Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Four Dead in Ohio

"Four Dead on Ohio" was written immediately after the Kent State Massacre, which took place on May 4, 1970. The song was originally call "Ohio" and its name was later changed. The song is unique and gutsy because it is only ten lines long that are repeated twice. This was a very courageous act made by Neil Young because he called Nixon out, who ordered for seventy seven Ohio National Guardsmen to storm the Kent State campus, where students were protesting the Vietnam War. Twenty eight of the seventy seven men started shooting when they reached the top of hill on campus. A total of sixty seven rounds were shot leaving four dead and nine others wounded. Some of the most moving words in the song for me are "what if you knew her and found her dead on the ground" because I feel like this really depicts the pain that the students felt on the campus that day. America was a place where they always felt they had the freedom to speak and express themselves but the shooting put everyone on edge and infuriated all who became aware of what the government was capable of. Below is one of the most famous pictures taken on that day and make me think only of those words that I shared with you earlier in this post. I have also uploaded a link where you can watch the music video, learn the words, and see images from that day and all of those who were affected and still grieve over the loss of their classmates.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI7-m919ynU

13 comments:

  1. My dad actually has a newer version of this song on a cd in his car. The funny thing is I can't seem to remember who it is by.

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  2. This is crazy! I used to go to Walsh which is only about 45 minutes away from Kent and I'd never even heard about this happening. Very intriguing.

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    1. This picture is unbelievable. I feel like the girl really expresses her pain just by her facial expressions.

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  3. This event alone summed up the anti-war effort on the home front. Despite who's fault the killings were, the fact of the matter is that it showed the clash between the youth of America and the government. America's youth was not willing to go to war to "stop the spread of communism."

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  4. I've never heard this song. That seems a bit excessive just because they disagreed. Where was their freedom of speech?

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  7. Before this I had never heard of this song, and once I looked at it more closely I found it interesting that it was written about the Kent State shootings.

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  8. I have never heard of this song before reading about it in your post. It is a very moving song and written all for a sad reason, I say this because people had to get killed and wounded for this to song to be made. Its terrible to think that because of a simple protest over the Vietnam War that four people were killed, that were students and on a campus. It made me very sad to learn about this.

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    1. This is a great picture to go along with one of your favorite lines in the song. It is sad that something like this had to happen.

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