Hard Rain

Bob Dylan’s iconic 1962 song “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” stands at the crossroads of musical and literary traditions. Alessandro Portelli explores the power and resonance of the song, considering the meanings of history and memory in folk cultures and in Dylan’s work.

Alessandro Portelli is professor emeritus of American literature at the University of Rome and was for many years a faculty member of the Columbia Oral History Summer Institute. His books include The Text and the Voice: Writing, Speaking, Democracy, and American Literature (Columbia, 1994) and They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History (2011).

Mary Larson, Oklahoma State University:
Hard Rain is a tapestry of autobiographical essay, music criticism, and pop culture reflection. The style is lovely, and Portelli addresses everything from innocence and apocalypse to lyric structure and oral tradition mnemonic devices through his comparison of Bob Dylan’s 'Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall' to the traditional folk song 'Lord Randal.'

Yolanda Chávez Leyva, University of Texas at El Paso:
While it is common knowledge that Dylan modeled 'Hard Rain' after 'Lord Randal,' Portelli treats the two songs equally. Neither is a footnote in the history of the other. Offering a wonderful analysis of orality and memory, Hard Rain represents a great contribution to our understanding of oral cultures by analyzing a 1960s classic song along with a seventeenth-century ballad. Captivating.

Mitchell Duneier, author of Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea:
Hard Rain is a rich and genre-busting meditation on oral history, on culture, on folklore, on poetry, on music, on Bob Dylan, and on many other things besides. Portelli, like Bob Dylan, brings to life many voices that are often not heard, and his book radiates critical acumen, encyclopedic knowledge and a bracing freshness of vision.