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“A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall” is a 7-minute anti nuclear war anthem. It was one of three social protest songs Dylan recorded on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan; the others are "Blowin' In The Wind" and "Masters Of War." Dylan said that the rain was not literal fallout rain, but "some sort of end that's just gotta happen."
"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" is based on an old folk ballad variously titled "Lord Randall" or "Lord Ronald," in which a mother repeatedly questions her son (beginning with "Where have you been?"), leading him to reveal he has been poisoned. The song ends when he falls dead to the ground.
American folk musicians adopted "Lord Randall" at some point in history. The song evolved into "Jimmy Randall." In In the Pine (Pikeville College Press, 1978), authors Leonard Roberts and Calvin Buell Agey report there being "about 100" known references to the song all over the United States.
Though no definitive line can be drawn, it seems likely that Dylan encountered an American variation of the song that he used as the basis for "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." By this time, Dylan was deeply immersed in the study of American folk music.
Ten years after Dylan recorded his version, Roxy Music frontman Bryan Ferry recorded a dark, claustrophobic cover as his first solo single, which reached #10 in the UK.
In the liner notes to The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Dylan wrote: "'Hard Rain' is a desperate kind of song. Every line in it, is actually the start of a whole 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."
Bob Dylan once introduced this song by saying hard rain meant something big was about to happen.
According to journalist Bob Spitz, Dylan wrote this song on the typewriter of Hugh Romney, better known as Wavy Gravy.
Patti Smith performed this song on December 10, 2016 as part of the ceremonies in Stockholm where Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan didn't attend the ceremony, but wrote a speech that was read by the US ambassador to Sweden. Smith got tripped up a few minutes into her performance and had to stop the music (the song is not an easy one to get through), but the audience gave her warm applause when she apologized, and she continued on.
Richie Havens was a regular performer in the Greenwich Village folk scene at the same time as Dylan and often sang this, assuming their mutual acquaintance Gene Michaels wrote the tune. "I used to have
arguments about that with different people. It was terrible ," Havens recalled in a 1994 DISCoveries interview. "I remember singing it at Folk City and a guy walking up to me with tears in his eyes, and telling me it was his favorite version of that song – and then walking away. I headed down to the dressing room down in the basement, and Dave Van Ronk was coming up. He said to me, 'Do you know who that was? He wrote that song.' I said, 'No, he didn't! Gene Michaels wrote that song.' said, 'No, he didn't! Bob Dylan wrote that song, and that was just him!' And it blew my mind that he had complimented me for singing one of his songs. At the time, I didn't even realize it."
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