“A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall” by Bob Dylan

"A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" made its recorded debut on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan in 1963, just Dylan with his acoustic guitar and harmonica and John Hammond producing. It's often pegged, even by Dylan himself, as a reaction to the Cuban Missile Crisis, but he'd started it in June 1962 and was singing it in public by that September, weeks before the standoff.

The bones are old, borrowed from Anglo-Scottish ballads like "Lord Randall", but the flesh is new: 20th-century poetry, Civil War newspapers he read in New York libraries, Balzac, Swift and the classics, all poured into what Dylan described as one long funeral song. Dave Van Ronk heard the start of a revolution in it, and Allen Ginsberg reckoned the kid had picked up the Beats' torch.

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