"Murder Most Foul" is a song by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, the 10th and final track on his 39th studio album, Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020). It was released as the album's lead single on March 27, 2020, through Columbia Records. The song addresses the assassination of John F. Kennedy in the wider context of American political and cultural history. Lasting 16 minutes, 56 seconds, it is the longest song he has released, eclipsing 1997's "Highlands" which runs for 16 minutes, 31 seconds.
In a statement released with the single, Dylan indicated that "Murder Most Foul" was a gift to fans for their support and loyalty over the years. The song's title comes from a line in Hamlet. In addition to members of Dylan's touring band, the song also features Fiona Apple and Alan Pasqua on piano.
The song was the first original music Dylan had released since 2012 and generated an enormous amount of commentary.
Background
Dylan began his career as a professional musician during the Kennedy administration and imagined having a humorous telephone conversation with the President in "I Shall Be Free", the closing song on his 1963 album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. Dylan told his early biographer Anthony Scaduto, however, that he wasn't particularly devastated by Kennedy's assassination: “I didn’t feel it any more than anybody else. We were all sensitive to it. The assassination took more of the shape of a happening. I read about those things happening to Lincoln, to Garfield, and that it could happen in this day and age was not too far-fetched. It didn’t knock the wind out of me. Of course, I felt as rotten as everyone else. But if I was more sensitive about it than anyone else, I would have written a song about it, wouldn’t I? The whole thing about my reactions to the assassination is overplayed”.
Yet Scaduto countered that, despite Dylan's denial, "the murder did have an enormous effect on him. He signaled that feeling to very close friends, and a couple of weeks after Kennedy’s death, Dylan gave a disastrous speech that indicated how much the assassination had troubled him. He went to the grand ballroom of the Hotel Americana in New York to accept the Tom Paine Award of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee for his work in the civil rights campaign”. In his highly controversial acceptance speech, given on December 13, 1963, an intoxicated Dylan admitted that he "saw some of myself" in Lee Harvey Oswald before he was booed and rushed from the stage. The speech was met with hysteria from the press, which led to Dylan issuing a written statement in which he clarified his comments without apologizing.
Dylan wrote about Oswald in his statement: “When I spoke of Lee Oswald, I was speakin of the times, I was not speakin of his deed if it was his deed. The deed speaks for itself but I am sick, so sick at hearin 'we all share the blame' for every church bombing, gun battle, mine disaster, poverty explosion, an president killing that comes about. It is so easy to say 'we' an bow our heads together I must say 'I' alone an bow my head alone for it is I alone who is livin my life...I do not apologize for myself nor my fears. I do not apologize for any statement which led some to believe 'oh my God! I think he’s the one that really shot the president'".
Composition and recording
When asked by historian Douglas Brinkley in an interview that appeared in The New York Times on June 12, 2020, if he had wanted to write a song about John F. Kennedy "for a long time", Dylan replied, "I'm not aware of ever wanting to write a song about J.F.K.” then reminded Brinkley that "Murder Most Foul" is about a crime, not a politician. When asked if he intended the song to express nostalgia, Dylan replied, "I don't think of ‘Murder Most Foul’ as a glorification of the past or some kind of send-off to a lost age. It speaks to me in the moment. It always did, especially when I was writing the lyrics out”.