The song Graham Nash wrote about the lessons learnt from his father
“I hate injustice,” Graham Nash once said. It’s a topic that floats into his music often as the subject of ethics and morals ties into his poetic readings of love and life. Nowhere is that clearer than on ‘Teach Your Children’, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s 1970 track that also serves as a code to live by. But he learnt that code from an early age when a traumatic experience forever shaped his thinking.
“My passion against injustice comes from what happened to my father,” Nash said on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs. It was his 10th birthday and the young boy received a gift that would spark a lifetime of creativity but also a dark change in his life. His father gave him a camera, passing down his own love of photography to his son.
“My father would take me and my youngest sister Elaine to Bellevue Zoo in Manchester. He would take pictures,” Nash remembered as a fond memory, “He would take a blanket off my bed and put it up against the window and tape it down to block out the light.”
He continued: “I always will remember the very moment that I fell in love with the photograph. He put a blank piece of paper into a colorless liquid and he’d say, ‘Wait’ – and there, fading into existence, was a photograph of me and my sister that my father had taken that morning. It was a piece of magic that I remember to this day.”
However, unknown to his father, the camera was actually a stolen item. “The police came to the door. That was shocking. And they told my father that the camera that he had bought from his friend at work – that he gave to me – had been stolen,” he remembered. But as he stuck to the moral code of supporting his community, Nash’s father refused to tell the authorities who he bought the camera front, landing himself in prison.
At the time, he was protected from the truth of what was going on. “The thing that I always remember was my father talking to me at bedtime and telling me that he would have to go away for a year. He didn’t tell me why,” Nash said, “My father never spoke a word about his time in Strangeways.” But as he grew up and learnt the injustice of what happened to his father, it made him passionate about not only justice but about staying true to your morals and passing good morals down through families and communities.
In short, he was passionate about teaching children well, as he wrote in his band’s 1970 hit. “Teach your children well / Their father’s hell did slowly go by,” the band sing, hinting at the impact Nash’s father’s fate, along with the fate of all fathers, had. “Feed them on your dreams / The one they pick’s the one you’ll know by,” they continue, imploring parents to live passionately and righteously so their children are encouraged to do the same.
It feels like the song is a way for Nash to rewrite the story of his father into a glorious ode, eventually gaining the language to do so when he became a musician. Even as he hints at his father’s “hell” and the impact the experience had on him, it’s clear that Nash sees the incident as a tale of courage that taught him bravery and the power of staying true to your code. As if offering his father something in return, the change in the lyrics to “Teach your parents well” later in the song nods to the way that inspiration is a two-way street. While the trauma of his father’s arrest influences Nash’s thinking, the impact it had on Nash could also be an inspiring thing for his Father, realising that his scary experience wasn’t for nothing if it could teach his son a lesson.
