Not What You Meant? There are 154 definitions for Carroll.

The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll

About 5 pages (1,596 words)

Questions on this topic? Just ask!

"The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll"

Album cover

Song by Bob Dylan

Album

The Times They Are a-Changin'

Released

Recorded

Length

5:48

The Times They Are a-Changin' track listing

"When the Ship Comes In"
(8)

"The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll"
(9)

"Restless Farewell"
(10)

"The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" is a topical song by Bob Dylan. Recorded on 23 October 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 William Devereux "Billy" Zantzinger (whom the song calls "William Zanzinger"), and his subsequent sentence to six months in jail.

1 The homicide
2 The song
3 Impact on Zantzinger
4 Pop culture
5 References
6 External links

The homicide

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. That night, 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. Already drunk before he got to the Emerson Hotel that night, Zantzinger had assaulted employees at Eager House, a prestigious Baltimore restaurant, with the same cane.^[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.^[1] Moments later, after ordering a bourbon that Carroll didn't bring immediately, Zantzinger cursed at her, called her "you black son of a bitch," and struck her on the shoulder with the cane. After striking Carroll, he attacked his own wife, knocking her to the ground. ^[1] Soon after the mortal 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.^[1] 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,^[1] 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 Sept. 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 brief time in the comparative safety of the Washington county jail, some 70 miles from the scene of the crime. Independent of his criminal sentence, he also paid $25,000 to Carroll's family.

The song

Dylan recorded the song 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 2006. His live-audience renditions of it appear on the albums Live 1975 (2002) and Live 1964 (2004). In Chronicles, Vol. 1, Dylan includes "Hattie Carroll" in a list of those of his early songs he feels were influenced by his belated introduction to the work of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, including Pirate Jenny (or The Black Freighter). Dylan writes that he was impressed by how the Brecht-Weill songs wedded a complex lyrical perspective to simple folk song structures. The prosody of the song is unusual. In part because the names Carroll and Zan(t)zinger both end on unstressed syllables, the lines of the verses each use a feminine ending, although those of the chorus do not. The song is cited in several accounts of the controversy surrounding Dylan's introduction of folk rock at the Newport Folk Festival.

Impact on Zantzinger

The song has continued to haunt Zantzinger in later controversies. He openly rented poorly-maintained properties which were in violation of county habitability codes. In 1991, it became known that he also collected rents on properties which he no longer owned, and had even won court battles against delinquent tenants on those properties. The fact that the tenants exploited on these properties were black, combined with the white Zantzinger's crime against Hattie Carroll, solidified his reputation for being racist and criminal. Dylan's song was invoked as an anthem for those calling for Zantzinger's prosecution in the rental cases. In 2001, Zantzinger told Howard Sounes, in Down the Highway, the Life of Bob Dylan, "It's actually had no effect upon my life," but expressed scorn for Dylan, saying, "He's a no-account son of a bitch," and "He's just like a scum of a scum bag [sic] of the earth, I should have sued him and put him in jail." Zantzinger claims the song is unfounded, though it closely reflects the facts which led to his 1963 conviction. He has not attempted to prevent Dylan from performing it.

Pop culture

"Blood Ties: Part 3," an episode of the Baltimore television serial Homicide: Life on the Street, mentions the song in reference to a case in which a wealthy black person is charged with the death of their 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 their housemaid. Billy Bragg wrote a song using the same melody called: "The Lonesome Death of Rachel Corrie." The reggae influenced progressive rock band Rx Bandits did a cover version of the song for a compilation titled "Listen to Bob Dylan." The reggae singer Michael Rose, formerly of Black Uhuru, also did a cover of this song for a compilation produced by Dr. Dread titled "Is It Rolling Bob?" The comic strip Three Panel Soul (by the creators of Mac Hall) includes a strip where a City of Villains character is modeled and named after William Zanzinger^[2] The singer/songwriter folk artist Christy Moore performed a cover of the song on the "2006 Live in Dublin" album. The Minnesota-based singer/songwriter Mason Jennings does a cover of the song in the biographical Bob Dylan movie "I'm Not There" released in November 2007.

References

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e The Spinsters' Ball February 22, 1963, TIME magazine.
^ .McConville, Ian; Boyd, Matt (2006-11-15). On the City of Villains. Three Panel Soul. Retrieved on 2007-02-25.

Carlson, Peter, "'A Regular Old Southern Maryland Boy.'" Washington Post, August 4, 1991: [1]
Frazier, Ian, "Legacy of a Lonely Death". Mother Jones, November/December 2004, 42-47; partial version on line. Reprinted by The Guardian February 25, 2005, as "Life after a lonesome death" (full version with the full song lyrics).
"Farmer Convicted in Barmaid's Death", New York Times Jun 28, 1963. p. 11
"Farmer Sentenced in Barmaid's Death", New York Times Aug 29, 1963. p. 15
Bill Bragg, "The Lonesome Death of Rachel Corrie," Youtube [2].