David Crosby Artistfacts

August 14, 1941 - January 18, 2023
Crosby is the sperm donor for Melissa Etheridge and Julie Cypher's two children, Bailey (born in 1997) and Beckett (born in 1998), who were born through artificial insemination. Beckett battled opioid addiction and died in 2020 at 21.
Jackson Browne has stated that David Crosby had a "legendary" VW bus with a Porsche engine in it.
Because of his weight problems and addictions, Crosby developed a number of health problems and underwent a number of operations, including a liver transplant in 1994 and heart surgery in 2014. He often claimed that he was lucky to be alive.
He had some very rough years in the '80s when he was addicted to cocaine. Crosby was arrested twice in 1982 for cocaine possession, but hired high-profile lawyers who kept him out of jail as long as they could. After another arrest in 1984 he was sentenced to rehab but he escaped the facility and was caught a day later, once again with cocaine. He finally went to prison in March 1985 and got out on appeal in May. He was sent back to jail in December and served eight months of a five-year sentence. When he got out, he was finally clean.
He has six children. His second child, a son, was put up for adoption when he was born in 1962. Crosby, who never revealed the identity of the mother, reconnected with him when his son, named James Raymond, sought him out in the mid-'90s. Raymond was already a professional musician when he learned that Crosby was his father; they quickly bonded and began collaborating on various projects.
Crosby was a founding member of The Byrds, but friction between him and his bandmates came to a head and he was fired in October 1967. After leaving The Byrds, Crosby went sailing on a schooner called The Mayan, which he bought with a $25,000 loan from Peter Tork of The Monkees.
David Crosby liked fly fishing. He told Mojo magazine: "Anytime you get out in nature and make yourself be quiet, that's rich stuff."
David Crosby started out as a singer of old folk songs who didn't compose his own music. It wasn't until his late teens that he wrote his first song, which was called "Cross The Plains." He told American Songwriter, "It was a fairly dumb song. Sincere, but dumb." He might be a little hard on himself: The folk singer Travis Edmonson recorded the song for his 1963 album Travis on His Own.
David Crosby's last live public performance took place on October 5, 2019 at 918 Bathurst, a renovated Buddhist temple in Toronto. He joined Canadian singer-songwriter and The Lighthouse Band member Michelle Willis at a recording of her live EP Just One Voice. During the set, the pair performed Crosby's songs "Janet" and "Glory" (both from his 2018 album Here Is You Listen and co-written by Willis), as well as Willis' original song "Trigger" and Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock" (recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young on Déjà Vu).

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