‘One time he could-‘a’ been, the champion of the world’: Bob Dylan's ‘Hurricane’ as protest song

Abstract

This article focuses on ‘Hurricane’, a song co-written by Bob Dylan (born 24 May 1941) and released in November 1975 on the Columbia Records label. The song details the imprisonment of an African-Amercian middleweight boxer, Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter (born 6 May 1937 in Delawanna, NJ) for a triple murder with accomplice John Artis in 1967. Like other examples of the ‘protest’ genre, ‘Hurricane’ explores versions of historic events, as does Rubin Carter's first autobiography The Sixteenth Round: From Number 1 Contender to Number 45472 (1973). The article begins with their creation as an intersection of popular music and sport to highlight inequalities in society. The second section considers more recent releases including a biopic, The Hurricane (1999) starring Denzel Washington and a second Carter autobiography Eye of the Hurricane: My Path From Darkness to Freedom (2011). Each is read as a multilayered text, reinterpreting the image of the fighter as his circumstances change from imprisonment to freedom.

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Corrigendum

Notes

^1. The eponymous album Kossoff, Kirke, Tetsu and Rabbit was recorded by Island Records in 1972 after Free disbanded and keyboards player John ‘Rabbit’ Bundrick formed a short-lived quartet with bassist Tetsu Yamauchi, drummer Simon Kirke and guitarist Paul Kossoff. It had limited critical or commercial success, except in our house.

^2. Williams, ‘Curious Mystery of the “Olimpick Games”’. These events, held from 1612, included music and poetry as pro-royalist statements of a right to leisure.

^3. Ellis, Historical Dictionary of Anglo-American, 54. The comment was reported by Maureen Cleave in the Evening Standard, March 4, 1966.

^4. Korr and Close, More Than Just a Game details the use of sports clubs as an important means of unity within Robben Island prison, South Africa, where Nelson Mandela was detained. A subsequent work is being developed on the musical collaboration of the prisoners to achieve similar aims.

^5. Birley, Social History of English Cricket, 319, cites the case of Gordon Ross who argued that one-day cricket was the pop-music version of the sport not followed by ‘true’ fans, as compared with three-day games which were equivalent to Mozart.

^6. Mandell, Nazi Olympics; Krüger and Murray, Nazi Olympics; and Hilton, Hitler's Olympics.

^7. Ezra, Muhammad Ali, 1.

^8. Zirin, The John Carlos Story.

^9. Cashmore, Making Sense of Sports, 432–3.

^10. Edwards, Revolt of the Black Athlete.

^11. Hoberman, Darwin's Athletes; and Sandiford, ‘Shooting Hoops Against Darwin's Athletes’.

^12. Johnstone and Norman, Race to Remember.

^13. Norman, Salute.

^14. John Ashdown, ‘50 Stunning Olympic Moments No.9: Cathy Freeman Wins Gold for Australia’, The Guardian, January 11, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport (accessed May 7, 2012).

^15. Beckles and Walcott, ‘Redemption Sounds’; and Williams, Cricket and Race, 132.

^16. The lyrics of all 11 verses of ‘Hurricane’ are available in Chaiton and Swinton, Lazarus and the Hurricane, 331–3.

^17. Lynskey, 33 Revolutions per Minute, ‘Prologue’.

^18. Doggett, There's a Riot Going On, 6.

^19. Lynskey, 33 Revolutions per Minute, ‘Prologue’.

^20. Bateman and Bale, Sporting Sounds.

^21. Scorsese, No Direction Home; and Pennebaker, Bob Dylan are two of the most notable recent documentary/biographies.

^22. Carter, Sixteenth Round. The book was first published as a hardcover by Viking, then by Warner as a paperback. There is also a recent new hardback edition by Lawrence Hill, an imprint of Chicago Review Press.

^23. Woolridge, ‘Mapping the Stars’.

^24. Taylor, ‘From Source to Subject’.

^25. Berkowitz, ‘Jewish Fighters in Britain’.

^26. Pipkin, Sporting Lives,14–15.

