Graham Nash

Born during World War II in Blackpool to a family from Manchester, where he would grow up, Graham William Nash found vocal-group fame twice--once on each side of the Atlantic. His musical career began to take shape at the age of five, when he met Allan Clarke at the Ordsall Board School. The two boys sang together almost from the time they met, and first made a name for themselves at the Salford Lads' Club. It was Nash, the more enthusiastic of the two, who developed a sweet, high tenor while Clarke concentrated on singing rich lead vocals. By their teenage years, the two boys got their first paying gigs playing in pubs in and around Manchester. They would perform together in various configurations, most often as an Everly Brothers-style skiffle duo (shades of Peter and Gordon and John Lennon and Paul McCartney), who were known to bill themselves as the Guytones and Ricky and Dane. In 1962, Nash and Clarke joined the Deltas, which included Eric Haydock and Don Rathbone; later that year, the foursome split off from the Deltas and went through some formative personnel changes, acquiring lead guitarist Tony Hicks and drummer Bobby Elliot. When asked to come up with a better name, they came up with the Hollies. Nash has said that this was after both the late Buddy Holly and the Christmas holly decorating Nash's house that year.

The rest is shiny vocal pop history. At first they applied an unmistakeable blend to songs written by others: "Just One Look," "Look Through Any Window," "Bus Stop" and other cover versions were these workmen's bread and butter. After a while they realized that songwriting would earn them more profit, and the team of Clarke/Hicks/Nash worked their way up from B sides to outright hits, like "On a Carousel," "Carrie Anne," and "Jennifer Eccles." Graham Nash actually did the lion's share of the writing, and got more and more restless as he improved. His Hollies magnum opus, "King Midas in Reverse (1967, from Dear Eloise/KIng Midas in Reverse demonstrated a wish to pull the group in a more "serious," psychedelic direction. Dissatisfied over the Hollies' commercial ambitions and opposed to their plans to record an entire album of Bob Dylan covers (1968's Hollies Sing Dylan), Nash left the group.

Having met David Crosby two years earlier during the Byrds' 1966 UK tour, Nash began playing with him again and soon joined Crosby--who had left the Byrds the year before--and Stephen Stills--whose Buffalo Springfield was in the process of falling apart--in the fledgling Crosby, Stills & Nash. (One of their first hits was Nash's "Marrakesh Express," which the Hollies had refused to record.) Nash also began dating Joni Mitchell around this time, though the romantic relationship didn't survive the decade. Since then, Nash has recorded numerous albums as part of CSN (with the occasional addition of Neil Young), as part of the duo Crosby & Nash, and as a solo artist. Besides the aforementioned "Marrakesh Express," his hits for CSN(Y) include "Teach Your Children," "Our House," "Just a Song Before I Go," and "Wasted on the Way."

Nash became a U.S. citizen in 1978, all the better to suit an activist on behalf of children and the environment. He cofounded Musicians United for Safe Energy--an anti-nuclear group--with Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, and John Hall in 1979.

Since the 1970s Nash has augmented a boyhood knack for taking pictures as a collector and printer of fine-art black-and-white photography.

Graham Nash has received numerous accolades as a archetypically legendary musician. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of Crosby, Stills, and Nash in 1997, and into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame the next year.

In February 2009 Nash spent his sixty-seventh birthday weekend performing and speaking in Clear Lake, Iowa, during 'Fifty Winters Later', a celebration of the life and music of Buddy Holly, held to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the last concert performed by his boyhood hero.