“Ballad of Hollis Brown” is a blues song written by Bob Dylan, released in 1964 on his third album The Times They Are A-Changin’. The song tells the story of a South Dakota farmer who, overwhelmed by the desperation of poverty, kills his wife, children and then himself. (More from Wikipedia)
This month’s Under-Appreciated Rock Band, HOLLIS BROWN is not a person, but the name of a band. It is taken from the name of a Bob Dylan song, “Ballad of Hollis Brown”.
Mike Montali, lead singer of Hollis Brown has stated: “Well, I guess naming our band after one of his [Bob Dylan’s] songs is kind of like wearing your heart on your sleeve. I personally think he’s the greatest artist of the 20th century. It’s strange because although we are big fans, we also are influenced by so many other things that we don’t want to get pigeonholed as folk rock. We don’t really cover much of his music, I think because we have the name Hollis Brown, so we feel like to do his music would be a bit too much.”
“Ballad of Hollis Brown” is on Dylan’s third album, The Times They Are A-Changin’, and I imagine that this is the album that most people think is his most overtly “protest” album. I beg to differ; Dylan’s breakthrough second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan includes four songs that are much closer to being protest songs than any of the songs on Times. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Bob Dylan is much less of a protest singer than he is generally perceived to be. I speak as someone who is as big a fan of the acoustic Dylan as of the electric Dylan, and I own dozens of songs from this time period that never made it onto any of Bob Dylan’s major-label albums – and there are hardly any protest songs among those recordings either.
To return to the topic at hand, “Ballad of Hollis Brown” is much more typical of the kind of truly wonderful song that Dylan was doing in those days: social commentary, and not protest. The song is based on a true story of a South Dakota farmer named Hollis Brown; desperately poor and at the end of his rope, he kills his wife, his children and then himself. As taken from Wikipedia, critic David Horowitz writes of this too-little-known Dylan classic:
“Technically speaking, ‘Hollis Brown’ is a tour de force. For a ballad is normally a form which puts one at a distance from its tale. This ballad, however, is told in the second person, present tense, so that not only is a bond forged immediately between the listener and the figure of the tale, but there is the ironic fact that the only ones who know of Hollis Brown’s plight, the only ones who care, are the hearers who are helpless to help, cut off from him, even as we in a mass society are cut off from each other.”
(May 2013)
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Items: Ballad of Hollis Brown
