A New Dylan Christmas Song Uncovered

A New Dylan Christmas Song Uncovered

by Larry Fyffe

The unwavering detectives at the Untold Dylan offices have managed to lay their sleuth-hound paws on the lyrics of a yet-to-be-released new Christmas song by Bob Dylan.

For the pleasure of our readers only, we publish the song’s lyrics along with its title:

Hard Reindeer Are Gonna Fall

Oh where have you been, Rudolf?, my red-nosed son
Where have you been?, my sad young one
The other reindeer call me nasty names
I’ve been left out of all their reindeer games
I’ve been up early mornin’, lookin’ for a deer yard
And it’s hard, and it’s hard, and it’s hard
And hard reindeer a-gonna fall

Oh what have you seen?, my red-nosed son
What have you seen?, my sad-eyed one
I saw St. Nick’s throne with no body on it
I saw a red sleigh with grey fog all around it
I saw ten thousand children with stockings all empty
And it’s hard, and it’s hard, and it’s hard
And hard reindeer a-gonna fall

Oh what’ll we do now?, my red-nosed son
What’ll we do now?, my sad-eyed one
Well the weatherman, he ain’t so proud
I can lead Santa through the darkest cloud
With my red nose a-blinkin’, and my horns a-blowin’
The soles of those socks won’t be forgotten
I tell ya ol’ foggie, you ain’t hard
It’s not hard, it’s not hard, it ain’t hard

The eight other reindeer shouted
out with glee
And they all played games around the
Christmas tree
Everyone of them’ll go down in history
Rudolf, Dasher, Dancer, Donner, Vixen
Comet, Cupid, Prancer, Blitzen
The tree caught on fire and killed them all
Blazin’ reindeer meat’s a-gonna fall
And its hard, it’s hard, it’s hard, it’s very hard

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Elsewhere in DYLAN: THE LIGHTER SIDE:  (For more info on this aspect of the site please click here)

• Bob Dylan And Omar Khayyam. Not to mention East Orange.
• Bob Dylan’s Efforts At Tourist Promotion: the Untold secret files
• Is Bob Dylan funny? Should we be funny about Bob Dylan? Does humour have a place in our society?
• Dear Babby: An advice column for the lovelorn

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What else is on the site

1: Over 450 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order below on this page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.  A second index lists the articles under the poets and poetic themes cited – you can find that here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews.