Plagiarising the papers: Three songs Bob Dylan ripped from the headlines
No one can doubt that Bob Dylan is an original artist. However, throughout his career, he has cherrypicked from across the spectrum of popular culture to craft some of his works deemed amongst the greatest in popular music. This is understandable, as it’s a trend that all great artists have partaken in, whether it be Elvis Presley, The Beatles or Nirvana.
In his greener years, Dylan was hailed as his generation’s answer to the eminent protest songwriter Woody Guthrie, a man Dylan made no bones about loving. Unsurprisingly, during his protest-song era of the early-mid 1960s, the stylistic nods to Guthrie couldn’t be clearer.
Then, when he went electric on 1965’s Bringing It All Back Home, the debt to the era’s defining penchant for rock ‘n’ roll was front and centre, causing outrage amongst some of those who had been fans of Dylan’s when he was a purely folk artist. Famously, the record was so divisive that in 1966 a crazed fan tried to stab Dylan in Scotland, declaring him a “fucking traitor to folk music”. This is Bob Dylan, though; he was undeterred and pressed on into the future and a career best described as a creative odyssey. Later, Dylan would look to Christianity, reggae and other areas for inspiration.
One place that Bob Dylan has always had his eyes on is the headlines. Famous examples include analysing the socio-political upheaval of his day on earlier tracks such as 1965’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and revisiting the 1963 assassination of President John F Kennedy on one of his finest outings to date, 2020’s ‘Murder Most Foul’.
In Rolling Stone, back in 2009, Dylan’s biographer Clinton Heylin revealed some of the secrets to the troubadour’s best-loved songs in his then-latest book, Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan 1957-1973. Using excerpts from Heylin’s work, the piece peeled back the curtain on several tracks, including three that Dylan ripped from the headlines.
First mentioned was 1963’s ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, a song released on the 1964 album The Times They Are a-Changin’. The protest piece is an account of the Black Baltimore barmaid who was killed after being hit with a cane by a wealthy white tobacco farmer in 1963. Heylin asserts that in the song, Dylan got nearly every aspect of the incident wrong, from his description of Hattie Carroll and the attack to the trial’s details. “There are two types of Dylan myths,” Heylin said. “One is the myth that Dylan himself creates, and the other is the myth that fans create.”
The next song Heylin says his research found was ripped from the headlines was 1975’s ‘Hurricane’ from the following year’s Desire. The song is about the imprisonment of the boxer Robin ‘Hurrican’ Carter and a man named John Artis for a triple murder. It lists acts of racism and profiling against the athlete, which Dylan claims led to a false trial and conviction.
Notably, in October 1965, Dylan was forced to re-record the song after concerns were raised by the lawyers of his label Columbia that references to Alfred Bello and Arthur Dexter Bradley – the two key witnesses in the case – as having “robbed the bodies” could result in a lawsuit. After all, Bello and Bradley had not been accused of such acts in the case.
The other song Heylin notes as being taken from the headlines is ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’, another one from The Times They Are a-Changin’. This piece is written about the 1963 assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in Mississippi and offers Dylan’s support for the African Civil Rights movement.
The lyrics blame the killing and the broader racial violence of the time on rich white people in power who manipulated poorer whites into directing their anger towards their Black counterparts. The song posits that Evers’ murderer, Byron De La Beckwith, does not deserve to be remembered in history, unlike the “king” Evers, as the KKK member was “only a pawn in their game.”
Dylan performed the song as part of the March on Washington on August 28th, 1963, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. However, it only received light applause, suggesting that many in the crowd did not agree with the sentiment that exonerates Beckwith as just a poor white man manipulated by politicians and the social system, as he clearly wasn’t.
Nevertheless, despite being plucked from the headline, Heylin revealed all three songs also to be erroneous. “He’s very lucky that he didn’t get his ass sued,” he writes of ‘Hattie Carroll’. “I love the song, but it’s a shameful piece of writing.”
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