Bob Dylan and the boxer – New York, 1964

Everybody has their favourite Dylan moment. Perhaps it is the thin, mercurial sound of Blonde on Blonde; or the world weariness that weighs on Blood on the Tracks; or even the righteous, fiery indignation burning within Bringing it all Back Home.

My personal favourite is found on Dylan’s 1974 live album, Before the Flood, when he sings, “even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked” and the crowd goes completely ballistic; Before the Flood being recorded at the height of the Watergate scandal. All these moments are examples of a musician capturing an energy few have ever hoped to equal.

Anton Newcombe, lead singer of The Brian Jonestown Massacre, said it best when he quipped that all the words uttered by Dylan could be summed up in just one: “hey”. Dylan turned heads, pricked ears and wracked minds – and often did so within the space of a three-minute song. His music, political at heart, never subscribed to a manifesto; but his words, often pointed and scathing, always fought for the underdog. Those without a voice could find one in Dylan’s recordings.

Hurricane, a song which documents the racial injustice of boxer Robin ‘Hurricane’ Carter’s incarceration, is often cited as Dylan’s finest protest song. It is certainly his most catchy and addictive; his words simply tumbling over each other as he chases his angry message home. But the past year I have found myself increasingly drawn to a little known song, found on The Bootleg Series: Volume 6: Live 1964, called Who Killed Davey Moore?

Never recorded in a studio, Who Killed Davey Moore? was left as a live favourite, often finding itself on Dylan’s set lists in the early 1960s. It is a folk protest song. On the surface, there are immediate similarities to the later Hurricane. Davey Moore was an American boxer, short in stature at five feet and two inches, whose life ended after sustaining heavy brain damage during a gruelling fight with the Cuban pugilist Sugar Ramos.

But in contrast to the blunt wordage that sears through the lines of Hurricane, the young Dylan is more subtle, more mature when decrying the tragedy of Moore’s short life. His finger is pointed with disdain at society, true, but it does so in silence. The nearest Dylan allows himself to the crime scene is the simple refrain: “Who killed Davey Moore?” It is a distant, refreshing and objective stance, and one that is sorely lacking in his later material (one is reminded of the righteous Bringing it all Back Home, when Dylan often seems to be giving his sermon upon on a mount).

Recorded live in New York, 1964 the youth simply leaves his audience to decide. “Who killed Davey Moore/ Why and what’s the reason for?”

“Not us”, says the angry crowd
Whose screams filled the arena loud
“It’s too bad he died that night
But we just like to see a fight
We didn’t mean for him to meet his death
We just meant to see some sweat
There ain’t nothing wrong in that
It wasn’t us that made him fall
No, you can’t blame us at all.”

The singer calmly documents a society that avoids taking responsibility – for to do so would mean looking into the mirror. Nobody is responsible. Not the referee, nor the Cuban. Not Moore’s manager, nor those placing bets on the outcome of the fight. It is a society founded on denial, on indifference. It is a society that refuses to answer questions. Significantly, Dylan finishes just as he starts, singing the refrain “Who killed Davey Moore? Why and what’s the reason for?”

It is a question still left unanswered to this day. And it is a question that still turns our heads, pricks our ears – and wracks our minds.