“Hollis Brown” was recorded on Dylan’s 1964’s album “The Times They Are  a-Changin’.” It had taken Dylan several years of  working on the song before he was ready to record this powerful performance.

“When he first sang [“Hollis Brown”] in public there’s no sense of event, there’s no sense that something’s happening as you listen,” Marcus said. Dylan’s subsequent performances, Marcus said, were still too preachy. “He’s giving a speech,” Marcus said of an earlier recording of the song. “‘There is a farm problem! We need a new farm policy!’” he said, speaking in jest of Dylan’s uninviting delivery.

In the song’s final form, Marcus explained, Dylan brings the listener in and makes him or her complicit in the crime. “What is happening in the song is happening as you listen,” Marcus said. “[The farmer] is standing in front of you, and he’s holding out his hand.”

“With that, the song walked away from Bob Dylan and into the world as if it had always been there, which it had,” Marcus said.  According to Marcus, part of this timelessness is its relation to the theme of poverty, which could have made it a song of the 1930s or even a ballad from the depression of the 1890s. “‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown’ seems set in the past because American poverty is so easily turned into art,” Marcus said.

To Marcus, folk music blurs the line between originality and tradition, as all new music is deeply rooted in the folk canon and every singer puts a unique stamp on the classics. “In the American folk song, there’s a language that, as people speak the same phrases as everyone else, seduces or compels them to add their own shadings,” he said. “Any statement can appear at once as commonplace and individual, something that anyone might say, but now heard in a way that no one else would ever say it.”

To complement his detailed description of the song’s sound, Marcus finally played the recording of the song from “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” The audience sat in silence as they listened to Dylan’s recorded voice sing, “Well there’s seven people dead / On a South Dakota farm / Somewheres in the distance / There’s seven new people born.”

—Staff writer Tree A. Palmedo can be reached at tree.palmedo@thecrimson.com.