Bob Dylan
| "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" | |
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| Song |
"The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" is a topical song written by the American musician Bob Dylan. Recorded on October 23, 1963, the song was released on Dylan's 1964 album The Times They Are A-Changin' and gives a generally factual account of the killing of 51-year-old barmaid Hattie Carroll by the wealthy young tobacco farmer from Charles County, Maryland, William Devereux "Billy" Zantzinger (whom the song calls "William Zanzinger"), and his subsequent sentence to six months in a county jail. Dylan's song, however, sentenced Zantzinger to lifelong infamy.The song never mentions that Zantzinger was white, and Hattie Carroll black, it's understood, according to Dylan biographer Howard Sounes, " a mark of Dylan's skill, the song combines the artistry of a poet and the economy of a news reporter."
The lyrics are a commentary on the racism of the 1960s, which valued a black woman's life so lightly. In 1963 when Hattie Carroll was killed, Charles County was still strictly segregated by race in public facilities such as restaurants, churches, theaters, doctor's offices, buses, and the county fair. The schools of Charles County were not integrated until 1967.[1]
The main incident of the song took place in the early hours of February 9, 1963, at the white tie Spinsters' Ball at the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore, Maryland. Using a toy cane, Zantzinger drunkenly assaulted at least three of the Emerson Hotel workers: a bellboy, a waitress, and — at about 1:30 in the morning of the 9th — Carroll, a barmaid. In addition to her work at the hotel, Hattie Carroll, at 51, was the mother of eleven children and president of a black social club.[2] A news report of Zantzinger's death mentions that Hattie was the mother of eleven children even though the song says ten.[3] [4]
Already drunk before he got to the Emerson Hotel that night, Zantzinger, 24 years old and 6'2",[1] had assaulted employees at Eager House, a prestigious Baltimore restaurant, with the same cane.[2] The cane was a 25-cent toy.[1] At the Spinsters' Ball, he called a 30-year-old waitress a "nigger" and hit her with the cane; she fled the room in tears.[2] Moments later, after ordering a bourbon that Carroll didn't bring immediately, Zantzinger cursed at her, called her a "nigger" also,[1] then "you black son of a bitch," and struck her on the shoulder and across the head with the cane. After striking Carroll, he attacked his own wife, knocking her to the ground[2] and hitting her with his shoe.[1]
Soon after the blow, Carroll told co-workers, "I feel deathly ill, that man has upset me so." She collapsed and was hospitalized. Hattie Carroll died eight hours after the assault.[2] Her autopsy showed hardened arteries, an enlarged heart, and high blood pressure, and gave brain hemorrhage as the cause of death.
Zantzinger was initially charged with murder. His defense was that he had been extremely drunk,[2] and he admitted to no memory of the attack. His charge was reduced to manslaughter and assault, based on the likelihood that it was her stress reaction to his verbal and physical abuse led to the intracranial bleeding, rather than blunt-force trauma from the blow that left no lasting mark. On August 28, Zantzinger was convicted of both charges and sentenced to six months' imprisonment.
Time magazine covered the sentencing:
In June, after Zantzinger's phalanx of five topflight attorneys won a change of venue to a court in Hagerstown, a three-judge panel reduced the murder charge to manslaughter. Following a three-day trial, Zantzinger was found guilty. For the assault on the hotel employees: a fine of $125. For the death of Hattie Carroll: six months in jail and a fine of $500. The judges considerately deferred the start of the jail sentence until September 15, to give Zantzinger time to harvest his tobacco crop.
— Time, "Deferred Sentence", September 6, 1963
After the sentence was announced, The New York Herald Tribune conjectured he was given a sentence that short to keep him out of the largely black state prison, reasoning that his notoriety would make him a target for abuse there. Throughout the United States, sentences over a year are generally served in a state prison; sentences under a year are usually served in a county jail or city lockup. Zantzinger instead served his time in the comparative safety of the Washington county jail, some 70 miles (110 km) from the scene of the crime.
In September, the Herald Tribune quoted Zantzinger on his sentence: "I'll just miss a lot of snow." His then-wife, Jane, was quoted saying, "Nobody treats his niggers as well as Billy does around here."[1]
Zantzinger was convicted of manslaughter on 28 August 1963, not tried by a jury of peers but by a panel of three judges. The sentence was handed down on the very day that Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his I Have a Dream speech in Washington. Bob Dylan, 22 at this time, was one of the celebrities at the march and on the journey home to New York he read about the conviction of Zantzinger and decided to write a topical protest song about the case. According to a Washington Post report in 1991 Dylan wrote the song in Manhattan, sitting in an all-night cafe.[1] A recent radio documentary on the song said rather that he wrote it both in New York and at the home of his then lover, Joan Baez in Carmel. According to Nancy Carlin, a friend of Baez who visited - " He would stand in this cubbyhole, beautiful view across the hills, and peck type on an old typewriter ..there was an old piano up at Joans..and peck piano playing..up until noon he would drink black coffee then switch over to red wine, quit about five or six." [5] He recorded it on October 23, 1963, when the trial was still relatively fresh news, and incorporated it into his live repertoire immediately, before releasing the studio version on January 13 of the next year. He also performed the song on Steve Allen's network television program soon after its release.
