It took Neil Young fifteen minutes to write “Ohio,” in 1970, days after the National Guard opened fire on a group of antiwar protesters on the Kent State University campus. Young’s bandmate, David Crosby, had given him a copy of Life that included a grim portfolio of the massacre—including John Filo’s devastating, Pulitzer Prize-winning image of a teen-age girl wailing over the body of a dead student. Young wrote the song, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were in the studio in Los Angeles the next day. The track was recorded live. Young later recalled that Crosby cried after the final take. Atlantic rush-released “Ohio” that June, and, although it was successful, the song was banned by some radio stations for its withering rebuke of President Nixon’s Administration: “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming / We’re finally on our own / This summer I hear the drumming / Four dead in Ohio.” Considering how quickly it was written and recorded, it is no surprise that “Ohio” is such a simple song. The lyrics are so spare that Stephen Stills originally thought that it needed another verse. But its austerity is also what makes it one of the defining protest songs of the Vietnam War.
Recently, “Ohio” was thoughtfully reimagined by Leon Bridges, Gary Clark, Jr., and Jon Batiste, as part of a playlist curated by Spotify called “Echoes of Vietnam,” inspired by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s* new PBS documentary series about the era. (The playlist also features the Lumineers covering Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” The score for the series was composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.) The new version of the song from Bridges, Clark, Jr., and Batiste is nothing like the original. Heavy, barbed guitar riffs have been replaced by a doleful piano melody and minimal slide and acoustic guitar. The trio’s vocals condense C.S.N.Y.’s roaring harmonies into an aching, solemn, bluesy requiem for the dead. “This is something I’ve always dreamed of, coming together with these guys,” Clark, Jr., said in an interview about the project. “It’s powerful. Three young black men coming together and making good music and making a statement.”
Young has called “Ohio” his best cut for C.S.N.Y., and yet he still found it hard to believe that he had to write it. “It’s ironic that I capitalized on the death of these American students. Probably the biggest lesson ever learned at an American place of learning,” he wrote in the liners for his 1977 anthology, “Decade.” It’s hard to imagine a time when the country was more divided than it is now. But Bridges, Clark, Jr., and Batiste distill C.S.N.Y.’s frenzied disbelief and turn it into an elegy for our time. Their version of the song amplifies the power of the original by demonstrating just how familiar this sort of anguish and grief have become today, particularly in black America. “You learn a lot about the history of America through our wars,” Batiste added in the same interview. “It blows your mind to think that America can get to that place. I mean, we’re still in a place right now that’s unfathomable.”
*A previous version of this post misstated the director of the PBS documentary “The Vietnam War.”
