The songs Bob Dylan wrote about real people
Poets look everywhere for inspiration, and Bob Dylan left no stone unturned when it came to his various artistic muses. The injustice of war, great loves, and Biblical characters all feature in Dylan’s work, the crucial creative unpinning for his folky melodies. But sometimes, a dose of reality provided the most intriguing stories.
Prominent examples include Dylan’s eponymous odes to the likes of Blind Will Mctell, John Wesley Harding, and Lenny Bruce. Major historical events have often provided Dylan with songwriting fire and made him the counter-culture voice of a generation – but more often than not, the figures involved in them are what overtake his interest.
While Dylan shifted away from penning protest anthems in the mid-1960s, ‘Hurricane’ marked his return to them in 1975. After meeting with boxer Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter in prison, Dylan penned the song, insisting racism had led to his wrongful imprisonment for homicide: “Here comes the story of the Hurricane/ The man the authorities came to blame/ For somethin’ that he never done/ Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been/ The champion of the world.”
While his artistic take on real-life stories were often well-received, his take on the 1963 death of Hattie Carroll drew some criticism for inaccuracies, prompting Dylan’s own biographer, Clinton Heylin, to say he was lucky he never faced a lawsuit. ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ charted a violent, racist attack on Carroll that resulted in William Zantzinger serving a brief prison sentence. But Dylan misspelt Zantzinger’s last name and misrepresented a few details from the trial in his efforts to commit the tale to song.
It has always been clear that racism deeply moved Dylan, having performed ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’ at the March on Washington in 1963. The song is written about the assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers, and Dylan performed it right before Martin Luther King’s speech. He told Rolling Stone: “To this day, it still affects me in a profound way”.
Another high-profile murder that rocked America was the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which inspired Dylan’s longest song. ‘Murder Most Foul’ from 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways spends nearly 17 minutes covering the “infamy” of that day, with Dylan singing that “President Kennedy was a-ridin’ high / Good day to be livin’ and a good day to die”.
But as always, it’s the personal relationships that build the most beautiful Dylan songs. Whether inspired by failed romances or lost friendships, it all makes moving songwriting fodder, and John Lennon’s death was one such song. ‘Roll on John’ was a tribute to Lennon, whom Dylan had befriended in the ‘60s.
It was a poetic reflection of his life and music: “From the Liverpool docks to the red-light Hamburg streets/ Down in the quarry with the quarrymen/ Playing to the big crowds, playing to the cheap seats/ Another day in the life on your way to your journey’s end.” But it was also a testament to his ability to not only weave through history and write about its cultural touchstones but spin great personal loss into a great, universally loved song.
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