Before David Van Cortlandt Crosby was making supergroup music with Stills, Nash, and Young, he was a founding member of The Byrds, itself a super-famous band.

In fact, the origin of CSN&Y centers around him getting in trouble with his Byrds band-mates when he played onstage with Buffalo Springfield at the infamous Monterey Pop Festival. He was substituting for Neil Young at the request of his friend Stephen Stills. This got David in trouble with the Byrds, and within a year he left that band, bumping into also-unemployed Stills and teaming up with Graham Nash (of The Hollies) to form Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Within a year, Young joined them and their combined efforts were some of the biggest artistic success of any of the four singer-songwriters.

The bulk of Crosby’s subsequent career is a stylized montage of songs recorded solo or with one or more of the other CSN&Y members, many of whom have teamed up to release albums at one time or another, in various combinations.