Songfacts®:

• Crazy Horse is best known as Neil Young's backing band, but they were also an autonomous group lead by Danny Whitten. "Beggars Day" is a track from their first album, which was released in 1971 shortly before Whitten began to succumb to drug abuse that led to his death the following year.
• This song was written and sung by guitarist Nils Lofgren, who joined Crazy Horse when he was 17 and was just 19 when the album was released. While Lofgren had a spotlighted adolescence, the song deals with the more typical pressures that come with the transition into adulthood. He explained in his Songfacts interview: "There was just a darkness as a kid - and we still do it to our kids today - like, 'Hey, you're 15 now, start thinking about what college you're going to, and SAT scores, and what you're going to do with the rest of your life.' It's just an enormous pressure and a very irresponsible thing to put on young people, because every four months they're a stranger to themselves due to hormones. And we're still doing it - it's kind of a crazy thing."