“On The Banks of the Ohio” performed by Bill Monroe and the Monroe Brothers my initially gave me the impression that this was going to be a light-hearted song.  The guitar was especially bouncy and quick, giving the feeling of a cheerful story.  Not until I listened a second time, reading along with the lyrics of the song, did I realize it is in fact far from cheerful.  I then proceeded to listen to Johnny Cash’s version of the same song, recorded some 14 years later, and was given a very different impression.

The rendition performed by the Monroe Brothers features multiple vocal tracks as well as multiple guitar tracks.  The layers of audio create a lively melody, which highly contrasts the lyrics of the song.  These speak of a man killing a woman because she would not marry him.  Clearly it’s a pretty bleak story, and yet the music is far from dark.

The Johnny Cash cover, however, has a single vocal track and a single guitar track.  Cash’s guitar is done in the piedmont style and although it is still a bouncy tune, the speed and style in which it is played makes for a more somber sound.  This combined with Cash’s deep, almost haunting voice mirrors the elements of the lyrics.  They begin merrily but digress into a dark tale of murder.  Although they depict a bleak story, they are told plainly, without any point of specific emphasis on the gore of the story.  This raises the question of authenticity.   Did Johnny Cash choose to play the song the way that he did so that the story would have a more appropriate sense of regret, to sound more authentic? 

Upon examining the lyrics between the two versions I noticed several differences.  During the chorus, the Monroe Brothers sing the line “In my home we’ll happy be”, whereas Cash replaces that line with “In no others arms entwined”.  The latter gives a more intense sense of possession and ownership than the first.  Again we see a divergence in lyrics at the point in the song when the murder is being committed.  The Monroe Brothers version tells a quick bit about “her” getting led to the riverbank and pushed in the water and drowning.  Meanwhile, Johnny Cash describes the act of plunging a knife into her chest as she begs for mercy, which is, of course, denied.  Then he takes her body to dump in the river where he watches it float down.  He clearly chose to include slightly more morbid details, giving the story a different kind of meaning. 

Once again the lyrics appear to differ at the end of the song.  The last stanza from the Monroe Brothers features the sheriff who comes along to straighten everything out and arrest the narrator of the song, neatly tying up the end of the story.  After that there is one more repetition of the chorus, which is followed by a cheery guitar solo of sorts.  But Johnny Cash leaves out the verse with the sheriff entirely.  After he says a few remorseful lines about killing the girl he loved, he repeats the chorus once more and ends it saying the last line slower than unusual with one final slow strum of the guitar.

Such small differences as these prove to majorly affect the mood of the song.  While the Monroe Brothers rendition sounds almost like a cautionary tale, Johnny Cash tells a horror story of his greatest regret.  Why these artists chose to represent different aspects of the song is hard to say.  But both made it their own by excluding some parts, while including others.  This presents entirely different emotional qualities from of what is, essentially, the same song.  Multiple variations of the same song like this one is a classic example of what happens in folk music.  When the song has been passed through oral tradition it tends to become interpreted by different artists to mean a variety things.  As each musician covers an already existing song, they alter it slightly, presenting the aspects that they identify with.  By doing so, the practice of oral tradition is perpetuated in which a single song carries on many different meanings.