Bob Dylan campaigned for Rubin Hurricane Carter in song

Person: Bob Dylan
Lived: b. 1941
Field: Music
From: American

The story

Rubin Hurricane Carter was a middleweight boxer from New Jersey who had been ranked among the leading contenders for the world title. In 1966 he and John Artis were arrested for a triple murder at the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, and in 1967 they were convicted and given life sentences. Over the following years serious doubts emerged about the evidence, the eyewitness testimony and the fairness of the trial. In prison Carter wrote an autobiography, The Sixteenth Round, published in 1974.

Bob Dylan met Carter in prison and then met a group of his supporters. In the middle of 1975 he took up the case. With the playwright Jacques Levy he wrote Hurricane, a ballad of more than eight minutes that tells the story like a film script, from the opening pistol shots in a barroom to the courtroom, and argues that racism and profiling led to Carter's conviction. Dylan first recorded it in July 1975, then re-recorded it in October with altered lyrics after Columbia's lawyers raised concerns about some lines.

Despite its length, the song was released as a single in November 1975 and reached number 33 on the Billboard chart, one of Dylan's most successful singles of the decade. Billboard called it probably the most powerful song he had recorded in ten years. It opened his 1976 album Desire.

Dylan performed Hurricane at every 1975 date of his Rolling Thunder Revue tour, keeping Carter's name before audiences across the country, and the tour played a benefit for Carter at Madison Square Garden that raised $100,000. Carter and Artis won a new trial but were convicted again in 1976. In 1985 Federal Judge H. Lee Sarokin overturned Carter's conviction, ruling that the prosecution had been based on racism rather than reason and on concealment rather than disclosure, and in 1988 all charges were dropped.

After 18 years in prison, Carter became an advocate for others in his position, serving from 1993 to 2005 as executive director of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted, now Innocence Canada. His story also inspired the 1999 film The Hurricane, starring Denzel Washington.