|
"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." ==Analysis== On September 22, 1962, Dylan appeared for the first time at Carnegie Hall, part of an all-star hootenanny. His three-song set included the first public performance of "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"〔The last of the 3 songs performed, it followed a rendition of "As Long as the Grass Shall Grow" which consisted of music written by Dylan and lyrics written by the noted Native American poet/singer/songwriter Peter LaFarge, recounting the US government's violation of its longstanding treaty with the Seneca nation in upstate New York.〕 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." Dylan had actually written the song more than a month before the crisis broke. Nevertheless, the song has remained relevant through the years as it has a broader sweep; the dense imagery suggests injustice, suffering, pollution and warfare. Pete Seeger interpreted the line "when the home in the valley meets the dark dirty prison" as referring to when a young person suddenly wants to leave his home, but then qualified that by saying "people are wrong when they say 'I know what he means'". While some have suggested that the refrain of the song refers to nuclear fallout, Dylan disputes that this was a specific reference. In a radio interview with Studs Terkel in 1963, Dylan said, "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."〔re-printed in Cott (ed.), ''Dylan on Dylan: The Essential Interviews'', p. 7–9〕 In ''No Direction Home'', Martin Scorsese's documentary on Dylan, the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg talks about the first time he heard Dylan's music: "When I got back from India, and got to the West Coast, there's a poet, Charlie Plymell - at a party in Bolinas - played me a record of this new young folk singer. And I heard "Hard Rain," I think. And wept. 'Cause it seemed that the torch had been passed to another generation. From earlier bohemian, or Beat illumination. And self-empowerment." Author Ian MacDonald described "A Hard Rain" as one of the most idiosyncratic protest songs ever written. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|