"Murder Most Foul" is a song by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, the 10th and final track on his 39th studio album, Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020).

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.

[14] 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.

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.

[17] Dylan scholar and musicologist Eyolf Ostrem notes in an essay on his website that while the song may give a first impression of being musically "formless", it is actually "strictly structured".

[20] Some commentators have interpreted the song as Dylan asserting that the assassination of John F. Kennedy was the result of a conspiracy of individuals and not Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone.

[21] Other critics, and even some of Dylan's fellow artists, however, have noted that, in spite of the specificity of many of the lyrics (e.g., "They blew off his head while he was still in the car"), "Murder Most Foul" ultimately seems to be less about the assassination of John F. Kennedy than the cathartic power of art in times of collective trauma.

[22] According to John Barry of the Poughkeepsie Journal, this made the song a particularly fitting release in the early days of lockdowns precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic: "Framing the lyrical narrative of 'Murder Most Foul' is the assassination of Kennedy, which is perhaps Dylan's reminder that we are turning the coronavirus corner right now and things will never be the same, just as the world turned a corner when Kennedy was shot on Nov. 22, 1963".

It is as though it has traveled a great distance, through stretches of time, full of an earned integrity and stature that soothes in the way of a lullaby, a chant, or a prayer".

[27] Dylan issued a statement on his website and via social media on the day that the single premiered calling it "an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find interesting".

[31] National Public Radio (NPR) described the song as "unfold[ing] slowly over a delicate instrumental backing of violin, piano and hushed percussion.

[33] Writing in The Guardian, Ben Beaumont-Thomas felt that the song described Kennedy's assassination in "stark terms, imagining Kennedy being led to the slaughter like a sacrificial lamb ... they blew off his head while he was still in the car / shot down like a dog in broad daylight'" and that Dylan created an "epic portrait of an America in decline ever since" with a form of salvation available in popular music with references to the Beatles, Woodstock and Altamont festivals, the rock-opera Tommy by the Who, Charlie Parker, Guitar Slim, Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Warren Zevon, Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, Little Walter, Carl Wilson, Queen and others.

Dettmar continued, however, in a more favorable tone, saying that after the first ten minutes "something amazing happens: Wolfman Jack shows up and starts to play tracks".

He stated that the last seven minutes of the song closely resembles a playlist "from one of the Theme Time Radio Hour shows that Dylan hosted from 2006 to 2009."

Dettmar admired the "ecumenicism" of the playlist the song has become, mentioning the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Stan Getz, Patsy Cline, the Everly Brothers, John Lee Hooker, the Animals and the Who.

[38] While reviewing Rough and Rowdy Ways in his "Consumer Guide" column, Robert Christgau said the track "sums up the musical grave-robbing Dylan has been transmuting into original art for 60 years now" while providing "an apt summum" to the album's "elegiac retrospective", "despite its excessive length and portentous isolation on the CD package".

He concluded that, within the context of the album, it is "both an elegy for and a celebration of all the dark betrayals, stunted gains, enduring pleasures, and ecstatic releases of an American era Dylan has inflected as undeniably as any artist even if he doesn't understand it any better than you, me, or whoever killed imperfect vessel JFK".

In an article accompanying the list, Simon Vozick-Levinson addressed the song in the context of Dylan's having won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016: "The specific names he asks the late Wolfman Jack to play on his cosmic radio hour are less important than the sheer quantity of them.

As the final verses roll on, he sounds like he's naming every song he can before we forget them, inscribing them all in a Book of Life expressed in the form of a midnight playlist".

Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, a one-record pop explosion, where a record appears and in an instant it can feel as if the whole world is listening, talking back, figuring it out, and playing with it as if it's a cross between the Bible and Where's Waldo?.

[42] In addition to being widely acclaimed by critics, "Murder Most Foul" has also been highly praised by many of Dylan's fellow artists, including Neil Young, who called it a "masterpiece",[43] Chrissie Hynde, who said, "It really knocked me sideways",[44] Nick Cave, who called it one of Dylan's "great songs",[45] Iggy Pop, who cited it as one of the highlights of the "album of the year",[46] and Elvis Costello and Margo Price, both of whom said it brought them to tears.

[47][48] Bruce Springsteen called the song "timely and epic" after playing it on the fifth installment of his Sirius XM satellite radio show, From His Home to Yours.

David Byrne, Pulp's Jarvis Cocker, Ride's Andy Bell and Devendra Banhart all selected "Murder Most Foul".

Dylan seems to be creating a link between two disparate events of national tragedy while also adding Roosevelt to the list of U.S. Presidents referred to on Rough and Rowdy Ways (along with Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in "Murder Most Foul", William McKinley and Harry S. Truman in "Key West (Philosopher Pirate)" and Abraham Lincoln in "I Contain Multitudes").

[55] The line "There's three bums comin' all dressed in rags" refers to the "three tramps" who were photographed by several Dallas-area photojournalists shortly after the assassination of JFK and who became the subject of conspiracy theories about being involved in the killing.

Some critics believe that Dylan's addition of "to the scene of the crime", however, may be a secondary reference to the Tulsa race massacre in 1921, a national tragedy that, like JFK's assassination, engendered collective trauma.