New York the spawning ground for Americana’s Hollis Brown
New York based, Bob Dylan influenced Ballad of Hollis Brown performs on July 13 at 8 p.m. at Saint Rocke. by Whitney Youngs The “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” the second song on Bob Dylan’s 1964 album, “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” tells the story of a poor, unemployed man living in a crumbling cabin on a farm on the outskirts of a South Dakota town with his wife and five children. Mr. Brown cannot feed his family, so at the height of his despondency, he spends his “last lone dollar/on seven shotgun shells” and kills his family, then himself. Dylan recorded the roughly five-minute ballad, with its Shakespearean ending and second-person narration, in New York City. The song underscores Dylan’s ability to craft a timeless protest song about economic and social injustices that continue to plague American society. The song resonated particularly with two Queens natives, Mike Montali and Jonathan Bonilla, who named their band after the destitute farmer. “I’d always written songs and I’d always wanted to be a songwriter,” recalls Montali, a second-generation American of Italian immigrants who began to sing around the age of 14. “We put bands together in school and no one wanted to sing…
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