Banks of the Ohio

Banks of the Ohio is an American murder ballad, and like most of them it has no author anyone can name. The Traditional Ballad Index dates the earliest text it knows to 1915, and the story it tells is an old one: British broadsides of the eighteenth century, The Oxford Girl and The Berkshire Tragedy among them, tell a close cousin of it, a young man who walks his sweetheart out and kills her by the water, and some of those may go back to real events.

It reached records in 1927, when two string bands cut it the same year: Red Patterson's Piedmont Log Rollers in August as Down by the Banks of the Ohio, and Grayson and Whitter under another title. The Blue Sky Boys and the Monroe Brothers both recorded it in 1936, and the Monroe record is the one that carried it into bluegrass. Doc Watson sang it with Bill Monroe in 1963, and the folk revival took it up at the same time, so it is one of the few songs a bluegrass jam and a folk club both know.

At a jam it goes around sixteen bars, 1155 5511 1144 1511, and the verses, the chorus and the breaks all take the same chords. The Idaho Bluegrass Association's jam leader points out that only eight notes of the melody really matter, the long note at the start of every other bar, and that singers disagree about the notes in between. A break can take the same liberty, as long as it lands on those eight.

On a mandolin in G the melody lives on the A course, from the open A to the d at the fifth fret, with the open D course and the G at its fifth fret for the pickup. Each line is a long note and then three quick ones, so the break is mostly about what the right hand does while the tune holds still: a two note walk at the end of each long note, and a chord tone on the beat where a singer would still be holding. The bars after the D and C chords arrive are the ones where the break fills most, and they are the ones to slow down first.