The music David Crosby said was drilled into him “289 times”
It’s absolutely fair to say, however much you might want to distance yourself from it, that the music your parents play for you growing up shapes your own musical tastes. In the case of David Crosby, this was undoubtedly true, but there was something that came before the folk music that he would make throughout his career.
Yes, every single bit of the work he’s best known for was informed by the folk music of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and having a musical education courtesy of his parents was something that certainly nurtured his direction. Ultimately, having the exposure to this was one of the best things that could have happened to him, and meant that we’ve been able to appreciate his work since the mid ‘60s, when he emerged as a member of The Byrds, and later went on to form a bond and supergroup with Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young.
Folk was now such an ingrained subject in the creative brain of Crosby that it seemed he was on his way to stardom, incorporating traditional elements of folk that he had been dutifully raised on. But rather than stick to those elements strictly, Crosby, along with his contemporaries, would take the genre into wild and wonderful directions.
With that in mind, it is easy to see how folk wasn’t the only thing Crosby ingested as a creative youngster. While folk played an enormous part in his upbringing, there was something else that he’d been enamoured with from as far back as he was able to recall.
Speaking to Fretboard Journal, Crosby once explained that he’d had something else drilled into him from an early age, and that it had a profound effect on his musical direction. While it’s not immediately clear from listening to his work, further inspection certainly reveals just how much of an influence it had on Crosby’s output, and there are aspects that can be broken down and made more apparent.
“My parents played a lot of classical music in the house,” Crosby revealed to the publication. “I probably heard the Brandenburg Concertos, you know, 289 times, by the time I was 6.” You can tell that there are still elements of classical music, especially the lavish works of Johann Sebastian Bach, lingering in his own works, and the fact that his arrangements were often complex, he incorporated multi-part song structures and produced detailed compositions suggests that hearing these works was hugely influential for him.
However, he continued by adding some of his favourites from other strands of music, stating that this was the primary influence for what he would go on to make. “The very first 10-inch 33 LPs [that we owned] were the Weavers, Josh White and a South African couple called Marais & Miranda,” he added. “Soon thereafter, Pete Seeger on his own, and soon thereafter, Odetta. They were folk music. That’s what my mom bought. So that’s what I was raised on.”
