A Bullet from the Back of a Bush

 The Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum is also, as is only fitting, a bookshop, and the other day there were a few books outside on offer at £1 each. One caught my eye immediately – The Still Moment. Eudora Welty: Portrait of a Writer by Paul Binding, a book I never knew existed. Naturally I snapped it up. 
  The Still Moment begins, arrestingly, with the murder of the black civil rights activist Medgar Evers outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, the town where Eudora Welty lived and died. Evers was shot from behind in a targeted attack by a white man, and his death caused an immediate outcry, sparking riots all over the Southern States. Welty's immediate reaction was to write a short story about the killing, writing it in the first person because 'I am in a position where I know. I know what this man must feel like. I have lived with this kind of thing.' The story, 'Where Is the Voice Coming From?', was written at one sitting on the day of Evers's death, and sent immediately to William Maxwell at The New Yorker. He decided to publish in the next issue, but it turned out that Welty's insight into the mind, motive and modus operandi of the killer was so uncannily accurate that details had to be changed for fear of prejudicing the case against the man who had now been arrested for Evers's murder. 'The route taken, the hour, the how and why of the crime – Eudora Welty had divined them all.'
  Welty's protagonist, exasperated by the attention given to a high-profile black activist in his town, decides to take the law into his own hands and get rid of him. He drives to his target's house late at night, parks his borrowed truck behind a tree, and awaits the man's return. The shooting exhilarates him – 'I was on top of the world myself. For once' – and he feels he has done his duty by his community, acting true to his own and that community's convictions. 'I done what I done for my own pure-D satisfaction,' he boasts, unrepentant, revelling in his notoriety, and facing arrest and the possibility of the  electric chair with equanimity. In the event, the real-life killer, one Byron de la Beckwith, was tried twice in Mississippi and acquitted twice when the all-white juries failed to agree. It was not until 1994 that he was finally convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. 
  The murder of Medgar Evers inspired Bob Dylan's 'Only a Pawn in Their Game' – not his best or most successful protest song, though it gets off to a cracking start – 'A bullet from the back of a bush Took Medgar Evers' blood...' (Oddly, and coincidentally, reminiscent of the opening of Geoffrey Hill's 'The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy' – 'Crack of a starting-pistol. Jean Juarès dies in a wine-puddle.'). Here is young Bobby singing 'Only a Pawn' at the March on Washington in 1963...

'One can, I think, safely say...'

 Although I am not by any means as ardent a Dylan worshipper as, say, Bryan Appleyard, I have for some while been getting almost daily Dylan-related items in my Facebook feed (also, for much less reason, Rolling Stones stuff). Usually the Dylan material is mildly interesting, if overlong, but yesterday came a splendidly pithy quotation from Mary Travers, of Peter, Paul and Mary fame: 
'One can, I think, safely say that the world fell in love with Bob Dylan's words before they fell in love with his voice.' 
Nicely put. One rarely comes across such delicately phrased, nuanced utterances in the music world – and what she says is very true. I remember the first time I heard the Dylan voice – on the radio, singing 'Blowin' in the Wind' – and even I, a broad-minded lad, was shocked by the sound. Nothing like it had been heard anywhere near the pop charts or mainstream radio, and even though I loved what I was hearing, it took me a while to get used to that raw, whiney, unmusical voice. I soon realised, however, that it was essential to the Dylan magic, as was apparent from the cover versions that were springing up everywhere: the more mellifluous the voice, the less effective the song. That voice, that guitar style and that wonderfully expressive harmonica playing – all belonged together and worked together magically to bring those songs fully to life. That is why Dylan's lyrics in isolation, on the page, are thin stuff compared to the fully realised song – and why it is ridiculous to call Dylan a poet, and supremely ridiculous to have given him the Nobel Prize for literature. He has been the supreme singer-songwriter of his generation, by a country mile – isn't that enough?