Crosby, Stills, and Nash perform “Ohio” at a May 4 Commemoration at Kent State University, 1997 (photo: Kent State University archives)

This is our third post on Neil Young’s “Ohio.” Read the first here and the second here.

In researching my posts on “Ohio,” I came across an online article about the May 4 shootings co-written by Professor Jerry M. Lewis. The article clarified a few common misunderstandings about the events of that day. Later, I came across an essay by Lewis entitled “Social Remembering and Kent State.” I was interested to learn how music, and particularly the song “Ohio,” played a role in the commemoration of those events–if it did at all. I had a suspicion that the song may have been something that irritated feelings that people would prefer to put behind them–that it coming at them unbidden on the radio at unpredictable moments would potentially be unwelcome. I haven’t actually found anybody who has quite yet said that.

Young’s searing guitar opens the clip, and “Ohio” and the May 4 shootings at Kent State are the pivot point for the documentary’s defining narrative. The clip is long, obviously, so you may want to come back to it later. Its argument, in essence, is that the events of May 4 signal the decline of rock and roll protest music and the turn to more personal, introspective, singer-songwriter music from the likes of The Carpenters, Elton John, and James Taylor.

This trajectory echoed something I had read in David Dunning’s A Dreamer of Pictures: Neil Young, a Man & His Music. Dunning writes:

“All but uniquely in rock, a protest record was out within ten days of the event it was protesting against. And according to Crosby, it was released ‘with the finger firmly pointed right where the guild lay: Nixon and the warmongers. At that point we were powerful. We affected the world, right then.

Did they? Did ‘Ohio’ have any lasting impact? Many radio stations did refuse to play it, and Vice-President Agnew was moved by it to denounce rock music as anti-American, but you could still buy the record at the local store–and who cared what Spiro Agnew thought about anything anyway.

In some ways ‘Ohio’ expressed the impotence of rock better than any other record before or since. It did indeed point the finger in the right direction, naming an American President as a murderer. 

… 

It was CSN&Y’s best record. It said everything there was to say, said in powerfully, beautifully. And maybe a few Americans had second thoughts about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness at other people’s expense. But the murder Nixon remained in office, and would in fact be re-elected two years later. In the meantime, active opposition to the war would dwindle as American ground troops were withdrawn.”

The VH1 documentary and Downing are both rather skeptical about art’s power to transform politics, at least in the case of “Ohio.” I don’t think it’s the entire story, and my discussion with Professor Lewis helps bear that out–both in terms of the protest, and music’s role in focusing our attention on what really matters and why. My interview with him is below. Following the interview, I’ll give you a few cover versions of Young’s “Ohio,” that will allow you to consider more broadly the difference voice, arrangement, and the passage of time make to the power of the song.

Prof. Jerry M. Lewis

Social Remembering and “Ohio”: An Interview with Jerry M. Lewis

MBM: Thanks for taking the time to talk with us. Our focus at Murder Ballad Monday is on how songs about violent events, real or imagined, operate in our individual and collective imagination. You’ve written extensively about the events of May 4, 1970 and also the process of “social remembering,” and I’m hoping that we can talk today about music and that process.

Professor Jerry M. Lewis: I should probably open with my thoughts about the song. I did a little writing on “Ohio” before for CNN, but they didn’t pick it up. They asked me what the carry-over was from May 4 to today. We call the events of that day “May 4th” around here, and not “Kent State.”

When I first heard “Ohio,’ I was offended by it–for a couple reasons. First, I thought the beat was too rock-ish, and not sacred enough; but what happened was that the students liked it, and weren’t offended by it at all, even in terms of being part of the vigil. They would play it all night long–for the first two or three years they played it. Now it gets played over documentaries about that day.

The second reason I didn’t like it was that the phrase “tin soldiers…” Use of the tin soldier imagery diminished the seriousness of the Guard’s power. The Guardsmen certainly weren’t toys.

The third problem, I never understood the line, “gotta get down to it… should have been done long ago….”

But, I’ve come around again to live with it, at least. I would have liked seeing “Give Peace a Chance” more associated with May 4th.

MBM: You were a faculty member at Kent State at the time.

Prof. Glenn Frank (photo Kent State University. News Service)

JML: I had just defended my dissertation in the fall of 1969 at the University of Illinois, and turned it in in February 1970. My actual graduation date is June 1970. I was a tenure track faculty member at Kent State at the time. I had just received my Ph.D. I was 33. I was 10 to 12 years older than most of the students at the protest.

The reason I was out there was that I was a Faculty Marshal. In the wake of some earlier protests, we thought we should have a faculty presence for all major events on campus–good guys and gals to be a presence while the students were protesting. There’s no doubt that the Senior Faculty Marshal Glenn Frank saved lives that day by getting students to disperse. They wanted to re-organize and the Guard was forming up their lines again.

[Listen to Glenn Frank appeal to the students to disperse here.]

MBM: What role do you think that “Ohio,” played for the Kent State community in the relatively immediate aftermath of those events?

