The Ryman Auditorium crowd was on its feet before the name had even been fully spoken. On September 23, 2006, Neil Young stood inside the former tabernacle in Nashville, Tennessee, accepting Artist of the Year at the fifth Americana Honors and Awards ceremony. He was 60 years old, a Canadian-born rocker being embraced by the very establishment his music had spent decades questioning. The honor arrived in a year when his newest work was a protest album aimed directly at the sitting American president.
Earlier in 2006, Neil Young had released Living With War, a record so blunt in its anti-war stance that some radio programmers refused to touch it. The Americana Music Association chose that exact moment to hand him its highest individual prize. The juxtaposition said everything about the genre's self-image: roots music with a conscience, tradition as a vehicle for dissent rather than nostalgia. Young accepted the award without softening his edges, a figure whose entire career had been built on refusing to stay in one lane.
Early years and polio
That career began far from Nashville. Neil Young was born on November 12, 1945, in Toronto, Canada, to Scott Young, a journalist and novelist, and Edna Blow Ragland Young, a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution with American and French ancestry. The family soon moved to Omemee, a rural settlement in Ontario. In late summer 1951, Neil contracted polio and lost partial mobility on the left side of his body, a physical mark he carried into every guitar solo for the rest of his life.
The illness reshaped his childhood. The family wintered in Florida, where Neil briefly attended school in New Smyrna Beach. When he was 12, his father left the family over extramarital affairs, and Neil moved with his mother to Winnipeg. There, the kid obsessed over rock and roll, rockabilly, doo-wop, R&B, and country, with Elvis Presley as his idol. He formed his first band, The Jades, while still at Earl Grey Junior High, then played in instrumental rock groups at Kelvin High School before dropping out to chase music full-time.
His first stable band was The Squires, whose local hit "The Sultan" gave him a taste of regional fame. Over three years, The Squires played hundreds of shows in community centers and clubs across Manitoba and Ontario. At Winnipeg's folk clubs, Young first met Joni Mitchell, who remembered him as deeply obsessed with Bob Dylan. Young also cited Phil Ochs as a major influence, placing him on equal footing with Dylan. In Winnipeg, he wrote the early folk song "Sugar Mountain" about lost youth, and Mitchell answered it with "The Circle Game."
Path to Los Angeles
The path to Los Angeles ran through Toronto and a band called The Mynah Birds, led by a young Rick James. They signed to Motown, but the debut album collapsed when James was arrested for desertion from the Naval Reserve. After the breakup, Young and bassist Bruce Palmer sold their equipment and bought a Pontiac hearse, driving it to Los Angeles. In 1970, Young admitted he had been in the United States illegally before obtaining his green card. On Sunset Boulevard, stuck in traffic, they spotted Stephen Stills and Richie Furay—and Buffalo Springfield was born.
Buffalo Springfield's 1966 debut took off after Stills wrote "For What It's Worth," with Young's melodic electric guitar harmonics threading through the track. The band helped forge folk rock and country rock as coherent genres. But the second album, Buffalo Springfield Again, arrived in late 1967 with two of Young's three songs recorded solo, apart from the group. By May 1968, Buffalo Springfield had dissolved after fulfilling contractual duties with Last Time Around. In 1997, the band entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but Young skipped the ceremony, writing that the show had nothing to do with the spirit of rock and roll, only with making money.
Solo debut and Crazy Horse
His solo deal with Reprise Records came after the breakup. The debut album, Neil Young, arrived on January 22, 1969, to mixed reviews; Young later dismissed it as "overdubbed rather than played." For the follow-up, he recruited Danny Whitten, Billy Talbot, and Ralph Molina from The Rockets, renaming them Crazy Horse. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, recorded in two weeks, became the first release credited to Neil Young with Crazy Horse. He wrote "Cinnamon Girl," "Cowgirl in the Sand," and "Down by the River" in a single day while lying in bed with a fever near 39°C.
The Americana honor in 2006 recognized a body of work that had long since outgrown any single scene. From the acoustic tour of fall 1970, when he played unreleased songs across North America, to the legendary Massey Hall concert in Toronto in 1971, released decades later as Live at Massey Hall 1971, Young kept folk music's rawness alive. In 1995, he recorded Mirror Ball with Pearl Jam, earning the nickname "godfather of grunge" for his distorted guitar sound. The man accepting that Nashville award had once threatened cameras with his guitar at Woodstock, refusing to be filmed during the electric set.
Two decades after that ceremony, the image lingers: Neil Young, 60 years old, standing in the Ryman with a protest album behind him and a lifetime of refusal in his posture. The Americana Music Association knew exactly what it was doing. They gave their Artist of the Year award to a man who had written "Ohio" four days after the Kent State shootings and released it as a single with CSNY almost immediately. That song, like the man himself, never asked permission.