Stephen Stills, Graham Nash Recall CSN Covering Beatles’ “Blackbird” (And Paul McCartney’s Reaction)

The Beatles might not have been at the legendary Woodstock Music and Art Fair in August 1969 (by that point, the Fab Four were well past their live performance days), but thanks to Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and David Crosby, their spirit was alive and well when CSN performed their version of “Blackbird.” The Paul McCartney-penned third track to the Beatles’ 1968 eponymous “White Album” B-side became a staple in CSN’s sets the following year.

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In a February 2025 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash recalled what it was like putting their spin on the instant Beatles classic and, perhaps equally importantly, what Paul McCartney had to say about their rendition of his covert civil rights anthem.

The Magic Of Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and David Crosby

Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and David Crosby only needed one night of singing together to know that they had stumbled upon something special. The trio’s ability to blend their voices and a keen sense of flavorful, complex harmony made Crosby, Stills, and Nash one of the most beloved acts of the late 1960s. (It certainly didn’t hurt that all three musicians were already industry vets, with Crosby coming from the Byrds, Nash, the Hollies, and Stills, Buffalo Springfield.) Star power aside, though, the real magic came from the way they made every song they sang invariably their own.

Their rendition of the Beatles’ “Blackbird” was no exception. “That was Stephen’s idea,” Nash told the Los Angeles Times in 2025, 56 years after the band first started incorporating the song into their sets. “We heard the Beatles do “Blackbird,” of course. Stephen, in his brilliant record-making, said, ‘You know, I think we can really sing this in some good three-part harmony.”

“The thing that set it off is I figured it out on guitar,” Stills added. “McCartney saw me play it later and said, ‘Why so complicated? It’s a [different] tuning.’ But I figured it out. I give a lot of the credit for those voicings to David Crosby. He was the master of coming up with the really far-out parts. I referred to him as the glue.”

Nash said this fortuitous lineup “was a part of the magic that we had discovered when we first started singing together. The Hollies and the Byrds and the Buffalo Springfield were very decent harmony bands. But when David and Stephen and I made our voices into one, we knew we’d struck magic.”

How CSN’s Version Of The Beatles’ “Blackbird” Differs From Original

While the most notable difference between CSN’s version of the Beatles’ acoustic classic “Blackbird” and the original is the addition of layered vocal harmonies, there are other changes in the arrangement that help feature David Crosby, Graham Nash, and Stephen Stills’ voices even further. One of the first recognizable differences is a lack of foot tapping and bird chirping. The part that Stills worked up on guitar follows the original melody and bass line for the most part. However, it’s noticeably more sparse than McCartney’s pseudo-Baroque arrangement, drawing the listener’s ear closer.

The three musicians blend jazzy sevenths and crunchy dissonance into their arrangement of “Blackbird,” which almost helps hammer home McCartney’s original intention of writing a civil rights anthem for Black women in the U.S. If you’re going to cover the Beatles at the height of the band’s fame, you better come correct, and we’d argue that CSN did just that.

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