Music

Sixty Years of Hard Rain: Dylan at His Timeless Best

“Oh, what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son?”

“Don’t Look Back” — painting by the author

During Duluth Dylan Fest in 2012 I was asked what the greatest Dylan song of all time was, an almost impossible question as there are so many. The first thought would have to be, by what measure? I thought about how hard it is just to pick one song from each decade of his career.

Then I was asked what my favorite Dylan song was. Naturally this is equally impossible for there are many, but if I were to narrow down the pool to five I would most assuredly include “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” It’s my personal opinion that this is one of the five greatest songs of all history, so it would have to be included in my top five Dylan picks.

The song was first performed live Sept. 20, 1962 at the home of Eve and Mac McKenzie and it’s been performed over 450 times since, most recently at the Firefly Festival in Dover, Delaware on 17 June 2017.

According to various sources it was written during the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962. He was just 21 years old at the time. Unlike many of his songs which talk explicitly about their subject matter (Oxford Town, Only A Pawn In Their Game, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll) this song gives no real clue as to its impetus. The historical…