The timeless term was coined by Stephen Stills when introducing the live acoustic sets by Crosby, Stills & Nash. It remains the most honest moniker of what they did best; steel and wood; flesh and bone – with an added aural slice of heaven on top. That’s really what the core, what the essence, of CSN was and always will be.
Perfect folk music with a liberal dose of magic within.
No other season spotlights the folk elements of Crosby, Stills & Nash more so than autumn. There’s always the cool shade of “Folk Fall” that permeates the best of their work. Folk played a crucial role in all three writer’s lives and careers, with David Crosby, a Santa Barbara, California native having made his way onto the Greenwich Village folk circuit before joining up with Les Baxter's Balladeers. A year later he co-founded The Byrds and broke new and important ground while helping bring the “folk rock” genre to the top of the pop charts.
Texas-born, Florida-raised (by way of Louisiana and Central America) multi-instrumentalist Stephen Stills made his folk bones in the early-1960's as a solo act in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. Starting at the legendary Gerde's Folk City, among other musical haunts, he soon threw his lot in with the nine-piece vocal group The Au Go Go Singers, which served as the house act at Bleeker Street's famed Cafe Au Go Go.
Graham Nash’s folk influences crossed the Atlantic direct from the Appalachian Mountains via his earliest influence, The Everly Brothers, and showed in the cutting-edge harmonies he and Hollies co-founder Allan Clarke developed for the group. While Stephen Stills and David Crosby, respectively, took divergent tacks incorporating heavy doses of blues and jazz into their songs, of the three, Graham Nash’s folk influences stayed closer to the surface than his partners’ works, remaining to this day a strong musical fingerprint.
The ultimate thread of the folk tradition found in CSN’s music can be traced by their effortless, signature three-part harmonies. David Crosby explained the original sense of brotherhood he shared with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash was evidenced by how they sang together: “There's a kinship there, and you can hear it in how we work with each other, what we do with our voices. It's sort of like aerobatic stunt flyers flying formation and doing stunts together — ‘kinda tricky stuff. It's just a bond, a natural bond.”
Stephen Stills reflected that whether creating music together, as a duo, or on their own, CSN’s status as a group always felt most like home: “It was the one we designated when we started. It was the whole idea in the first place. We were trying to think of the name, so we decided to use our names. Why? Well, because we can use it as a mothership, you see, and keep coming and going and often doing our own things. And as it was, it become the most reliant.”
Graham Nash told us that since first singing together in 1968, the quality of Crosby, Stills & Nash's harmonies remained the truest extension of them: “We have no claim on any of the notes that we sing — anyone can sing the same notes that we sing; but they can't sound like me and David and Stephen when we sing together. The way our voices move the air before it gets into the microphone is unique. Nobody sounds like us. Nobody."
Fall is the greatest season for reflection -- a winding down, a time of reassessment with Crosby, Stills & Nash, as always, providing the most incredible soundtrack.