"Ballad of Hollis Brown" is a folk song written by Bob Dylan, released in 1964 on his third album The Times They Are A-Changin'.
According to Michael Gray, the guitar work and melodic structuring in "Hollis Brown" are taken from the Appalachians, "where such forms and modes had evolved, in comparative isolation, over a period of almost two hundred years".
[2][3][4] The album version of the song is performed as a solo piece by Dylan, with his vocals accompanied by an acoustic guitar in the flatpicking style.
[5] Lyrically, this song consists of 11 verses that bring the listener to a bleak and destitute South Dakota farm, where a poor farmer, his wife, and five children living in abject poverty are subjected to even more hardships.
Indeed, the blues perspective itself, uncompromising, isolated and sardonic, is superbly suited to express the squalid reality of contemporary America.