Ballad of Hollis Brown

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"Ballad of Hollis Brown" is a song written by Bob Dylan, released in 1964 on the album The Times They Are A-Changin'.

Musically, this song is a very simple blues, played by Dylan alone on an acoustic guitar in the flatpicking style. The guitar is tuned unusually, similar but not exactly like "Drop D" tuning: Both the 1st and 6th strings, which normally play two Es separated by two octaves, are tuned down a whole step, down to D. Also, Dylan uses a capo on the 1st fret. Therefore, while his fingers are positioned as if he were playing in the key of D minor, the song actually comes out in Eb minor. According to Michael Gray, the guitar-work and melodic structuring in "Hollis Brown" are taken from the Appalachians (see Old-time music), "where such forms and modes had evolved, in comparative isolation, over a period of almost two hundred years." The song is a little over 5 minutes long.

Lyrically, this song consists of 11 verses which bring the listener to a bleak and destitute South Dakota farm, where a poor farmer (Hollis Brown), his wife and five children, already living in abject poverty, are subjected to even more hardships. In despair, the man kills his wife and children and himself with a shotgun. Critic David Horowitz has said of this song:

Technically speaking, "Hollis Brown" is a tour de force. For a ballad is normally a form which puts one at a distance from its tale. This ballad, however, is told in the second person, present tense, so that not only is a bond forged immediately between the listener and the figure of the tale, but there is the ironic fact that the only ones who know of Hollis Brown's plight, the only ones who care, are the hearers who are helpless to help, cut off from him, even as we in a mass society are cut off from each other.... Indeed, the blues perspective itself, uncompromising, isolated and sardonic, is superbly suited to express the squalid reality of contemporary America. And what a powerful expression it can be, once it has been liberated (as it has in Dylan's hands) from its egocentric bondage! A striking example of the tough, ironic insight one associates with the blues (and also of the power of understatement which Dylan has learnt from Guthrie) is to be found in the final lines of Hollis Brown:
There's seven people dead on a South Dakota farm,
There's seven people dead on a South Dakota farm,
Somewhere in the distance there's seven new people born.
How much of the soul of contemporary American society and its statistical conscience is expressed in this sardonic image!

Dylan has played "Hollis Brown" live immediately following its composition in 1962, during the "comeback" Bob Dylan and The Band 1974 Tour, and at Live Aid in 1985. It has also made many an appearance on the Never Ending Tour, up to his most recent tour of Europe in the fall of 2005.

[edit] Covers

A large number of musicians and groups have covered "Ballad of Hollis Brown," including:

[edit] References

  • Matt Cowe and Arthur Dick. Acoustic Masters for Guitar. Wise Publications, 2004.
  • Bob Dylan's official webpage. Retrieved 03/14/2006.
  • Michael Gray. Song & Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan. Continuum, 2000.
  • David Horowitz. "Bob Dylan: genius or commodity?" Peace News, 11/11/64.
  • Oliver Trager. Keys to the Rain: The Definitive Bob Dylan Encyclopedia. Billboard Books, 2004.

[edit] External links

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