^27. Key texts exploring different aspects of imprisonment, including political and unjust confinement, include the following: Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy; Thoreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings; Wilde, De Profundis and Other Writings; Genet, Prisoner of Love; Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago; and Mandela, Conversations With Myself. See also Ben Myers, ‘Tough Sentences: Writing in Prison’, The Guardian, May, 16, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2007/may/16 (accessed September 28, 2011).

^28. Carter, Eye of the Hurricane.

^29. Dettmar, Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan.

^30. Carter, Eye of the Hurricane, 256.

^31. Russell, Popular Music in England, 3.

^32. Alison Flood, ‘Nobel Prize Odds A-Changin’ for Bob Dylan', The Guardian, October 4, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/04 (accessed October 4, 2011).

^33. Carter, Sixteenth Round, 4.

^34. Ibid.; Carter, Eye of the Hurricane, 46–7, is more conciliatory towards his family.

^35. Carter, Sixteenth Round, 70.

^36. Ibid., 185.

^37. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness; and Johnson, My Life and Battles. The latter is a translation of the 1914 autobiography Mes Combats and amalgam of autobiographical articles that appeared in La Vie Au Grand Air (1911).

^38. Carter, Sixteenth Round, 125; Carter, Eye of the Hurricane, 78–80, mentions little about his family.

^39. Chaiton and Swinton, Lazarus and the Hurricane, 335–6.

^40. Dylan, Chronicles.

^41. Rotolo, Freewheelin' Time, 53, 60–1.

^42. Russell, Popular Music in England, 12–14, outlines the overlap between topical ballads, labour chants, popular satires, spirituals and hymns that often saw new lyrics attached to well-known melodies. Lynskey, 33 Revolutions per Minute, 686–8, develops the same thesis with reference to anti-British messages during the American War of Independence and reveals ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ as a revised and reworded version of a British drinking song which in 1814 was called ‘The Defence of Fort McHenry’.

^43. Lynskey, 33 Revolutions per Minute, 53.

^44. Malcolm, Autobiography of Malcolm X. See also Perl, Malcolm X and Lee, Malcolm X.

^45. Dwight D. Eisenhower, ‘Military-Industrial Complex Speech’ in Public Papers of the Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960, 1035–40, H-Net, http://www.h-net.org/ ∼ hst306/documents/indust.html (accessed September 23, 2011).

^46. Richard Williams, ‘Tomorrow Is a Long Time’, The Guardian, August 10, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/aug/16/biography.bobdylan (accessed September 28, 2011).

^47. Richard Williams, ‘Suze Rotolo Obituary: Artist, Activist and Bob Dylan's Muse Who Resisted the Role of Handmaiden’, The Guardian, February 28, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/feb/28/suze-rotolo (accessed September 28, 2011).

^48. Bulson, ‘Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963)', 126–7.

^49. Boddy, On Boxing, 348–9.

^50. Mailer, Fight; and Boddy, On Boxing, 348.

^51. Christopher Ricks, ‘Just Like A Man? Bob Dylan and the Charge of Misogyny’, The Barnard Forum on Poetry and Poetics (Barnard University New York), February 8, 2011, http://english.barnard.edu/events/just-man-bob-dylan (accessed September 23, 2011).

^52. Boddy, On Boxing, 349–50.

^53. Haynes, I'm Not There used six actors to play phases of Dylan's life to further make the point.

^54. Oates, On Boxing, Back cover.

^55. Chaiton and Swinton, Lazarus and the Hurricane, 244–5.

^56. Lynskey, Horton, Hamilton, Carawan and Seeger, 33 Revolutions per Minute, 43–64.

^57. Chaiton and Swinton, Lazarus and the Hurricane, 182–3.

^58. Carter, Eye of the Hurricane, 122–3.

^59. Ibid., 132–3.

^60. Chaiton and Swinton, Lazarus and the Hurricane, 304.

^61. Algren, Devil's Stocking.

^62. Marwick, New Nature of History, 121–5.

^63. Griffin, ‘Sport and Canadian Anti-Apartheid Policy’.

^64. Monnington, ‘Politicians and Sport’, 125–50.

^65. Roberts, Guinness World Records, 191.

^66. Ibid.

^67. Ibid.