Carry On (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song)
Carry On is the first song on the album Déjà Vu, by the recording act Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young. Written by Stephen Stills, this song was released as the B-side of "Teach Your Children", and went on to receive steady airplay of its own from AOR radio stations.
| "Carry On" | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young | ||||
| from the album Déjà Vu | ||||
| A-side | "Teach Your Children" | |||
| Released | September 1970 | |||
| Format | Single | |||
| Recorded | November 5, 1969 | |||
| Genre | Baroque pop, soft rock, folk rock | |||
| Length | 4:26, 3:16 (radio edit) | |||
| Label | Atlantic | |||
| Songwriter(s) | Stephen Stills | |||
| Producer(s) | Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young | |||
| Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young singles chronology | ||||
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The song
When nearing the end of the recording sessions for Déjà Vu, Graham Nash told Stephen Stills that they still didn't have an opening track. Many recording acts or producers prefer to start an album with a particularly catchy song, in order to set the mood and encourage listeners who are checking it out for the first time. Stills took two incomplete songs — (one being the song Questions[1] he'd written for and recorded with Buffalo Springfield), and edited them together with parts of a jam session from a few days earlier, to produce one finished piece.
Session drummer Dallas Taylor:
The song was written in the middle of the Deja Vu sessions, when Nash told Stephen they still didn't have an opener for the album. It was something of a message to the group, since it had become a real struggle to keep the band together at that point. Stephen combined two unfinished songs and stuck them onto a jam we'd had out in the studio a few nights before, me on drums and Stephen on a Hammond B-3 organ.[2]
The song was also an inspiration for Led Zeppelin, whose track "Friends"[3] on Led Zeppelin III is generally seen as being inspired by it, including a similar slack-stringed C-tuned acoustic opening.[4]