The Tragic True Stories Behind These 5 Bob Dylan Songs

Even from the very early days of his career in the 1960s, Bob Dylan was frequently called the "voice of a generation." Beginning as an acoustic guitarist and harmonica player, Dylan worked firmly in the folk tradition, emulating his hero Woody Guthrie in writing potent protest songs that managed to capture the spirit of the age. Many of these, such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'," are timeless and to this day are considered anthems of progressive grassroots political movements even as they remain definitive of the upheavals of the 1960s.

But Dylan wasn't just a master of grand statements. Like Guthrie, his subjects were often specific and related to historical events that moved him to write, several of which he would perform at protests for causes he believed in. Here are five tragic Dylan tracks and the real-life stories they are about.

Bob Dylan's sophomore album, "The Times They Are a-Changin'," was released in 1964. The album eclipsed his self-titled debut, which bar two songs, was made up of folk and blues standards showcasing Dylan's precocious songwriting talent and understanding of the American political landscape.

The album contains the song "Only a Pawn in their Game," the subject of which is the horrifying murder of Civil Rights activist and NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers. He was shot from behind and killed by white supremacist Byron de La Beckwith on June 12, 1963. Beckwith was tried three times for the killing as a result of hung juries despite a wealth of evidence demonstrating he was responsible and was only convicted of murder 31 years after the crime took place. In the song, Dylan places Beckwith's detestable actions in the context of the systemic racism that was still in effect in the era in the form of the Jim Crow laws and other policies of subjugation.

Dylan performed "Only a Pawn in their Game" at Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 March on Washington, the occasion of the Civil Rights leader's famous "I Have a Dream" speech. The event was deeply moving for the young Dylan, who was an ardent supporter of the cause. In Martin Scorsese's 2005 documentary "No Direction Home" the songwriter recalled: "I looked up from the podium and I thought to myself, 'I've never seen such a large crowd ... I was up close when King was giving that speech. To this day, it still affects me in a profound way" (per Rolling Stone).

Among the very first songs written by Bob Dylan was "The Death of Emmett Till," a response to the horrifying story of the racially motivated torture and lynching of a 14-year-old Black boy in Mississippi in 1955. Originally intended for potential inclusion on "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan," the studio recording is little known outside the collections of Bob Dylan completists — it existed only as a bootleg until its eventual official release on "The Bootleg Series Vol. 9" in 2010 — and is not considered among the songwriter's best work. However, experts claim the song laid the groundwork for a later more accomplished song, "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," that Dylan would record for "The Times They Are a-Changin'" in 1964.

Hattie Carroll was a 51-year-old Black woman and mother of 11 who in 1963 was working at the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore when she died after being attacked by a white drunken guest named William Zantzinger. Zantzinger had become enraged after Carroll had asked him to wait a moment for his drink, after which he racially abused her and struck her with his cane somewhere along her neck and shoulder. Shortly thereafter, she collapsed. By the next morning, she had died of a stroke in the hospital. Though Zantzinger was initially charged with murder, the charges were reduced to manslaughter since the defense posited that Carroll's poor health was a factor in her death. He was sentenced to just six months in prison for the slaying. Dylan's contempt for the justice system as well as the killer is palpable in the song.

1975's "Hurricane" rose to number 33 on the Billboard charts, making it one of the most commercially successful of his protest songs and representing another high point in his career which had been rocked by the release of his much-derided double album "Self Portrait" five years earlier. Written in collaboration with Jacques Levy, "Hurricane" tells the story of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, a talented Black boxer from Paterson, New Jersey who would find himself implicated in a shooting at the city's Lafayette Bar and Grill in 1966, for which he would spend two decades behind bars.

The shooting of four white victims, two of whom died, became the basis for the prosecution's claim that the attack constituted racial revenge. Carter and an accused accomplice, John Artis, were sentenced to life in prison. In 1974, Carter published a book that he had written behind bars, titled "The Sixteenth Round," which argued his case that he had been the victim of a prejudiced judicial system and that he was innocent.

Dylan was convinced by the book, and went to meet Carter in prison. As a result, he became the boxer's most visible supporters, organizing two "Night of the Hurricane" concerts to rally support. It took two retrials to get Carter out of prison. He regained his freedom in 1985, and went on to found Innocence International in 2004 to campaign on behalf of wrongly accused prisoners.

Bob Dylan's career was just entering the big time when on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed while his motorcade was passing through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. The event was seismic for the American people, with Earl Warren telling the nation during his eulogy for Kennedy: "There is nothing that adds shock to our sadness as the assassination of our leader, chosen as he is to embody the ideals of our people, the faith we have in our institutions and our belief in the fatherhood of god and the brotherhood of man" (per The John F. Kennedy Library).

It might have been expected that Dylan, an artist who seemed so in tune with the feelings of many Americans, would use the horrifying event as inspiration for a song. However, the fact was Dylan was in the process of moving away from the overt political and socially-minded songs for which he had grown famous. It took him more than 50 years to address the assassination with the song "Murder Most Foul," a 17-minute epic released on his 2020 album "Rough and Rowdy Ways."

Dylan's epic song doesn't just paint the assassination as a tragedy; it contextualizes it as the catalyst for the countercultural explosion that was to follow. Released at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, "Murder Most Foul" has been interpreted as a timely portrayal of how society at large processes traumatic events.

Bob Dylan first performed the song "Roll On John" back in 1962. That version was simply a traditional folk song, which for decades the song was a footnote in Dylan's discography. That all changed in 2012, when "Roll On John" re-emerged as the title of the final track on Dylan's well-received studio album "Tempest."

Whereas the first version is concerned with a love affair, the new version is undoubtedly about Beatles songwriter John Lennon, whose murder in New York on December 5, 1980, shocked music fans around the world. The Beatles were hugely inspired by Dylan's work: Lennon in particular turned toward more Dylan-esque songwriting in the form of "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" and "Norwegian Wood," the latter of which Dylan answered playfully with "Fourth Time Around," and famously "went electric" in 1966, as a result of rock's commercial dominance. Dylan met the Beatles in August 1964 and is credited with introducing them to cannabis.

Dylan and Lennon had a complicated relationship. They only met a handful of times, and their encounters were generally too awkward to be considered a true friendship. Lennon even took to disparaging Dylan's music in the 1970s after the dissolution of The Beatles. However, as critics Scott Beauchamp and Alex Shephard have argued in The Atlantic, by harking back to the traditional folk song that inspired its title, Dylan memorializes Lennon as a mythic figure, a folk hero of the rock 'n' roll age.