“Ohio” by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young

"Ohio" is Neil Young's furious answer to the Kent State shootings of May 4, 1970, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young put it out as a single with the wound still fresh. Young wrote every word and note, the band cut it at the Record Plant, and it hits like a newspaper headline set to a snarling guitar: plain-spoken, raw, all grief and fury.

The flip side was Stephen Stills's "Find the Cost of Freedom", and the pairing reached number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100. The studio take didn't land on an album until the So Far compilation in 1974, though a live version showed up on the double album 4 Way Street. In 2025 Rolling Stone put it at number 9 among the best protest songs ever written.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.