The wording of the lyrics, a cane / That sailed through the air and came down through the room, either describe the arc of the cane's descent, or assert that the cane was thrown, or is a metaphor for the baselessness of the attack and its impact on society. And the next line, doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle presumably draws on poetic license as to the degree of malice evidenced.
The song juxtaposes Zantzinger's wealth and connections to the powerful with the brevity of that sentence. Despite the song's topical nature, Dylan continues to perform it in concert as of May 2009.[6] His live-audience renditions of it appear on the albums The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975, The Rolling Thunder Revue (2002) and The Bootleg Series Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall (2004).
In Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan includes "Hattie Carroll" in a list of his early songs which he feels were influenced by his introduction to the work of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. He describes writing out the words of Pirate Jenny (or The Black Freighter) in order to understand how the Brecht-Weill song achieved its effect. Dylan writes: "Woody had never written a song like that. It wasn't a protest or a topical song and there was no love for people in it. I took the song apart and unzipped it - it was the free verse association, the structure and disregard for the known certainty of melodic pattern to make it seriously matter, give it its cutting edge. It also had the ideal chorus for the lyrics"[7]
Literary critic Christopher Ricks considers the song to be "one of Dylan's greatest" and the recording on The Times They Are A-Changin' to be "perfect." He devotes an entire chapter to it, analyzing both the meaning as well as the prosody in his book on Dylan's songs as poetry. "But here is a song that could not be written better."[8]
The song continued to haunt Zantzinger in later controversies until his death in 2009. After serving his sentence for manslaughter, Zantzinger returned to running the farm in Charles County. He also began selling real estate, and moved to more urban Waldorf, Maryland, still within Charles County. Eventually he moved to a 2-acre (8,100 m2) home in Port Tobacco, where he lived throughout the 1990s[1] until moving to a new home in St. Mary's County around 2001[9] in Chaptico, Maryland, called Bachelor's Hope.[10]
In addition to federal tax delinquencies, Zantzinger fell more than $18,000 behind on county taxes on properties he owned in two Charles County communities called Patuxent Woods and Indian Head, shanties he leased to poor blacks.[11][12] In 1986, the same year the IRS ruled against him, Charles County confiscated those properties. Nonetheless, Zantzinger continued to collect rents, raise rents, and even successfully prosecute his putative tenants for back rent.[1] In June, 1991, Zantzinger was initially charged with a single count of "deceptive trade practices."[1] After some delay, Zantzinger pleaded guilty to 50 misdemeanor counts of unfair and deceptive trade practices.[13] He was sentenced to 19 months in prison and a $50,000 fine.[14] Some of his prison sentence was served in a work release program.[15]
In 2001, Zantzinger discussed the song with Howard Sounes for Down the Highway, the Life of Bob Dylan. He dismissed the song as a "total lie" and claimed "It's actually had no effect upon my life," but expressed scorn for Dylan, saying, "He's a no-account son of a bitch, he's just like a scum of a scum bag of the earth, I should have sued him and put him in jail."[16] Zantzinger died on January 3, 2009, at the age of 69.[17]
Clinton Heylin, author of the Dylan biography Behind the Shades Take Two, defends Zantzinger and chastises Dylan: "Dylan's portrait of William Zantzinger verges on the libelous… That the song itself is a masterpiece of drama and wordplay does not excuse Dylan's distortions, and thirty-six years on he continues to misrepresent poor William Zantzinger in concert."[18]
"Blood Ties: Part 3", a 1997 episode of the Baltimore television serial Homicide: Life on the Street, recites some lyrics of the song in reference to a case in which a wealthy black person is investigated for the murder of a Haitian domestic choked to death in a hotel washroom. She had gone to the party at the hotel to beg the killer to let her keep her job as the family housemaid. The actors having the dialog were Andre Braugher and James Earl Jones, who played her employer.
The comic strip Three Panel Soul (by the creators of Mac Hall) includes a 2006 strip in which a City of Villains character is modeled and named after William Zantzinger.[19]
On his album A Larum, Johnny Flynn mentions Hattie Carroll in his song "Shore to Shore," about a bus accident that resulted in the death of a young girl:
I am the masked rider, give me some grace/ You've never seen me and you don't know my face/ She was no Hattie Carroll, it was cold, it was blue/ And it only happened despite me or you/ Me or you, me or you
