“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” is a song written by Bob Dylan in the summer of 1962. It was first recorded in Columbia Records’ Studio A on December 6, 1962 for his second album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. The lyric structure is based on the question and answer form of the traditional ballad “Lord Randall”, Child Ballad No. 12. Dylan has stated that all of the lyrics were taken from the initial lines of songs that “he thought he would never have time to write”. (More from Wikipedia)
“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: “Blowin’ in the Wind”, “Masters of War”, “Oxford Town”, and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”.
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.
The most complex and imaginative of these songs, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” is sometimes mistakenly linked with the Cuban Missile Crisis; but actually, Bob Dylan had already written the song before the crisis happened. In the liner notes on the album, Dylan famously spoke of this song: “Every line in it is actually the start of a whole new song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one.” Author Ian MacDonald described “A Hard Rain” as one of the most idiosyncratic protest songs ever written.
In the Studs Terkel interview mentioned above, Dylan uncharacteristically laid out what he meant by some of the lyrics in “Hard Rain”: “No, it’s not atomic rain, it’s just a hard rain. It isn’t the fallout rain. I mean some sort of end that’s just gotta happen. . . . In the last verse, when I say, ‘the pellets of poison are flooding the waters’, that means all the lies that people get told on their radios and in their newspapers.”
(May 2013)
