What song did Bob Dylan write about Emmett Till?
The murder of Emmett Till remains one of the most horrific and contentious chapters in America’s history of racism. Notoriously, the 14-year-old African-American was killed by two white men and thrown in a river when holidaying in Mississippi on August 28th, 1955, after they accused him of disrespecting one of their wives. It was such a monumental moment that the tragic case has become a prevalent topic in music and broader popular culture since. The most notable instance in music was when Bob Dylan addressed the matter in one of the most profound moments in his protest period of the early 1960s.
What ensued after Till’s death caused the social fabric of America to fray ever further, with the tensions that had been bubbling for decades rearing their head. The mother of Till, Mamie Till Bradley – who from that moment on became a lifelong activist – exposed the world to America’s racism by holding an open-coffin funeral for her son, where his mutilated, bloated body was there for all to see. Not only did the unfettered barbarism of the country’s racism cause shock and fury, but the death of the teenager also led to questions regarding the validity of American democracy.
Tens of thousands attended Emmett Till’s funeral to view the open casket, with the image of his body quickly circulating in the Black and white communities in the US. This brought intense scrutiny of the lack of Black civil rights in Mississippi. Still, nothing changed, with the killers getting away without charge, in one of the most questionable moments in modern American jurisprudence.
Till’s murder catalysed the next phase of the civil rights movement, which would ramp up and force the country and world to take it seriously. In December of that year, the Montgomery bus boycott began in Alabama, leading to the Supreme Court ruling that segregated buses were unconstitutional. There was still much to do, but Till’s murder galvanised the civil rights movement. Only a matter of years later, Bob Dylan starkly addressed it in his track, forcing white listeners to grapple with the inherent injustice of their country.
What happened to Emmett Till?
The 14-year-old Emmett Till was born and raised in Chicago, and in August 1955, he vacationed with relatives near Money, Mississippi. At one point in the south, he spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, a white, married grocery store owner. What happened here has always been disputed. However, Till was accused of flirting with, touching, or whistling at Byrant. Allegedly, this violated the racist code of behaviour for Black citizens in the Jim Crow era of the South.
A few nights after the incident, Bryant’s husband Roy and half-brother JW Milam went to Till’s great uncle’s house armed and abducted the teenager. They beat and mutilated him before shooting him in the head and throwing his body in the Tallahatchie River. Till’s bloated body was discovered and retrieved from the water three days later.
In September 1955, an all-white jury found Bryant and Milam not guilty of the murder. Protected against double jeopardy, the two men freely admitted to the murder in a 1956 interview with Look magazine, confirming that they tortured and murdered Till. They received $4,000 for their story, a figure equivalent to roughly $40,000 today.
On April 27th, 2023, it was announced that Carolyn Bryant Donham passed away aged 88. During her husband and Milam’s trial, she famously testified that Till had grabbed her hand and propositioned her. Yet, in a 2008 interview, she retracted the claim, reportedly saying: “That part’s not true”.
This reappraisal of events caused the Department of Justice to re-examine the case, but when asked again by investigators, she denied that she had lied during the trial. She was never taken into custody over the events that led to Till’s death.
In June 2022, a search of the local county courthouse uncovered an unserved arrest warrant charging Bryant, Donham and Milam with the abduction. Whilst the warrant went public at the time of the case, the then-Sherrif explained to the press that he didn’t want to “bother” a mother with two young children.
In an unpublished memoir acquired by the Associated Press, Donham documented that she didn’t know what would happen to Till when accusing him (per BBC).
What song did Bob Dylan write about Emmett Till?
Dylan was not the first to write stark political songs, with him taking many cues from the eminent Woody Guthrie. However, his protest pieces were a stark departure from the era of holding hands and jiving, leading to his meteoric rise. In 1962, he wrote a plethora of important songs, including ‘The Death of Emmett Till’, a scathing analysis of America’s insidious racism.
Dylan recorded ‘The Death of Emmett Till’ for Marcus Witmark & Sons, one of the first two publishing companies he was on. Over the years, it appeared on an array of bootlegs, not receiving an official release until 2010, when it arrived on The Bootleg Series Volume 9: The Witmark Demos: 1962–1964. As diehard fans of the Duluth musician will know, it also featured on the 1972 compilation Broadside Ballads Vol. 6: Broadside Reunion, where Dylan was credited as Blind Boy Grunt.
In the song, Dylan recounts the murder, with his lyrics some of the bleakest of his career. He opens: “Twas down in Mississippi not so long ago / When a young boy from Chicago town stepped through a Southern door / This boy’s dreadful tragedy I can still remember well / The colour of his skin was black and his name was Emmett Till”.
Later ni the track, he fuses the horrific crime with his natural penchant for vivid poetry, singing: “Then they rolled his body down a gulf amidst a bloody red rain / And they threw him in the waters wide to cease his screaming pain / The reason that they killed him there, and I’m sure it ain’t no lie / Was just for the fun of killin’ him and to watch him slowly die”.
Typical of his style of the era, Dylan offered some hope moving forward. Concluding: “This song is just a reminder to remind your fellow man / That this kind of thing still lives today in that ghost-robed Ku Klux Klan / But if all of us folks that thinks alike, if we gave all we could give / We could make this great land of ours a greater place to live”.
Interestingly, when appearing on Folksinger’s Choice radio show in March 1962, Dylan revealed that his song was taken from Len Chandler’s ‘The Bus Driver’. Years later, he expanded on this point in his 2004 memoir Chronicles: “One of the most colourful songs had been about a negligent school bus driver in Colorado who accidentally drove a bus full of kids down a cliff. It had an original melody and because I liked the melody so much, I wrote my own set of lyrics to it. Len didn’t seem to mind.”
Revisit ‘The Death of Emmett Till’ below.
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