John Filo’s Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of the then 14 year old Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the body of Jeffrey Miller, one of the four Kent State University students killed by National Guard troops at on May 4, 1970.

[This post begins a four-part series on “Ohio,” here are the second, third, and fourth posts.]

“So anyway, we’re in Butano Canyon at Steve and Leo’s place, and the tragedy at Kent State had just happened. Time magazine had a picture of the girl, Allison Krause, after the National Guard had killed her and three other victims. We were looking at it together. She was lying there on some pavement with another student kneeling down looking at her, as I remember.

  These people were our audience. That’s exactly who we were playing for. It was our movement, our culture, our Woodstock generation. We were all one. It was a personal thing, the bond we held between the musicians and the people of the culture: hippies, students, flower children, call them what you will. We were all together.

  The weight of that picture cut us to the quick. We had heard and seen the news on TV, but this picture was the first time we had to stop and reflect. It was different before the Internet, before social networking to say the least. So full of this feeling of disbelief and sadness. I picked up my guitar and started to play some chords and immediately wrote “Ohio”; four dead in Ohio. The next day, we went into the studio in LA and cut the song. Before a week had passed it was ll over the radio. It was really fast for those times, really fast. All the stations played “Ohio.”

                                                                                   —Neil Young, Waging Heavy Peace

Introduction

John Filo’s picture above and the song “Ohio,” penned by Neil Young, present two of the most lasting, evocative icons of the events of May 4, 1970 at Kent State University, when Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on a group of unarmed protesters on campus, killing four and wounding nine others. The picture and the song bear only a tangential relationship to one another, in that this particular image is probably not the one that sparked Young’s muse. We’ll get to that shortly. Before we go any further, though, take a moment to listen, even if you know the song, and let Young’s opening guitar riffs and martial beat set the tone and cadence.

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.

Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.
Four dead in Ohio.
Four dead in Ohio…

Over the next few posts, we’re going to listen to “Ohio” and explore how the song functions in the individual and collective emotional processing and memory of these events. As usual, we’re going to stick to the song and not to a discussion of the events themselves, except for how they relate to the song. There are many good sources for the historical background. You might want to start here or with this video.

Disentangling the history and politics from the song will be a challenge, as it is a protest song. Some older folks are more familiar with the story than they want to be. Some younger folks don’t know the story at all. We’re going to talk to people who were there or close by at the time, and explore in particular how the song affected them, which often only makes sense in light of the way the events themselves affected them.

We’re not going to worry too much whether “Ohio” is a ballad (it’s not). I should also add here for the sake of new readers our standard caveat that to weigh in on the song as a murder ballad does not mean that we’re making any legal claims about the events the song describes. The events that gave rise to the song present important political matters. They are just not the important matters we explore here. We’re interested in “Ohio” as an artistic response by Young (and his collaborators) and as a vehicle for people processing and recollecting the tragedy, and perhaps organizing and healing as well. Today, we’ll take on the first half.

“Ohio” very simply gets at the emotional truth of the May 4th shootings at Kent State for many people. James Michener, who wrote one of the first attempts at a full history of the events surrounding May 4, said that he was deeply affected by “Ohio”: “it did what I could not do…it dealt with it at an emotional level.” In today’s post, I’m going to spend a little time getting at that emotional work, both with reference to the lyrics and to the music itself. In the next two posts, we’re going to explore personal and critical responses to the song, and how it informed how people processed the enormous impact of that day, and the role that music may play in galvanizing or diffusing outrage.

“What if you knew her?”

Cover of Time magazine May 18, 1970

Young’s “Ohio” delivers a sharply honed emotional point, with scant reference to the details of May 4. “Ohio” does not tell a complete story–as if it could. The theme it mines lies principally within the lines “we’re finally on our own” and “four dead in Ohio.” The song is both dirge and protest anthem, plaintive wail and drumming a beat for a counterculture response. The rest is in the guitar riffs. We’ve heard Young’s telling an emotional story before within his guitar playing, in Shaleane’s posts on “Powderfinger.” We’re hearing it here, too. Young’s angry, keening guitar sets the stage. The beat, as Pat recently observed to me privately, marches right back, musically speaking, in the direction of those Guardsmen.

Although a rough general consensus exists that Young’s inspiration came from printed news accounts, the precise details of the song’s genesis are slightly jumbled, both in Young’s telling and in the journalists’ accounts. The details of the jumbling may shed light on Young’s process in creating the song, so please bear with me for a moment through what may initially seem like a trivial point. It’s trivial in light of the gravity of the day’s events, but informative about song craft, empathy, and the murder ballad. I’m trying to figure out who the “her” is in the song, and why Young wants us to relate to her.

