13 tracks
Side one "Blowin' in the Wind" "Girl from the North Country" "Masters of War" "Down the Highway" "Bob Dylan's Blues" "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" Side two "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" "Bob Dylan's Dream" "Oxford Town" "Talkin' World War III Blues" "Corrina, Corrina" "Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance" "I Shall Be Free"

13 tracks
Side one "Blowin' in the Wind" "Girl from the North Country" "Masters of War" "Down the Highway" "Bob Dylan's Blues" "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" Side two "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" "Bob Dylan's Dream" "Oxford Town" "Talkin' World War III Blues" "Corrina, Corrina" "Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance" "I Shall Be Free"

"A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" is a song written by Bob Dylan in the summer of 1962. It was first recorded in Columbia Records' Studio A on December 6, 1962 for his second album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. The lyrical structure is based on the question and answer form of traditional ballads such as Lord Randall. Dylan has stated that all of the lyrics were taken from the initial lines of songs that "he thought he would never have time to write."

On September 22, 1962, Dylan appeared for the first time at Carnegie Hall as part of an all-star hootenanny. His three song set marked the first public performance of "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," a complex and powerful song built upon the question-and-answer refrain pattern of the traditional British ballad "Lord Randall", published by Francis Child.

One month later, on October 22, U.S. President John F. Kennedy appeared on national television to announce the discovery of Soviet missiles on the island of Cuba, initiating the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the sleeve notes on the Freewheelin' album, Nat Hentoff would quote Dylan as saying that he wrote "A Hard Rain" in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis: "Every line in it is actually the start of a whole new song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn't have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one."

In actuality, Dylan had written the song more than a month before the crisis broke. Nevertheless, the song remained relevant through the years because of its broader message: the imagery suggests injustice, suffering, pollution and warfare. Folk singer Pete Seeger interpreted the line "When the home in the valley meets the dark dirty prison" as referring to when a young person suddenly wants to leave his home, but then qualified that by saying, "People are wrong when they say 'I know what he means.'"

While some have suggested that the refrain of the song refers to nuclear fallout, Dylan disputes that this was a specific reference. In a radio interview with Studs Terkel in 1963, Dylan said:

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Wikipedia