Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
Teach Your Children chords
Teach Your Children by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young is a beginner song in D, played with no capo. The whole sheet is 4 chords (D, G, A, Bm) across 3 sections: Intro → Verse ×2 → Chorus. 3 of the 4 shapes are open chords and Bm is the one that needs a barre. It sits at roughly 76 BPM.
By Chiye · Updated
Hardest change in the sheet: Bm → G, once.
- Difficulty
- Beginnerbarre shape Bm
- Key
- Dwith no capo
- Tempo
- 76BPM
- Tuning
- Standard (E A D G B E)low to high
- Chords
- 43 open, 1 with a barre
- Sections
- 3each with its own progression
Chords in Teach Your Children
Frets read low E to high E, x means leave that string out.
Chord sheet
One chord per bar, four beats to the bar: the shape lands on beat one and the dots mark the beats after it, so you can see where the change falls without any lyrics. Where a section has no strumming pattern written, play one chord per bar. Tap a bar to hear it.
Lyrics are not reproduced for this song: they are still in copyright and this site has no licence to publish them. The chords, structure, strumming and sing-along timing are all here. Songs whose words are public domain →
Intro♩=76
Verse× 2 · ♩=76
Chorus♩=76
Printable one-page chord chart
How to play Teach Your Children
Four chords, one of them a barre, and a pedal-steel melody that makes the whole thing sound far more complicated than it is. The verse is a two-bar loop of D – G – D – A, repeated for as long as the stanza lasts, so the right hand does all the work: a relaxed four-four strum with a small accent on beat two. This is a song where playing softly is the technique. If you dig in, the changes start to clatter and you lose the gentle, ringing quality the record has.
The only chord that needs planning is the Bm at the end of the chorus line. Your middle finger on the B string at fret 3 is part of the D chord anyway, so keep it down and build the rest of the Bm barre around it: index across all five strings at fret 2 and the ring and little fingers on the D and G strings at fret 4. The change back to D is simply lifting the barre off while keeping that middle finger exactly where it was, which is why this turnaround is easier than it looks.
Work at 60 BPM with two bars per chord change and loop D – G – D – A until the chord changes stop being events. Then add the chorus and practise only the last three chords, Bm – G – A – D, twenty times in a row; that descent is where beginners lose the beat. Finally, try the Asus4 shape in place of the plain A in the verses for the suspended, open sound, and play the intro twice as an instrumental before you start singing.
How to practise Teach Your Children
Four steps computed from this sheet: the order the shapes are easiest to learn in, the changes that really occur in the progressions above, where each chord turns up, and the tempo ladder up to the recorded speed.
Learn the shapes easiest first
D (x-x-0-2-3-2, beginner) → G (3-2-0-0-0-3, beginner) → A (x-0-2-2-2-0, beginner) → Bm (x-2-4-4-3-2, intermediate, needs a barre)
3 of the 4 shapes are open chords, so start there and leave Bm until the others change cleanly.
Drill the changes this sheet actually uses
D → G6×G → D5×D → A4×G → A2×
These counts come from the progressions on this page, so they are the changes you will actually play, not a generic list of pairs to practise.
Know where each chord turns up
- Devery section
- Gevery section
- Aevery section
- BmChorus
Climb the tempo ladder
Start at 46 BPM and move up only when a full pass is clean: 46 → 57 → 68 → 76 BPM. The recorded feel is around 76 BPM, and the last step is the one that always feels like a jump. Stay at 68 for longer than feels necessary.
The section to leave until last is Chorus (12 bars in this sheet).
Playing Teach Your Children with a capo
This sheet needs no capo. Each card shows what you would finger at that capo position so the song still sounds exactly as written. Useful when the shapes above are awkward, or when you want to sing it higher without learning new chords.
No capoas written
D G A Bm
3 of 4 stay open
Fret 1
C# F# Ab Bbm
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 2
C F G Am
3 of 4 stay open
Fret 3
B E F# Abm
1 of 4 stay open
Fret 4
Bb Eb F Gm
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 5
A D E F#m
3 of 4 stay open
Fret 6
Ab C# Eb Fm
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 7
G C D Em
4 of 4 stay open
Working out a different key? The capo calculatordoes the same arithmetic for any chord set.
More songs built on the same chords
If Teach Your Children clicks, these use the closest set of shapes, so the chords you just learned keep working.
More beginner songs to learn after this one: Wonderwall, Let It Be, Creep, Hallelujah.
These chords across the songbookHow often each chord in Teach Your Children turns up across all 80 songs on this site, and what it most often moves to next. The counts come from the sheet library itself, not from theory.
248bars of this chord across the songbook
44songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 40×.
418bars of this chord across the songbook
59songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 80×.
120bars of this chord across the songbook
20songs use this shape
Most often followed by D, 24×.
53bars of this chord across the songbook
11songs use this shape
Most often followed by A, 12×.