A Box of Rain: Collected Lyrics of Robert Hunter

Published 1990 by Viking

Brokedown Palace

Going home, going home

By the waterside, I will rest my bones

Listen to the river sing sweet songs

To rock my soul"

When A Box of Rain: Collected Lyrics was released in 1990, I wasn’t mature enough to absorb the full gravity of Robert Hunter’s words. I may not be much more mature now—but I’m a different reader. Returning to the book three decades later felt less like revisiting a relic and more like stumbling into a room I didn’t realize I’d been living next to all along.

A Box of Rain is less a songbook than a literary artifact—a window into the mind of the man who gave language to the Grateful Dead’s musical soul. Hunter, the band’s primary lyricist and one of rock’s most distinctive writers, gathered nearly three decades of work in the first printing. The familiar classics are present, but so are lesser-known pieces and lyrics that never found a studio, stage or setlist. Those pages expand the map of his imagination beyond what even devoted Deadheads tend to carry around in their heads.

Reading Box of Rain straight through is like eavesdropping on the internal evolution of a poet who happened to work in tandem with music. The famous songs—“Ripple,” “Scarlet Begonias,” “Touch of Grey,” “Friend of the Devil,” “Box of Rain,” and “Brokedown Palace”—retain their resonance even stripped of melody. On the page they read like modern American folk tales, steeped in myth and plainspoken mystery. But the book’s deeper reward lies in the material that never made it to the Grateful Dead's domain. Without the frame of performance, Hunter’s voice feels both freer and more personal, at times more melancholy or abstract than the songs Deadheads know by heart.

I was particularly taken with these lines from “Jacob Baum”, a tune Hunter performed a handful of times. I can easily hear Jerry’s or Bobby’s voice spinning this chorus through song on Wake of the Flood.

Jacob Baum

Water witch, come now

Blend your willow and see

Is there water in my land?

Cold, sweet water for me?

Find that water, cold clear water

Flow from an underground spring

Come, cool water-- Oh, come, sweet water

Please bend your willow and see

For Heads, Box of Rain serves as a reminder the Grateful Dead’s lyrical world didn’t stop where the music did—it extended into verses that never met melody. For readers new to Hunter, the body of work stands as proof his best lines don’t depend on guitars or slightly out tune harmonies. The words breathe on their own, equal parts riddle and revelation…

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Box of Rain 9/17/70 Fillmore East, New York, NY

Reflection coming soon!