We would both surely include his Buffalo Springfield resistance anthem “For What It’s Worth,” with Stills’s calm, urgent baritone and rhythmic stops originally released to protest a Los Angeles curfew-its composition probably began earlier when Stills was still nineteen-it has endured long past its original occasion. I assumed our choices would overlap, and that high among them would be “4 + 20,” whose piercing Appalachian melancholy seems to belong more to the ages than to the moody twenty-four-year-old who wrote it, as well as “Find the Cost of Freedom” with its sea shanty cry of grief and endurance. Several years ago an academic colleague and I embarked on what we called a “Stills-off”: we would listen to our record collections and narrow the musician Stephen Stills’s oeuvre down to its top five songs. Stephen Stills performing on the Dutch television program Toppop, 1972
