Introductory note by the editor: “Ballad for a friend” has always been one of my favourite Dylan tracks, but one that is wrongly ignored by most commentators in my view. I’m therefore delighted to have a review to publish of the song, that is not just me raving over its quality. But just in case you want to go back over previous reviews, these are listed at the end, although most of them are simply me telling the world what a work of genius everyone has missed.
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by John Wolf
Ballad for a Friend
Sometime in January 1962, Bob Dylan recorded a number of songs for Leeds Music in New York. He had been in the city for barely a year, yet things were already moving quickly. In September of the previous year he had received what was probably the greatest gift a young, unknown folk singer could hope for: an extraordinary review by the influential folk critic Robert Shelton, who had seen him perform at Gerde’s Folk City. Superlatives seemed inadequate. From that moment onward Dylan’s career accelerated, although one suspects that even without Shelton’s blessing he would eventually have found his audience.
“Mr. Dylan’s voice is anything but pretty,” Shelton wrote in The New York Times. At first glance, it hardly sounded flattering. But he immediately continued: “He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a southern field-hand musing in melody on his porch.” A few lines later came perhaps the most memorable observation of all: “All the husk and bark are left on his notes and a searing intensity pervades his songs.”
I will return to Shelton’s review later. For now it is enough to say that it helped convince Columbia’s legendary A&R producer John Hammond that the young Dylan deserved a chance. After an audition in October 1961, Hammond offered him a recording contract. Not bad after only ten months in New York. His debut album would appear just five months later.
As if that were not enough, Lou Levy of Leeds Music invited Dylan to record a number of publishing demos. Among those recordings—at least as they reached me decades later—was Ballad for a Friend. Overshadowed by the more widely known I Was Young When I Left Home, this quiet little song offers a remarkably revealing glimpse of the speed with which Dylan’s musical language was already beginning to evolve.
Ballad for a Friend is not a throwaway. It is not another anonymous blues or folk sketch that passes by unnoticed. During its brief running time of just two minutes and twenty-four seconds, an astonishing amount takes place. Every time I return to it I discover something new, and every time it leaves me with the same lingering feeling of incompleteness.
Explaining why is surprisingly difficult. This is one of those songs in which everything is compressed: the melody, the harmony, the silence, the text, the timing. Every element seems to support every other. Whenever I try to describe what the song does to me, the experience refuses to stay neatly inside analytical boundaries.
Musically, Dylan does something so subtle that it is easy to miss. Traditional folk and blues songs often rely on a simple I–IV–V harmonic progression. The dominant chord—the V—creates tension and naturally seeks resolution. Our ears expect the final return home. When that resolution comes, the musical sentence feels complete.
In Ballad for a Friend, Dylan appears to understand this expectation perfectly. He plays in A major and moves toward E major, where one instinctively expects the final step that would complete the harmonic circle. Instead, he stops. There is no satisfying resolution. The expected musical answer never arrives. What follows is not another chord but silence.
The final vocal phrase hangs suspended over that unresolved harmony as if the song itself refuses to finish what it has begun. Suddenly the missing chord is no longer merely a harmonic omission; it becomes a form of absence. The silence begins to resemble loss.
That feeling is reinforced by Dylan’s vocal delivery. Even this early in his career, he sings with remarkable restraint. His voice sounds detached, almost emotionally distant, which is precisely what makes the performance so affecting. The text itself is full of grief, yet Dylan never dramatises it. He withholds emotion rather than displaying it. The limitation is everywhere: in the harmony, in the phrasing, in the voice. It creates the familiar sensation of wanting to take a deep breath without quite managing to do so. In life that release eventually comes. In this song, it never does.
I suspect I will return many times to what I have begun calling “the fall toward the minor,” and more generally to the expressive power of unresolved harmony, because these ideas occupy an important place in my own musical world. Yet the lingering suspension in Ballad for a Friend offers another, equally beautiful possibility. It is contemplative rather than dramatic. Every final line of every verse feels like a farewell—to a friend from Utah.
The song tells of a man who learns of the sudden death of a childhood friend with whom he grew up in “North County.” Already at this early stage of his songwriting Dylan begins experimenting with shifting narrative perspectives. Sometimes the bearer of the tragic news seems to be speaking; at other moments the grieving friend himself takes over. Those subtle changes in viewpoint would later become one of Dylan’s great artistic strengths.
It took me years to recognize just how frequently he employed this technique. Only after reading Michael Gray’s discussion of Robert Browning did I begin to notice how naturally Dylan allows different voices to merge into one another, creating conversations that often remain hidden beneath the surface of the lyrics.
The protagonist is devastated. His friend has not simply grown old or drifted away. He has been violently removed from life. This is not merely the universal sadness of mortality that accompanies every human existence from birth onward. It is sudden, arbitrary loss. Every silence that follows the unresolved harmony becomes another moment of disbelief, another pause filled with grief, another attempt to comprehend something that refuses to make sense.
The song closes with the line: “Listenin’ to them church bells tone.” It comes very early in Dylan’s career, yet it already reveals a writer capable of ending a song with extraordinary simplicity. He would return to church bells, death, memory and farewell many times throughout the decades that followed—perhaps so often that the image eventually lost some of its original force. But none of that diminishes what happens here.
Because every time I return to Ballad for a Friend, those church bells still sound as if they have only just begun to ring.
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Other articles on Untold Dylan celebrating this song:
- The songs Bob wrote and then ignored: Ballad for a Friend and the issue of originality
- Bob Dylan: the lyrics AND the music – Ballad for a Friend
- Dylan cover of the day No 7: Ballad for a Friend
- Dylan Obscuranti – track 8 “Ballad for a friend”
- Ballad for a friend: Bob Dylan’s lost masterpiece