"
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
William Devereux "Billy" Zantzinger (whom the song calls "William Zanzinger"), a wealthy young tobacco farmer from
Charles County, Maryland, and his subsequent sentence to six months in a county jail.
The lyrics are a commentary on
racism in the 1960s. 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]
Killing[edit]
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 11 children (the song says "ten") and president of a black social club.
[2][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. 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.
[5] After striking Carroll, he attacked his own wife, knocking her to the ground
[2] and hitting her with his shoe.
[1]
Very soon, 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 helped her to the kitchen. Her arm became numb, her speech thick. 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. A
spinal tap confirmed
brain hemorrhage as the cause of death. She died in
Mercy Hospital at 9 a.m. on February 9, 1963.
[6]
Zantzinger was initially charged with
murder. His defense was that he had been extremely drunk,
[2] and he admitted to having no memory of the attack. His charge was reduced to
manslaughter and assault, based on the likelihood that it was her
stressreaction 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.
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 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
jailor 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 negroes as well as Billy does around here."
[1]
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 in
Washington. Bob Dylan, 22 at that 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
protest song about the case. According to a 1991
Washington Postreport, 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 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."
[7] 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, 1964. He also performed the song on
Steve Allen's syndicated 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" draws on
poetic license to
anthropomorphize the cane as malicious.
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."
[9]
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."
[10]
Impact on Zantzinger[edit]
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 m
2) home in
Port Tobacco, where he lived throughout the 1990s
[1] until moving to a new home in
St. Mary's County around 2001
[11] in
Chaptico, Maryland, called Bachelor's Hope.
[12]
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.
[13][14] 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.
[15] He was sentenced to 19 months in prison and a $50,000 fine.
[16] Some of his prison sentence was served in a
work release program.
[17]
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."
[18]Zantzinger died on January 3, 2009, at the age of 69.
[19]
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