Sometimes, Bob Dylan writes music that enacts social change on a national, even global, level. Other times, Dylan’s music has effected change on an individual level, zeroing in on how broad injustices and societal failings affect the lives of average citizens. In the first week of 1976, a powerful protest song of the latter category peaked at No. 33 on the Billboard Hot 100. A modest placement by pop standards, but a significantly impactful one nonetheless.
The song, co-written by producer Jacques Levy, appeared on Dylan’s 1976 album, Desire. Opening the entire album was “Hurricane”, which recounted the trial of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a former champion boxer who was convicted of murdering three white people at the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey, in mid-June 1967. Dylan became aware of the case after Carter sent the songwriter a copy of his autobiography, which recounted how the prosecution framed him and his friend, John Artis, for crimes they did not commit.
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Carter’s story had a profound impact on Dylan, and he went to visit the boxer in prison. “The first time I saw him, I left knowing one thing,” Dylan later said, per Rolling Stone. “I realized that the man’s philosophy and my philosophy were running down the same road. And you don’t meet too many people like that.” Dylan and Levy wrote “Hurricane” in honor of the boxer shortly after that visit.
The eight-minute track is a classic and biting folk ballad, telling the “story of the Hurricane, the man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done / Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been the champion of the world.”
Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” Helped Reignite Interest in the Case
In the verse that describes a cop pulling Rubin “Hurricane” Carter and John Artis over “like the time before and the time before that,” Bob Dylan adds, “If you’re Black, you might as well not show up on the street ‘less you wanna draw the heat.” The lyric directly references the racist undertones that put Carter and Artis in their harrowing position. First and foremost, they didn’t commit the crime. Police profiled them for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then, when police brought the two Black men to the hospital where one of the victims of the attack was staying to identify them as the killers, the victim also said Carter and Artis didn’t do it.
As interest in the case grew following Dylan’s November 1975 release of “Hurricane”, a retrial took place in 1976. The prosecution once again blamed Carter and Artis for the triple murder. This time, successfully claiming it was retaliation for a Black man’s murder by a white man elsewhere that night. Finally, eight years later, a Newark judge overturned Carter’s conviction, citing, “The extensive record clearly demonstrates that the petitioners’ convictions were predicated upon an appeal to racism rather than reason and concealment rather than disclosure,” per Rolling Stone.
Dylan’s release of “Hurricane” helped elevate innocent Black men’s voices to a level they likely never would have achieved in a systemically racist judicial system. It was the law that eventually helped Carter and Artis go free. But Dylan was the squeaky wheel that got the grease, so to speak. That track proved the immense power that folk music—and our collective voices in the face of injustice—can hold.
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