JML: They didn’t respond so much to the lyrics as to the rhythm of CSN&Y. You would see them kind of bobbing and weaving to the rhythm of the song. Some students didn’t even know the name of the song. They called it “Four Dead in Ohio.”

Students tell me that it’s played all the time on rock station now—not connected to recognizing the anniversary or anything.

MBM: Yes. I that’s my sense of it, too. It appears on classic rock stations, but not always or even often to mark the occasion.

Dean Kahler (in wheelchair), one of the nine students wounded non-fatally by National Guard bullets on May 4, 1970 holds a candle at the seventh annual vigil and walk. (Photo Kent State University. News Service.)

MBM: The VH1 video you referred me to talks about a turn to individualistic, introspective, and romantic music taking the lead, at least with regard to popular music on the national scene in the wake of the events of Kent State—away from protest music and psychedelia.

JML: The VH1 folks sort of implied that the protest at Kent State and elsewhere was over. I think the protests continued. The mass rally [as a form of protest] was under some difficulties, because it was clear that the social control forces were willing to shoot into crowds.

After the demonstrations, activists would often go back and get stoned. I’ve also done some sociological studies of marijuana culture. The psychedelic music correlated with the drug culture. One of the things that struck me was that smoking marijuana was highly ritualistic. The ones that I observed tended to smoke (not use water pipes and things like that).

I don’t think Kent had that strong a music culture.

CSNY is certainly protective of the rights to use the use the song. In a subsequent documentary, “Kent State: The Day the War Came Home,” producers wanted to use CSNY’s song, but couldn’t get permission or it was too expensive, so they went with a Creedence Clearwater Revival song instead.

MBM: You’ve been a part of convening May 4 memorials at Kent State through the years. What role has music played in those memorials?

Memorial Walk, 2010 (photo credit: Kent State University)

JML: I was the founder, along with two students, of the Annual Walk and Vigil. I felt as a sociologist that we needed some ritual expression of our sadness, and I wanted to protest nonviolently. So, I organized the vigil walk. Students stand vigil all night long both to remember and to protest.

I thought the Walk and Vigil would last five to seven years, but it keeps going on. It’s part of the culture of Kent State. One of my colleagues, a scholar at the University of Illinois says it’s one of the longest memorial services associated with a university that he knows.
The musical element of the Walk and Vigil occurs when people show up at the Prentice Hall parking lot, and in the early years students would arrange to play music, usually “Ohio,” from open windows in an adjacent building. In recent years, there’s not been music played.

Sometimes, when they would have protests, ”Give Peace a Chance” would be sung. It would just break out. The annual commemoration service [separate from the Walk and Vigil] always has some musical group. At times, this has drawn major performers like Richie Havens or Peter, Paul, & Mary–usually on the major anniversaries.

I initially negotiated a two hour recess from class to allow the commemoration at 12:44. We would commemorate the students lost at Kent State on May 4, and the Jackson State students killed a few days later.

In 1975, the university said we’ll have no more ritual recognition. Can you imagine? Well, three of the students wounded that day formed the May 4th Task Force. We had a Center for Peaceful Change, now Peace Studies, and the May 4th Task Force emerged from that. It now leads the commemoration.

We don’t have a good word in English that captures what we’re doing with the annual commemoration service. What generally happens is that there’s a speaker who talks about each of the victims, and some other speakers. It generally begins with music.

The music at the commemoration is sometimes 60s style music; other times its more modern. I think CSN&Y were there once. I tend not to go to the first part of the program. I get pretty emotional. I have a certain sense of survivor’s guilt. I usually skip the music portion and come in toward the end.

MBM: You’ve written about May 4th and the process of “social remembering.” What do you mean by this term? How does it work? What does it do for people?

Professor Jerry M. Lewis (photo credit: unknown)

JML: Social remembering is the social organization of remembrance—often conducted through a contested process. Every step of remembering that day on campus was controversial–the memorials, the vigil, the commemoration, etc. It’s a collective effort to make sense of the tragedy and to systematically remember it. It’s socially/organizationally based, following norms and rules.

When I was organizing the first vigil, the university administrators were asking me how many people can stand vigil in the parking lot. “You can have eight,” they said. I said, “OK, then what are you going to do with the other 2000?”.

They let me go ahead with the 2000.

Even a vigil required negotiations. Social remembering is socially organized and often in a conflictual situation. It’s a goal-oriented activity. What I tried to argue in my essay (Jerry M. Lewis, “Social Remembering and Kent State”. in C. A. Barbato and L. L. Davis, Democratic Narrative, History, and Memory. Kent. Ohio: Kent State University, pp. 176-193.) was that the process of social organization was a very rational set of actions, but the dysfunction was that it was conflictual all the way along.

One of the criticisms from one of the wounded students is that the university never built a complete memorial. The May 4th task force wanted to name campus buildings after the students. That caused a conflict because the university didn’t want to do it. Early administrations were embarrassed by the shootings

On the memorial is the phrase “Inquire, Learn, and Reflect.” I wrote the memorial should reflect “Inquiring, Learning, and Reflecting.”

