergenerational understanding requires holding multiple points of view simultaneously.
Within the context of CSNY's catalog and the broader California rock tradition, "Teach Your Children" represents the optimistic strand of the early-1970s sensibility: the belief that culture could be deliberately shaped toward more humane outcomes through the choices individuals made in their most intimate relationships, beginning with the family. This stands in productive tension with the political urgency of other CSNY recordings from the same period, particularly "Ohio," which addressed the failure of the social order in terms of violence and state power rather than domestic transmission of values.
The song reached number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of 1970 and has retained its cultural presence for more than five decades, precisely because the question it addresses is perennial. Every generation of parents faces the challenge Nash describes, and every generation of children faces the complementary challenge of determining what they wish to inherit and what they will consciously reject. The song's durability is evidence that it articulated this challenge in terms that remain recognizable regardless of when the listener encounters it.
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