The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest

"The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" is a song on Bob Dylan's 1967 album John Wesley Harding. He has performed the song live in 1987 (with the Grateful Dead), 1988, and 2000.

The ballad is the longest song on John Wesley Harding, and it is without chorus, bridge, or refrain to vary its structure: just several verses plainly spoken by Dylan. Like the rest of the album, the instrumentation is very sparse, the lyrics are evocative, inviting interpretation as an allegory. The story has a character named Frankie Lee responding to suggestions and temptations from a certain Judas Priest. Frankie Lee eventually dies "of thirst" after spending 16 nights and days in a home with 24 women inside, supposedly a brothel.

In his 1998 book Don't Think Twice, It's All Right, Andy Gill analysed this song, writing:

The early verses, in which Frankie agonizes over Judas' offer of money, presumably echo Dylan's recent contractual negotiations, or those earlier in his career: certainly Judas' attempt to rush Frankie into a hasty decision "before [the dollar bills] all disappear" closely reflects standard negotiating practice in the music business. As, indeed, does Judas' dangling of carnal carrots to help sway Frankie's mind, in the form of the brothel in which he eventually exhausts himself. To Frankie, such worldly delights are represented as "Paradise," though the devilish Judas recognizes their true price is "Eternity" - Frankie's mortal soul.

Unusually for a Dylan song, "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" seems to end with an explicit moral, telling the listener "the moral of this story, the moral of this song, is simply that one should never be where one does not belong", to help one's neighbor with his load, and "don't go mistaking Paradise/for that home across the road." These closing lines, practically a non sequitur, are of debatable sincerity.