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Music / Songs / King Harvest (Has Surely Come)

King Harvest (Has Surely Come)

The closing track on The Band, and by general agreement one of the best things the group ever recorded, even though it was nearly left off the album for space. The song tells the story of a struggling farmer during hard times, a burned barn, a horse gone mad, a dry summer threatening the harvest, who finds hope and solidarity in joining a union. It's unusual subject matter for Robertson, who wrote it; most of the group's other songs deal in individual characters and private histories rather than labor politics, but the lyric treats the union not as an abstraction but as something concrete and dignifying for a man who has nothing else going for him.

Musically it's one of the most sophisticated things on the record, funky and jazzy in a way nothing else on the album quite is, built around a rolling piano figure and shifting time signatures that make it feel looser than it actually is. Levon Helm sings lead, with Richard Manuel's harmony stacked on top through the choruses. Although credited solely to Robertson, several people close to the sessions have described it as effectively a group composition, worked out collectively in the room rather than brought in finished.

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