A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall

Dylan began it in summer 1962 in Greenwich Village. Its structure follows the old ballad Lord Randall. He recorded it in a single take on 6 December 1962 at Columbia Studio A, with John Hammond producing, and it appeared on Freewheelin' in May 1963.

In Nat Hentoff's liner notes Dylan said, "Every line in it is actually the start of a whole new song." Asked by Studs Terkel in 1963 whether it was about atomic rain, he said it was just a hard rain. It is often tied to the Cuban Missile Crisis, though the song is said to have been written more than a month before it, a claim that lacks a firm citation.

Live

Dylan premiered it at a Carnegie Hall hootenanny on 22 September 1962. He played it at the Concert for Bangladesh in August 1971 and at the Montreal Forum on 4 December 1975, a recording released in Bootleg Series Vol. 5 and used in Scorsese's 2019 documentary. In Japan on 23 May 1994 he played it with Michael Kamen's orchestra. At the Nobel ceremony on 10 December 2016 Patti Smith sang it, lost her place and asked to restart.