Banks of the Ohio

This 19th century murder ballad comes from a family of songs that goes back to British broadsides like "The Oxford Girl," in which a young man walks his sweetheart to the river, asks her to marry him and kills her when she refuses. In the American version the narrator, Willie, tells the story himself, and the chorus looks back at the life he had hoped for.

The first records came in 1927, by Red Patterson's Piedmont Log Rollers and by Grayson and Whitter as "I'll Never Be Yours." Ernest Stoneman, the Blue Sky Boys and the Monroe Brothers recorded it in the next decade, and Doc Watson sang it with Bill Monroe in 1963.