Ohioana Sheet Music Collection
Link on the sheet music pictures to
learn more about the music and the lyrics.
The sheet music collection includes approximately 10,000 pieces of printed
music featuring Ohio composers, lyrists, performers, publishers, or Ohio as a subject.
Ranging from popular music to sacred hymns, with just about everything in between,
the collection includes operettas and orchestral scores; patriotic, war, and war
protest songs; minstrel songs; temperance songs; college songs; chant (Gregorian plain song);
ballads; tarantellas – all manner of song from silly ditty to solemn requiem.
Ohio has been the subject of many a song and Ohio appears as the single word title of music by both
Leonard Bernstein and Neil Young. Bernstein’s composition Ohio is from the 1953 musical comedy
Wonderful Town, which is based on the play My Sister Eileen. Neil Young’s Ohio
is a protest song written in response to the tragic May 4th shootings of four Kent State University
students in 1970 (recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young).
Another single title that is used for two very different pieces is Round on the End and High in the Middle: O-H-I-O.
The “riddle” of the song is easy enough, but its history as an Ohio college pep song can be confusing. Over the years,
the marching bands of both Ohio State University and Ohio University have performed two separate works using the title,
though the songs differ in both melody and lyrics. The words and music from the song
adopted by OSU are from Alfred Bryan’s and Bert Hanlon’s 1922 Broadway show, The Hotel Mouse.
The other tune of the same title was written in 1931 by Frank Crumit for his
alma mater, Ohio University. To add to the confusion, Crumit wrote OSU’s Buckeye Battle Cry (1919), and
though that song’s popularity led the university to award him an unprecedented honorary Varsity O, he never attended OSU.
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