Lyrically Speaking: Decoding Bob Dylan’s ‘Hurricane’
For a whole year in 1962, at the tender age of 21, Bob Dylan undertook the rather daunting task of writing about injustice for a whole year. “Songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment,” he writes in his memoir. “They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality. Some different republic, some liberated republic.”
During that year, he asserted himself as a unique sensation. Dylan was certainly not the first to stand aside from the stream of songs about holding hands and dancing the jive; pop-culture era folk was born on the frontier search for timeless authenticity, but all too often it wasn’t timeless at all—it mistook the word as something that only plays backwards. Whereas Dylan’s tracks that sprung forth in 1962, like ‘The Death of Emmett Till’, were not murder ballads from a bygone era, but rather a disdainful look at the slaying of a black man in 1955, and the echoes that cast through the forthcoming Civil Right Movement.
However, this all took a heavy toll on such young shoulders, so once he had set the revolution underway, he slunk into the shadows to reclaim his youth. His songs, on the surface, became less socially conscious. Alas, this did not mean that he had abandoned the causes he first song about, and he made that very clear when he saw an injustice that he could do something about with 1976’s ‘Hurricane’. The song documents the case of Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter with pointed reportage, illuminating the racial prejudices at the heart of the American justice system.
On June 17th, 1966, three white people were fatally shot at a bar in Paterson, New Jersey. After two witnesses described two black men as the possible perpetrators, the police scoured the surrounding area. They soon pulled over a young boxing hopeful called Rubin Carter and his passenger John Artis. They did not fit the description provided but were arrested all the same. Due to insufficient evidence, no charges were brought against the men, and they were released. Carter returned to pursuing his promising boxing career.
However, on the basis of the testimonies of two white career criminals who became tied to the case – Arthur Bradley and Alfred Bello – after they were found travelling with weapons in the area but insisted they were en route to rob a factory, Carter was sentenced to 30 years to life and Artis received 15 years to life. Meanwhile, Bradley and Brello got severely reduced sentences for “playing ball with the law”.
While imprisoned, Carter began working on his memoir documenting the injustice he faced. He sent a copy of The Sixteenth Round: From Number 1 Contender to Number 45472 to Dylan. The folk star read the book and decided to take up his cause. He set about raising money for his defence by pledging revenue from his Rolling Thunder Revue tour and writing a song that would provide a case for Carter’s innocence.
Not content with half-baking a poetic pine for justice, Dylan decided to offer up the most comprehensive protest song in music history. So, Dylan teamed up with a fellow songwriter who had a strong interest in the case, Jacques Levy, and together they set about piecing together the narrative of what happened that day.
As Levy would later tell Clinton Heylin: “Bob wasn’t sure that he could write a song [about Carter]… He was just filled with all these feelings about Hurricane. He couldn’t make the first step. I think the first step was putting the song in a total storytelling mode. I don’t remember whose idea it was to do that. But really, the beginning of the song is like stage directions, like what you would read in a script: ‘Pistol shots ring out in a barroom night…. Here comes the story of the Hurricane.’ Boom! Titles. You know, Bob loves movies, and he can write these movies that take place in eight to ten minutes, yet seem as full or fuller than regular movies.”
With this script-like format set in place, Dylan documented every detail he could in defining the arc of the story. This arcing narrative sense provided two important assets to the song: it allowed him to fill the song with specifics that openly pointed towards exonerating Carter, but the overarching tale clearly corroborated wider injustices and racial biases. This secondary point meant Dylan could litter the track with literary devices to grab you into the tale and make you realise the wider consequences. Thus, at times it might be shocking – for instance, his use of the n-word – but this is all to ram home the unflinching point of prejudice not just against Carter but persecuted minorities in general.
As a result of the song’s ability to raise both awareness of the case and funds for Carter’s defence, there was a retrial in 1976. However, this failed to secure justice for Carter and Artis—they were once again found guilty. But the beauty of the timeless song was that it wouldn’t let the case go away. So, in 1985, having reassessed the evidence, Federal Judge H. Lee Sarokin ruled that Carter and Artis had not received a fair trial. He deemed the prosecution had been “based on racism rather than reason and concealment rather than disclosure.” After 19 years, Carter and Artis were finally released rendering Dylan’s track one of the most influential – in a positively literal sense – in history. Its message continues to resonate.