HARD RAINS GONNA FALL
“A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” is a song written by Bob Dylan in the summer of 1962. The
lyric structure is based on the question and answer form of the traditional ballad “Lord
Randall“, Child Ballad No. 12. On September 22, Dylan appeared for the first time at
Carnegie Hall, part of an all-star hootenanny. This show was his first public performance
of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, a complex and powerful song built upon the question
and answer refrain pattern of the traditional British ballad “Lord Randall“, published by
Francis Child.
One month later, on October 22, U.S. President John F. Kennedy appeared on national
television to announce the discovery of Soviet missiles on the island of Cuba, initiating
the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the sleeve notes on the “Freewheelin’” album, Nat Hentoff
would quote Dylan as saying that he wrote “A Hard Rain” in response to the Cuban
Missile Crisis: “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.”
In fact, Dylan had written the song more than a month before the crisis broke. However,
the song has remained relevant through the years as it has a broader sweep; the dense
imagery suggests injustice, suffering, pollution and warfare.
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains,
I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways,
I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests,
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans,
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard,
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard,
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.
Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’,
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’,
I saw a white ladder all covered with water,
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children,
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.
And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?