Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts

What follows isn't really relevant to the vinyl transcription project but this blog is a place I can share such thoughts with the world. I wrote this several years ago and I posted it on some Dylan forum on the web, but I couldn't say where. I wouldn't be surprised if the site where I posted it no longer exists. At the time, I a fair amount of positive feedback on my basic premise. During the years since I wrote this, I've had some different ideas about the storyline but what follows is how I saw it back in around 2004, or possibly earlier.


An analysis of "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts" from Bob Dylan’s "Blood on the Tracks" (1975)


After listening to Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts for about the zillionth time, something clicked like a Colt revolver in my brain. While the following interpretation does not jive even closely with the summary of the screenplay as it appears on http://www.edlis.org/twice/threads/lily_rosemary_screenplay.html nevertheless, I thought it worthy of consideration. I operate from the assumption that none of the words are accidents. All are carefully chosen for their meaning.


"Lily was a princess, she was fair skinned and precious as a child.... She had come away from a broken home and lots of strange affairs.... She had two queens.... It was known all around that Lily had Jim's ring and nothing would ever come between Lily and the King…."


So Jim is the King and Lily was a princess. That means that Lily was Big Jim's daughter. Lily was playing poker and had two queens "and was hoping for a third to match her pair." Why two queens? Why not two ten’s or two eight’s? With Lily being a princess, the queens would refer to her mothers. Since we know that she came from a broken home, having two mothers (a mother and a step-mother) makes sense. But since Rosemary is referred to as "a queen without a crown", I surmise that Lily was Big Jim’s daughter from his first marriage and that Jim had dumped Lily's mother to shack up with Rosemary. (I think that foul play was involved in dethroning Lily’s real mother but that would just be gossip.) Clearly, Jim never made an honest woman out of Rosemary so it is not surprising that Rosemary grew "tired of playing the role of Big Jim's wife".


Everyone in town knew of Big Jim’s tendency to lavish jewelry upon his lady friends. The town’s people all said that Jim, "owned the town’s only diamond mine". Clearly, the diamond mine is metaphorical since diamonds are only mined in a portion of Arkansas and those are only crude industrial diamonds; not exactly the stuff of fortunes. Furthermore, Arkansas doesn’t exactly conjure up the impression of a boomtown hinted at by the song. After the break-up between Jim and her mother, young Lily left town and grew up moving around a lot. Rumor even had it that when Jim’s daughter disappeared, she took with her the ring that Jim had given to her mother. Eventually Lily wound up back in the town where her father was a big wheel. Somewhere out on the road, Lily met up with the Jack of Hearts and although she fell in love with the rogue, ("…which took her everywhere. But she'd never met anyone quite like the Jack of Hearts.") Sadly however, Lily saw Jack mainly as her instrument of justice. Lily dyed her hair to avoid recognition and got a job working in the dance hall that Jim frequented. Lily and Jack conspired on a scam that looked like a pretty simple bank heist. Jack and the boys were to clean out the bank safe, which contained mostly Big Jim’s fortune. But the money ends up being the least important part of the plan.


Lily turns out to be the mastermind of a quadruple whammy by engineering the situation so that 1) Big Jim would unleash his Colt revolver on Jack 2) leaving Lily with all the money. If getting your accomplice killed seems cold-hearted, remember that Lily, "…did whatever she had to do. She had that certain flash every time she smiled." Then 3) Rosemary, who obviously has a host of emotional problems but clearly had feelings for Jack, stabs Jim in the back after "drinking hard and seeing her reflection in the knife". Finally 4) the home-wrecker step-mother, Rosemary, winds up on the gallows to literally take the fall for the murder of Lily’s philandering father. It all gets even weirder if you consider that Lily who grows up and comes back as a dance hall girl would have doubled as a prostitute and could easily have been a lady of the evening for Big Jim. "He took whatever he wanted to and he laid it all to waste." That was where Jim saw a picture of Jack "upon somebody’s shelf."


"Nobody knew the circumstances but they say that it happened pretty quick." "’Has your luck run out?’ she laughed at him, ‘Well, I guess you must have known it would someday.’" Jack and the gang had gained access to the bank vault through the wall of Lily’s dressing room, hence the brand new coat of paint and "Down the hallway footsteps were comin' for the Jack of Hearts." Lily inadvertently tips Jack off that she has betrayed him by telling him that he is looking like a saint. Saints are all dead! Through Lily’s betrayal, Jim had discovered the bank theft and "The door to the dressing room burst open and a colt revolver clicked." Quite possibly Rosemary had tampered with Jim’s gun so that it did not fire properly but merely clicked. Regardless, Rosemary stabs Jim in the back with her penknife.


After the heist was over, Lily took "all of the dye out of her hair". Remember, she was fair skinned, right? The gang was on the outskirts of town waiting for Jack "who had business back in town" yet the next day was hanging day and "the only person missing on the scene was the Jack of Hearts". Jack’s luck had indeed held and he had made his escape but he recognizes that Lily had betrayed him. That leaves Lily, " thinking about her father who she very rarely saw, thinking about Rosemary and thinking about the law, but mostly she was thinking about the Jack of Hearts." Not bad for a day's work! Isn’t the justice system great? What a tangled up web we weave.