Country and Johnny Cash: The songs that inspired Neil Young
It can be challenging to imagine the greats before they became great, to picture Joni Mitchell struggling to make ends meet before she became one of the most renowned songwriters in music history or to visualise Paul McCartney playing local shows around Liverpool rather than headlining Glastonbury. But even the most established and esteemed artists had to start somewhere, including folk legend turned grunge godfather Neil Young.
Between his work as a soloist, alongside Crazy Horse, and with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Young has earned widespread acclaim for his folk rock flair. He penned classic tracks like ‘Harvest Moon’ and ‘Heart of Gold’ and developed a particularly singular guitar style, picking up Grammys and a claim to being “one of the greats” along the way.
But before Young secured his place as one of the greats, he was merely listening to them. He spent his childhood somewhere between Winnipeg and Ontario, where he would find many of the songs that would inspire him to try his own hand at the craft. One of the first was ‘Four Strong Winds’ by fellow Canadians Ian and Sylvia.
Young discovered the track as a pre-teen when he would plug all of his money into the jukebox just to hear it once more. “I loved it so much that I would, you know, put nickels and dimes in the jukebox to play it over and over and over again until I didn’t have any change,” he recalled during a conversation with Conan, “I would just stand there in front of it and listen to it.” Young even covered ‘Four Strong Winds’ as the concluding track to Comes a Time in 1978.
This wasn’t the only song that Young divulged to Conan as a formative influence on him. He also picked out Gogi Grant’s ‘The Wayward Wind’ from 1955. Over distant strums and strings, Grant sings of restless winds and yearning, imagery that it’s easy to imagine bleeding into a Young track. The influence of the song can certainly be felt in his own catalogue.
There is perhaps no better example of greats inspiring greats than Young crediting a Johnny Cash song as one of his earliest influences. Young picked out ‘Ballad of a Teenage Queen’ from Sings the Songs That Made Him Famous as one of the songs that inspired him. Perhaps this marks the beginning of Young’s interest in slightly more rocking music, with muted twangs and Cash’s iconic voice.
Young’s music taste as a budding songwriter refused to stick to one genre – his next pick came from blues singer Jimmy Reid with ‘Baby, What You Want Me To Do’, a swaying track full of twangs and harmonicas, an instrument that Young himself would come to favour. Again, it’s easy to find the influence of Reid, and of ‘Baby, What You Want Me To Do’ in particular, in Young’s own music.
Young rounded out the list with the rocking ‘Bop-A-Lena’ by Ronnie Self, which pairs a bouncy piano with classic harmonies and nonsensical lyrics. “Oop-scooby-dooby-lena, go gal go, bop-a-lena, bop-a-lena, she’s my gal,” Self sings. It’s a track that seems to show off a slightly more light-hearted side to Young’s early music taste.
Between Cash and Grant, it’s easy to see how each of these songs not only inspired Young in his youth, but as he started carving out his own path to become the best of the best.
