"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 a 51-year-old African-American barmaid, Hattie Carroll (née Curtis; March 3, 1911 – February 9, 1963),[1] by then 24-year-old William Devereux "Billy" Zantzinger (February 7, 1939 – January 3, 2009), a young man from a wealthy white tobacco farming family in Charles County, Maryland, and of his subsequent sentence to six months in a county jail, after being convicted of assault.
The melody of the chorus is largely taken from a folk song called "Mary Hamilton". The lyrics are a commentary on 1960s racism. When Carroll was killed in 1963, 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.[2]
Killing
The main incident described in the song took place in the early hours of February 9, 1963, at the white tie Spinsters' Ball at the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore. 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 51-year-old barmaid. According to the song, Carroll "had borne 10 children",[3] though other accounts range from 8 to 11[1][2]:1[4][a].[5] She was president of a black social club.[citation needed]
Already drunk before he got to the Emerson Hotel that night, the 6'2" Zantzinger[2] had assaulted employees at Eager House, a prestigious Baltimore restaurant, with the same cane.[6] The cane was a 25-cent toy.[2] 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.[6] Moments later, after ordering a bourbon that Carroll did not bring immediately, Zantzinger cursed her, called her a "nigger",[2] then "you black son of a bitch", and struck her on the shoulder and across the head with the cane. In the words of the court notes: "He asked for a drink and called her 'a black bitch', and 'black s.o.b'. She replied, 'Just a moment' and started to prepare his drink. After a delay of perhaps a minute, he complained about her being slow and struck her a hard blow on her shoulder about half-way between the point of her shoulder and her neck." She handed him his drink.[4] After striking Carroll, he attacked his own wife, knocking her to the ground[6] and hitting her with his shoe.[2]
Within five minutes from the time of the blow, Carroll leaned heavily against the barmaid next to her and complained of feeling ill. Carroll told co-workers, "I feel deathly ill, that man has upset me so." The barmaid and another employee helped Carroll to the kitchen. Her arm became numb, her speech thick. She collapsed and was hospitalized. Carroll died eight hours after the assault.[6] Her autopsy showed hardened arteries, an enlarged heart and high blood pressure. A spinal tap confirmed brain hemorrhage as the cause of death. She died in Mercy Hospital at 9 a.m. on February 9, 1963.[3]
Zantzinger was initially charged with murder. His defense was that he had been extremely drunk,[6] and he claimed to have 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 that 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.
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 his notoriety would make him a target for abuse there. Zantzinger served his time in the comparative safety of the Washington Countycounty jail, some 70 miles (110km) 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."[2]
Song
Zantzinger was convicted of manslaughter on August 28, 1963, and was not tried by a jury of peers but by a panel of three judges. The sentence was handed down on the same day that Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Bob Dylan, aged 22 at that time, was one of the celebrities at the march and on the journey home to New York City he read about the conviction of Zantzinger and decided to write a protest song about the case. According to a 1991 Washington Post report, Dylan wrote the song in Manhattan, sitting in an all-night cafe.[2] A 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 Joan's... and peck piano playing... up until noon he would drink black coffee then switch over to red wine, quit about five or six."[4] 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 February 10, 1964. [8]
In Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan includes "The Lonesome Death of 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."[11]
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."[12]
Dylan's song ("The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll") contains at least two inaccuracies. Zantzinger was not booked for first degree murder, but for second degree murder. Dylan also misspells and mispronounces Zantzinger's surname as "Zanzinger".[4]
Impact on Zantzinger
After serving his sentence for manslaughter, Zantzinger returned to running the farm in Charles County and began selling real estate. He moved to more urban Waldorf, Maryland, still within Charles County. Eventually he moved to a 2-acre (8,100m2) home in Port Tobacco, where he lived throughout the 1990s[2] until moving to a new home in St. Mary's County around 2001[13] in Chaptico, Maryland, called Bachelor's Hope.[14]
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.[15][16] 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.[2] In June 1991, Zantzinger was initially charged with a single count of "deceptive trade practices".[2] After some delay, Zantzinger pleaded guilty to 50 misdemeanor counts of unfair and deceptive trade practices.[17] He was sentenced to 19 months in prison and a $50,000 fine.[18] Some of his prison sentence was served in a work release program.[19]
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."[20]
↑ In this programme a neighbour of Carroll from northwest Baltimore says she was the mother of eight children, not ten, although it is possible that only eight were alive at the time of their mother's death.
Related Research Articles
Rubin "Hurricane" Carter was an American-Canadian middleweight boxer who was wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for murder, until released following a petition of habeas corpus after almost 20 years in prison.
