The Big Bend playlist: 30 great Ohio songs

In a 2013 Gallup poll, only one of three Ohioans said their state was “the best, or one of the best places to live.”

The top two were Montana and Alaska, with Ohio at 39th on the pride scale. While competing license plates, “Birthplace of Aviation” vs North Carolina’s “First in Flight,” make the case for invention, you could argue that for music, if there was ever any doubt, Ohio can go down as the deeply influential centerpiece that it is. From traditional folk songs passed down through small communities and the 1876 design of the Musical Telegraph by Elisha Gray to the dawn of early recordings that captured the voices of Bessie Brown and Una Mae Carlisle and onward another 100 years, the music’s grown and reshaped into the present. 

The only rule for the accompanying playlist was for each artist to have spent the majority of their early years in the state, along with some portion of their working career. Exceptions were made for the late Bobby Few and Albert Ayler (both grew up in Cleveland and they played together as teenagers), The Isley Brothers and Ruth Crawford Seeger, who were all either East Coast or expat bound, and who were too good to leave off the list. A lot of jazz, classical and experimental music (Golden Palominos, Elizabeth Bell, C. Spencer Yeh, Elliott Sharp) moved to New York, and almost all country and bluegrass to Nashville. However, for the purposes of this list, the artists included spent their musically formative years in the state and are more or less based in Ohio. 

The most significant contributions are in two categories. There’s a staggering amount of exceptional soul, funk and R&B music from Dayton and surrounding areas; the soul-jazz of Springfield’s Brute Force, Bootsy Collins’ psychedelic funk, along with the wildly successful Zapp and Ohio Players, as well as Platypus, Faze-O, Heatwave, Lakeside, Aurra and Sun. There were more charting R&B singles attributed to Dayton than any other city between ‘72 and ‘88. They lived on as source material for West Coast’s G-funk in the following decade, and still have a hand in present day hip-hop. A lot of influential late ’80s and ’90s rock also came out of the area – The Breeders, Brainiac, Guided by Voices, along with the Columbus trio Scrawl. 

The other major grouping is the early-to-the-party punk (Electric Eels in ’72) of Cleveland, with Pere Ubu and associated artists ‒ Peter Laughner, Rocket From the Tombs, Hy Maya and The Dead Boys ‒ The Styrenes, Mirrors, Akron’s The Numbers Band, Devo and a lot more. The adage, “Cleveland Rocks,” makes sense in this context; you can see a giant community of like-minded musicians well up around the city in the ’70s. 

Those two categories make up a lot of the list, along with segments of solo guitar music, Appalachian-rooted songs of Anne Grimes and Jean Dowell, music from Lorain’s Puerto Rican community, the 4-track recordings of Bill Fox, hip-hop and garage/bubblegum pop. Also worth noting is the great current music happening in Cleveland’s Mourning [A] BLKstar, the show tune-like ballads of Baby Dee, and Mansfield’s Afrxnts.

Some artists have been left off only for not being available on streaming services; the Alan Lomax collection of Captain Pearl R. Nye recordings, and Black Unity Trio (only available through Ohio’s eminent Gotta Groove). Also not included is a great deal of gospel, metal and hardcore throughout the state, as well as the vast northeast polka scene, bolstered by Youngstown’s Peppermint Studio. 

These 30 songs don’t scratch the surface of the overwhelmingly rich music that’s come out of the state, but hopefully it will get you to dig further. The playlist wouldn’t have come about without the wealth of knowledge of Chris Davis (Cherry Blossoms), Beth Piwkowski, and Brian Gempp (Required Wreckers).