Cover of Life magazine May 15, 1970

You can view the Life story here. Time‘s online content doesn’t include the pictures, but I can’t find a picture neatly matching Young’s description in the physical copies of that issue I and my blogging friends have reviewed. Krause died at the hospital or on her way to it, so it’s almost certainly not her dead body that Young actually saw in the picture. I have looked extensively, and haven’t yet been able to find a picture of Sandra Scheuer as a victim of the shooting. Krause and Scheuer were the only female casualties that day. Only Scheuer and Miller died on campus. The only images of an injured Krause that I’ve been able to find (I think) appear just after the 3:00 mark in this video, and in this picture, Both are uncredited and didn’t appear in Time, to the best of my knowledge.

The point of exploring this detail is not to quibble with Young’s memory, but rather to pursue a possible insight on his artistic process–that his choice of the line “what if you knew her, and found her dead on the ground” can’t be traced simply back to an image he saw in the magazine. The lyric presents a listener with an image that was certainly true to the day, and surely true to someone’s experience of it, but the contrast between what he saw and what he wrote highlights a deliberate choice to invite the listener to imagine a female victim.  The supposed visual inspiration was one step removed from the best way Young could find to deliver the emotional content of the song. That best way was to call forth imaginatively what the papers and magazines appear not to have depicted photographically.

It’s possible that he just chose “her” over “him” as a more felicitous pronoun within the overall sound of the line. It could be that the “her” is the unnamed woman on the cover of Time above, although she doesn’t fit with Young’s statement in his memoir. What seems most likely to me is that he found “her” to pack more of a punch. Whether that’s because of the victim’s femininity or the presumption that a woman would have been more innocent or unthreatening within the conflict that day, we can only speculate.

Young’s factual accuracy over what picture inspired him matters far less than his emotional accuracy. This song is exceedingly emotionally accurate, and somehow that’s informed by Young’s decision in those two lines.

David Crosby

“The bravest thing I ever heard”

While I’m tempted to reprise more of the history of the song’s creation and release here, others have done so. I will direct you to a few of them, and move on to more of Young’s performances in this post, and look forward to addressing the reaction to the song in the next posts. Check here, here, and here for helpful sources on the creation of the song.

Young’s lyrics are few but incisive. David Crosby said that Young naming President Richard Nixon in the opening line was “the bravest thing I ever heard.” Students at Kent State were protesting the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, which Nixon’s administration ordered without Congressional approval. Nixon was not directly involved in the decisions that led to martial law at Kent State–it was Ohio’s Governor who had called out the National Guard. Nevertheless, Nixon’s presence looms over the song from the beginning.

Richard Nixon

By the time I first heard the song, or understood what it was about at least, Nixon had already resigned. It’s difficult, therefore, for me to imagine the true power of naming him in the song at the time, when he was popular with a large swath of the American public, and not stigmatized by the scandal that brought him down. The song both invoked and added to Nixon’s symbolic power, especially relative to “Ohio’s” theme of the painful realization that the State (the government) was no longer there to protect its citizens.

Some critics believe that the line “we’re finally on our own” refers to the new independence of the college student’s lives. That’s a possible reading, certainly, but seems less persuasive to me than reading it as Young’s declaration that government was no benevolent protector, and the illusion that it was had now been removed. Young appears to be arguing, rather, that the day reveals the violence inherent in political power.

In the liner notes to his collection Decade, Young wrote that the events of that day represented “probably the biggest lesson ever learned at an American place of learning.” That sentiment strikes me as consistent with this theme of abandonment and a political epiphany of the most excruciating and tragic kind.

In the next two posts, we’ll explore how “Ohio” felt for a few people close to the events of May 4, and ask whether it served more as an anthem to galvanize to a cause, or a requiem that mourned the loss, but ultimately diffused the rage. In the final post in this series, we’ll explore a few other musical responses to the events of May 4, 1970. Before I turn you loose on this one, however, and especially because we’ve gone on along without much music, I’ll leave you with a few more of Young’s performances of “Ohio.”

Recordings

After the 45 rpm single version listed above, which is also the version included on their 1974 anthology So Far, CSN&Y recorded this furious version of “Ohio” from April 1971 for their live release 4 Way Street.

On YouTube here.

Earlier that year, Young performed the song solo and with an acoustic arrangement at Massey Hall in Toronto.

Here’s the video of that performance on YouTube, courtesy of Warner Bros.

The song remains in Young’s repertoire. Here’s a performance from Farm Aid in 2010, with a highly-charged electric arrangement.

And, more recently, an acoustic performance from April 2014 in Chicago:

Finally, one more for today, a performance from CSN&Y’s reunion tour in 2000: CSNY2K, representing an anchor tune for the short-lived foursome. This arrangement leaves little doubt as to the martial musical antiphon to the marching soldiers. No live video here, but they clearly put all the passion into the song they had for it when it debuted 30 years prior. Crosby sings out “Why?!” with all the same urgency–as well he should.

Thanks for reading and listening. We’ll have more personal engagement and critical reflection on the song in upcoming posts, as well as some illuminating and powerful covers.