Headline: Pop Matters, 5/17/2023
The fictions perpetuated by Bob Dylan:
1. His last name is Hardin, not Harding.
2. He was not a friend to the poor.
3. He shot and killed many honest men.
4. There is no such place as Chaynee County in the US.
5. All his 'helping hand' did was pull the trigger on anyone who pissed him off.
Lyrics: Bob Dylan
From the New York Times Book Review (5/31/2025)
The Texan outlaw John Wesley Hardin, on the other hand, was no fabulist. Burrough reveals the hero of Bob Dylan’s 1967 ballad to be a psychopath. “Literally,” Burrough writes, “a serial killer.” He shot Black men for little or no reason (even by the standards of the time, Hardin was a vicious, violent racist) and seems to have killed a man for snoring. He had already murdered as many as 24 people by his 18th birthday.
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