May 4 Memorial

MBM: As an analyst of social processes, do you think that a song like “Ohio” galvanizes dissent or diffuses it. What happens to that social anger in the wake of these events?

JML: That’s what I thought you were going to ask about first!

I’ve really struggled with that. I think there’s a middle position. I think it facilitates remembering. That’s why I changed my view on the value of the song, because students link it to the four dead. I would have liked to have seen the names of the four dead in the song. [Ed., in the previous post, you can listen to Devo do just this in their version.]

That’s certainly the way it works now. Students are stimulated by inquiry. Nowadays, it facilitates inquiry.

Maybe early on, it may have served to water down protest–same with “Give Peace a Chance.” Early on, I would accept the position of dampening down protest.

There was another music event in the wake of the tragedy. There was a Requiem on a Sunday afternoon in early June, 1970 performed by Cherubini at a church in Kent. The conductor was Robert Shaw. I don’t know what [piece] it was. For the people who sang it, it was kind of a “Give a Peace a Chance” for older people.

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Special thanks to Jerry M. Lewis for sharing his perspective on music, memory, and May 4. In addition to the official commemorations involving music, “Ohio” has also been performed by various artists performing in the area, as a tribute to the students. Glenn Gamboa’s 2000 article on the song in the Akron Beacon Journal mentioned a few, including Tori Amos (Listen on YouTube here.)

The Isley Brothers, 1971

The Isley Brothers created their own landmark version of the song in their medley “Ohio/Machine Gun,” on their 1971 album Givin’ it Back. Significantly, they alter the first line to “Tin soldiers, I hear them comin'” or “Tin soldiers, with guns they’re comin’.” Nixon is left out of the picture, and the Beatitudes from the Gospels are spoken through the transition into Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun.” More importantly, though, they cross some other challenging territory. Bruce Eder’s Allmusic.com review puts this performance in context, and is worth quoting at length regarding the way this performance cut across racial divisions within the counterculture:

The opening cut of Givin’ It Back, “Ohio/Machine Gun,” is a slap-in-your-face reminder of just how angry the times and the people were. The track evokes instant memories of the campus bloodshed of 1970, not just at Kent State but also the often-forgotten killings a few days later at Jackson State University in Mississippi, where the victims of a fusillade of sheriff’s deputies’ bullets were black students. More than that, the track itself is also a reminder of the divisions that existed on the left; to listen to pundits on the right, the anti-war and civil rights movements, along with the counterculture, were all part of one vast, organized, calculated left-wing conspiracy. The truth is that there was nearly as big a split, culturally and politically, between young blacks and young whites on the left and on college campuses as there was anywhere else in the population.

Blacks reacting to years of oppression had little use for mostly middle-class white college students, however sympathetic many of them purported to be to their situation, while well-meaning white students and activists couldn’t begin to know what privation of the kind experienced by blacks and Hispanics in most American towns and cities was. In music, too, there was a lot of division; blacks usually didn’t resonate to the top artists in the white world and, in particular, were oblivious to (and even resentful of) the adoration accorded Jimi Hendrix by the white community. 

So, when the Isley Brothers — whose appeal among black audiences was unimpeachable — opened Givin’ It Backwith a conflation of Neil Young‘s “Ohio” and Jimi Hendrix‘s “Machine Gun,” they were speaking to anger and bloodshed in the streets, but they were also performing an act of outreach that was about as radical as any they could have committed on record in 1971. That they incorporated a prayer into their reformulation of the two songs, amid Ernie Isley‘s and Chester Woodard‘s guitar pyrotechnics, turned it into one of the most powerful and personal musical statements of its era, and it’s worth the price of the album just for the one cut.

Listen on YouTube here. The Isley Brothers also recorded the song for their 1973 live album, The Isleys Live.

More recently, the Canadian duo Dala recorded a remarkably affecting version of  “Ohio” as part of the 2008 compilation release Cinnamon Girl: Women Artists Cover Neil Young for Charity. Their two female vocal harmony is haunting, as is their turn to “Ohio’s” original flip side, “Find the Cost of Freedom” in the middle of the arrangement. Where Young raged, Dala mourns, and at this remove, it works just as well.

In this live performance of “Ohio,” they insert lyrics from U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” as well. Full of surprises, these folks are.

This is already a very long post, but I’ll give you just one more before turning you over to your own Spotify and YouTube searching. I’ve found the Paul Weller (Spotify) and Mott the Hoople (Spotify) covers a little lacking, although the latter certainly brings all the rage and energy. For one final piece, having moved through more R&B and jazzy modes, I’ll give you Ben Harper and his slide guitar giving us “Ohio” as a blues.

Thanks for reading and listening. For one final post in this series, we’ll review other songs responding to the tragic events of May 4, 1970 at Kent State. Stay tuned.