Bob Dylan’s draft of ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ goes up for auction

Another rare Bob Dylan manuscript is hitting the auction block. This time, it’s a typewritten copy of the lyrics to “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” written when Dylan was just 21.

Sotheby’s estimates that the two-page document with handwritten notes could go for up to £200,000 (around $314,000) during a “Rock & Pop” auction in London on Sept. 29.

“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” was first performed on Sept. 22, 1962 at Carnegie Hall and was finally recorded in December that year. It appears on his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which was a collection of the best songs he had written up to that time. Other songs on the album include “Blowin’ In The Wind,” “Masters of War” and “Girl From The North Country.”

Sotheby’s notes that the manuscript features several changes, although it does include some of the song’s most famous lines. Notably, the document reads “It’s a hard rain must fall” instead of “It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.”

“You can see it was not originally intended as a working draft,” Gabriel Heaton, Sotheby’s books and manuscripts specialist, told the Guardian. “It was meant to be a final version of the song but when he starts reading it again, he clearly is unhappy with it and starts reworking, starts revising … more ideas start spilling out of his brain.”

Several Dylan papers have hit the auction block in recent months. Lyrics for songs he never released were auctioned off last winter and Sotheby’s auctioned off a manuscript for “Like A Rolling Stone” for $2 million in June 2014.

image courtesy of INFphoto.com

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