'Look at Miss Ohio'

 

Berea, Ohio

 

    At the start of my morning stretches — have to push this rotator cuff repair back to normalacy — I called up Apple music on my iPhone where I'd left off last night, at Gillian Welch singing "Look at Miss Ohio." Usually I'd progress to the next song; instead I backtracked to the beginning:

Oh me oh my oh

Look at Miss Ohio
She’s a-running around with her ragtop down
She says "I wanna do right, but not right now"

     Not sure what the song is about, exactly, but the terminology evokes the Ohio I remember, with beauty queens and tiaras, fun times and convertibles. I actually went out, once, with a high school classmate who had a red 1965 Mustang convertible — her father's, I assume. I remember the car well; the date, not so much.
     I'm a sucker for Ohio songs, which are distinct from Cleveland songs, like Ian Hunter's "Cleveland Rocks," — pressed into service as the theme song for the Drew Carey show, with its joyful burst into downtown, though they, sadly, cheaped out when it came to paying rights for the vastly superior original and hired an imitator.

     Ohio songs, like the state itself, are good but idiosyncratic, both stuck in certain eras and timeless, such as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's classic protest ,"Ohio," 
      Lately, like "Look at Miss Ohio," Ohio tunes are vaguer, less defined. The National's "Blood Buzz Ohio" has a weird, somber quality to it over driving drums.

I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees
I never married, but Ohio don't remember me

     I like bees, and Ohio certainly doesn't remember me. As for marriage, well, you can't relate to everything. Though looking at the video, the song seems to be about the miserable trudge of active alcoholism, which might explain its appeal to me. 
     Chrissie Hynde feels like she deserves a category of her own, with many references to her hometown of Akron, and "My City Was Gone," her classic spin on Thomas Wolfe's edict about the impossibility of going home.

 I went back to Ohio, but my city was gone
 There was no train station
 There was no downtown

     As with Chicago, "Cuyahoga" is a Native-American word that started out describing a body of water — it means "crooked river" in a language thought to be Mohawk — and then gets attached to the place around it, now the name of both the county containing Cleveland, and the river that runs through it. I never listened hard to R.E.M.'s "Cuyahoga" beyond its nostalgic tone. 

This is where we walked
This is where we swam
Take a picture here
Take a souvenir

       The line that touches me now, seeing that my home state has slid into MAGAland, is "Let's put our heads together/And start a new country up." Someone has to.
     Just being about Ohio isn't enough to save a song. Patty Griffin's "Ohio" is a droning dirge. Not even the talents of Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant are able to save it.
     There's only one way to end this. I wouldn't be here without Ohio State University, where my parents met in 1954. "The Buckeye Battle Cry" might not touch on the University of Michigan fight song, "The Victors," but it's the best we've got, and it'll have to do. "Our honor defend/We fight to the end." That sounds like a plan.

Downtown, Berea