David Crosby - 2017 - Musician - Raph_PH

Credit: Far Out / Raph_PH

The two singers David Crosby said would last 100 years

Tue 24 February 2026 17:30, UK

Any songwriter like David Crosby wasn’t looking to simply make another hit song.

There were countless bands that were in the business trying to sell millions of copies whenever they made a new record, but the real artists of every generation are looking to make something that no one’s ever heard before and will continue ringing for decades to come. But even with the vast amount of harmonies that Crosby introduced to the pop world, he felt that there were only a few people who could manage to be relevant after everyone from their generation was long gone.

Then again, Crosby was no slouch when it came time to write perfect songs. ‘So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star’ is still one of the finest songs The Byrds ever made, and even when he was working with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, tunes like ‘Almost Cut My Hair’ are among the best folk tunes of the early 1970s. Every song was like a musical treat for the ears, but Crosby was far more interested in what could be done when he started working in some stranger harmonies into the mix.

This was the same guy that had worshipped Miles Davis and John Coltrane as much as The Beatles, so it wasn’t out of the question for him to throw in some jazz-inspired lines every now and again when he was playing. Some of them weren’t going to work as well as others, but even if If I Could Only Remember My Name wasn’t received well at the time, you can hear how ahead of the curve it was when you look at the other folk singers that wanted to work outside of their comfort zone.

But even if Crosby made the most outlandish folk music of all time, it still wouldn’t hold a candle to what Bob Dylan could do. He was doing everything that his folk heroes had done and applied them to his own writing, and even if his voice wasn’t the most tuneful thing in the world, Crosby had to admire the pure craftsmanship on tunes like ‘Masters of War’ when he first heard it back in the day.

Those songs were going to be around for a long time, but Crosby felt the same way about Joni Mitchell when she first burst onto the scene, saying, “Now, I think they’re gonna look back in a hundred years and say, well, it’s either Joni or Bob, and Joni’s 10 times the musician Bob is. So there you go. I think she is inarguably the best singer-songwriter of the last 50 years, there’s no question. And I think Bob’s next after her.”

And it’s not like Dylan would even deny that Mitchell was the better musician. Her songs were brilliant tone poems whenever listening to tunes like ‘My Old Man’ or ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, but when she strummed the guitar, she was making music that no one had ever thought of before. No one had the sense of tuning their guitars to open tunings, but in the process, Mitchell was exploring strange harmonies that were beautiful but never featured on a proper pop song before.

She also knew everything she was talking about whenever she had a guitar in her hands. Her work with some of the greatest jazz players of all time is still second to none, and even if there are more than a few times where she went too far away from the pop market, she deserved to be mentioned within the same breath as people like Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus rather than anyone in the pop sphere.

Crosby liked both Dylan and Mitchell in equal measure, but what they were doing represented two completely different facets of songwriting. Dylan was the one that was advancing pop music and telling people about the real problems with the world, but if he opened everyone’s minds as to what was possible, Mitchell opened everyone’s hearts as to how music could make you feel at every opportunity.