The Times They Are a-Changin' is the third studio album by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. It was released on February 10, 1964, through Columbia Records. Whereas his previous albums, Bob Dylan and The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, combined original material and cover songs, this was the first to feature only original compositions. The album consists mostly of stark, sparsely arranged ballads concerning issues such as racism, poverty, and social change. The title track is one of Dylan's most famous; many feel that it captures the spirit of social and political upheaval that characterized the 1960s.
Folksinger is an album by folk singer-songwriter Phranc, released in 1985.
"Hurricane" is a protest song by Bob Dylan co-written with Jacques Levy and released as a single in November 1975. It was also included on Dylan's 1976 album Desire as its opening track. The song is about the imprisonment of boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter (1937–2014). It compiles acts of racism and profiling against Carter, which Dylan describes as leading to a false trial and conviction.
Charles Stanley Dutton is a retired American actor and director. He is best known for his roles in the television series Roc (1991–1994) and the television film The Piano Lesson (1995), the latter of which earned him a Golden Globe Award nomination. His other accolades include three Primetime Emmy Awards and three NAACP Image Awards.
"Mary Hamilton", or "The Fower Maries", is a common name for a well-known sixteenth-century ballad from Scotland based on an apparently fictional incident about a lady-in-waiting to a Queen of Scotland. It is Child Ballad 173 and Roud 79.
The Bootleg Series Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall is a live album by Bob Dylan, released in 2004 on Legacy Records. It is the fourth installment of the ongoing Bob Dylan Bootleg Series. The album is the complete recording from the October 31, 1964 "Halloween" show at Philharmonic Hall in Manhattan by Bob Dylan.
Baltimore National Cemetery is a United States National Cemetery located along Maryland Route 144 on both sides of the boundary between the neighborhoods of Beechfield in Baltimore City and Catonsville in Baltimore County. It encompasses 72.2 acres (29.2 ha). As of 2022, the cemetery has nearly 46,000 interments. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2016.
The Judy Collins Concert is a 1964 live album by American singer and songwriter Judy Collins, which included combined traditional folk material with songs by Bob Dylan and Tom Paxton. It was recorded on March 21, 1964 at the Town Hall in New York City.
Live at Carnegie Hall 1963 is a six-song live set by Bob Dylan. It was released as an EP by Columbia Records in 2005. The songs were recorded on October 26, 1963 at Carnegie Hall in New York City.
"Weeds" is a darkly humorous short story by Stephen King. It was first published in Cavalier magazine in May 1976.
65 Revisited is a 2007 American documentary film directed by D. A. Pennebaker. It was made from footage the director shot for his 1967 film Dont Look Back. Both films show Bob Dylan and entourage during their 1965 concert tour of the UK. The newer film includes outtakes from its predecessor, and adds several full-length song performances.
The soundtrack album for the Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There was released as a double CD on October 30, 2007. It features only one recording by Dylan himself—his previously unreleased recording of the title song "I'm Not There" recorded during The Basement Tapes' sessions in 1967—plus various other artists' recordings of songs written by Dylan. These CDs do not contain the movie sound track. Fragments from less than half of the titles are heard in the film, which features more of Dylan's own recordings. The end credits relay a complete list of music heard in the film.
The Bob Dylan England Tour 1965 was a concert tour by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan during late April and early May 1965. The tour was documented by filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker, who used the footage of the tour in his documentary Dont Look Back.
"Percy's Song" is a song written by Bob Dylan. It was recorded during the October 1963 sessions for Dylan's third album, The Times They Are A-Changin', but ultimately not included on that album. Dylan performed the song on stage at his Carnegie Hall concert on October 26, 1963.
Pi Delta Psi (ΠΔΨ) is an Asian American-interest cultural fraternity founded at Binghamton University on February 20, 1994. As of 2020, the organization listed over 3,000-lifetime members spanning 30 undergraduate chapters and 1 alumni chapter.
"Lay Down Your Weary Tune" is a song written by Bob Dylan in 1963. Dylan originally recorded it for his album The Times They Are a-Changin', but his version of the song was not officially released until 1985 on the Biograph box set. In the album liner notes, Dylan claims that in the song he was trying to capture the feeling of a Scottish ballad he had just heard on a 78 rpm record. The specific ballad Dylan was referring to has not been identified, but speculation includes "The Water Is Wide", "O Waly, Waly" and "I Wish, I Wish".
Now Ain't the Time for Your Tears is the debut solo album by English singer-songwriter and Transvision Vamp vocalist Wendy James, released on 8 March 1993 by MCA Records.
1 2 3 4 Sounes, Howard (May 17, 2010). Parker, Sara (ed.). The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll (Radio broadcast). Includes "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" by Bob Dylan and an interview with William Zantzinger. Falling Tree production. BBC Radio 4.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
