A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall

"A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" is a song by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. Mischaracterized, even by Dylan, as a response to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, Dylan, in fact, wrote it in June of 1962 and debuted it publicly that September. The first studio version appeared on his second studio album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963).

“Hard Rain” was a breakthrough for Dylan and American song with its introduction of symbolist imagery of Arthur Rimbaud and others to folk songs. The poet Allen Ginsburg saw the song as a passing of the torch from the Beats, like himself, to a new generation, while Dylan's close associate folk singer Dave Van Ronk said the song was “unlike anything that had come before…clearly the beginning of a revolution”.

To Dylan "Hard Rain" spoke to a "culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course. It's all one long funeral song."