David Horowitz

DAVID HOROWITZ
 
 
David Horowitz  (born January 10, 1939) is an American conservative writer based in Southern California.  Between 1956 and 1975, Horowitz was an outspoken adherent of the New Left.  He later rejected leftism completely and has become an outspoken conservative.  Horowitz has recounted his ideological journey in a series of retrospective books, culminating with his 1996 memoir Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 

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)

 

Last edited: March 22, 2021