Bob Dylan– “Who Killed Davey Moore?”

I say as often as I can in doing this blog that our focus is primarily on the music and not as much on the death. Nevertheless, I still feel somewhat abashed in linking the stories of Marilyn Monroe and Davey Moore to a children’s nursery rhyme like “Who Killed Cock Robin?” (see this week’s first post here). Then I remember that it is not me who linked them, and that there must be something going on in the minds of the songwriters, singers, and audiences, that makes this connection intelligible and meaningful.

Pete Seeger

Here is Seeger’s performance of “Davey Moore,” introduced as “a completely different kind of elegy.”

 (You can listen to it on YouTube here, and you can hear Seeger’s studio version on Spotify here.)

You can hear the urgency and presence of the issue underlying the song in how Seeger attacks it. At the time of the Carnegie Hall performance, Moore had not been dead three months. His death had sparked an outcry, including an effort by then Governor of California Pat Brown to have the sport banned in the state. The in the ring death of a fighter the previous year had already sparked some national conversation about banning boxing.

Dylan first performed the song within a couple weeks of Moore’s death. The earliest available recording of it, from Spotify is found on the first disc of his Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3.

(On YouTube here.)

The box set notes to this performance explain:

“Boxer Davey Moore was knocked out by Sugar Ramos on March 23, 1963 and died two days later, having never regained consciousness. Just 18 days later at his New York Town Hall concert of April 12, Bob Dylan premiered “Who Killed Davey Moore?,” presumably having read about the response of those directly involved in the fight [gave] to Moore’s death in the newspapers. The song was featured in his set throughout the rest of the year and most of 1964. The performance heard here — from Carnegie Hall, October 26, 1963 — was scheduled for inclusion on the Bob Dylan in Concert LP. The song was forgotten when that project was aborted.”

Well, perhaps not exactly forgotten then. Dylan last performed the song at the historic Philharmonic Hall concert on Halloween Night, 1964. (We last featured this performance as the setting for Dylan’s duet with Joan Baez on “Silver Dagger.”) Here are Dylan’s lyrics, although you’ll note that they vary slightly between the two performances. No surprise there.

Unlike “Who Killed Norma Jean?”, which reprises the funeral roles of the original “Cock Robin,” merely implying complicity in Marilyn Monroe’s death, every aspect of Dylan’s performance–from the unrelenting ironic diatribe of the lyrics to the tone in which he delivers them–delivers an overt indictment against each and every one of the people denying responsibility for Moore’s death.

The full force of Dylan’s poetic fury unleashes in this stanza:

“Not me,” says the gambling man
With his ticket stub still in his hand
“It wasn’t me that knocked him down
My hands never touched him none
I didn’t commit no ugly sin
Anyway, I put money on him to win”

If you’re interested in learning more about the actual circumstances of Moore’s death, I can recommend no better source than this April 1, 1963 Sports Illustrated article by Morton Sharnik. It’s a remarkably crisp and moving piece of sports writing, and well worth the read. The full fight video is available on YouTube here. I have not watched the whole thing, or the end.

Suffice it to say that the fight was particularly fierce. As Sharnik aptly put it, “Ramos and Moore seemed
joined in a brotherhood of courage.” The specific injury that probably did more than anything else to lead to Moore’s death was that he hit the back of his head on a ring rope when he got knocked down at the end of the fight. This led to a gradual swelling at the brain stem from which he didn’t recover.

Davey Moore and Sugar Ramos, March 21, 1963

That Dylan kept this song in his repertoire for such a short time is part and parcel of his transformation from folk singer and protest singer to a singer-songwriter who charted the much wilder, interior territories of the human soul and human relationships.

Anthony DeCurtis, in his essay “Bob Dylan as Songwriter” encourages us to view even “Davey Moore” as moving away from supposedly obvious villains. DeCurtis writes that songs like “Who Killed Davey Moore?” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” shift “the focus away from individuals to larger but inevitably more abstract, social issues. If activists are often seeking to put a ‘human face’ on political issues that can seem difficult to personalize, Dylan often does the opposite–moving the focus away from individual people and specific events, and pointing to larger social causes and meanings. ‘The answer is blowing in the wind,’ indeed.” (The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan.) But, DeCurtis argues, Dylan doesn’t do this to diffuse responsibility to the point of meaninglessness. He adds “As Dylan points out, it is braver and more difficult to interrogate your own relationship to the heinous events of your age than to shield yourself behind bromides like ‘we all share the blame.'”

Perhaps we have three options to reconcile “larger social causes and meanings” with “interrogating your own relationship,” keeping in mind that this is an aesthetic question, not a jurisprudential one. First, we can blame the parties directly responsible. Alternatively, we can attribute the tragedy to forces beyond anyone’s control, where responsibility is so diffuse as to be meaningless. The third option, which strikes me as the most artistically alive, is to be somewhere in between–so that we can never comfortably say either “they did it” or “everybody is responsible, so nobody is responsible.” It is an option that is in many ways more politically animating than the first, but artistically forces the listener to think about responsibility in the deepest personal sense. How ought we be responsible to (not for) one another? It’s never wholly “them” or “everybody,” but somehow, and meaningfully, “us.”

Phil Ochs

Phil Ochs recorded his own elegy to Davey Moore. (Lyrics here.) It is poignant to listen to not only for its own sake, but also because it’s a reminder of the separate track Ochs’s career took. Ochs did not effect the same sort of artistic transformation that Dylan accomplished–from an outer politics to an inner. Ochs stayed a protest singer, and a good one. His “Here’s to the State of Mississippi,” which we covered last June, is a master class in biting social protest songwriting. The contrast between Ochs and Dylan may seem like a stray point, and it’s not intended to be an indictment of Ochs, who clearly had many demons to wrestle. It’s a contrast, though, that illustrates the value of Dylan’s continual self-reinvention. Sailing the ship of one’s art through a Scylla of folk purity and a Charybdis of earnest social protest was not an easy feat. Not that Dylan would have met the same tragic end as Ochs, but this transformation is what allowed him to be more than “The Voice of a Generation,” but a voice for generations to come.

Successors

The specific historical circumstances of the song, probably just as much or more than Dylan’s dropping it from his repertoire–the song was unavailable on an official recording until the “Bootleg” series started coming out in the 90s–made it so there are few cover versions of the song. Of the few I’ve found, I’d say that Boombox’s is the most enjoyable, if one can say that, on its own merits.

Here is their recording off of their 2005 album Visions of Backbeat.

The only YouTube versions of the song I can find are just extended instrumental grooves. It’s an intriguing contrast to the strident protest of the song to set it to a dance rhythm, but perhaps an effective way to reach new audiences.

Here’s a streamable version from their web site.

Dylan’s song has also been adapted to more recent causes as well, by amateur performers. Here’s an adaptation of the song to 2012’s Trayvon Martin tragedy, by someone identifying himself, wittily enough, as HoodieGuthrie. I don’t know that I can hope to find the lyrics for this. It’s fast paced, lyrically, and there’s a lot going on within it, (e.g., “but Jesus proved that the sinner and the one who pays don’t necessarily have to be one and the same…”). As you’re aware, we don’t often show these sorts of home movie clips, but this seemed worth making an exception.

Next up

In the next post, we’ll listen to another artist who asked “what’s the reason for?” in a song of another man who died too young.