Bob Dylan / 5:47
Musician
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: October 23, 1963
Technical Team
Producer: Tom Wilson
Sound Engineers: George Knuerr and Pete Dauria
This song is based on a factual account of the killing of Hattie Carroll. At about 1 a.m. on February 9, 1963, William Devereux “Billy” Zantzinger entered the ballroom of the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore, Maryland, with his wife and, using a toy cane, drunkenly assaulted three employees. Among them was a black barmaid, Hattie Carroll, whom he had previously insulted because she was black and because she had been slow to bring him a glass of bourbon. Hattie Carroll, fifty-one years old, died eight hours later at Mercy Hospital on February 9. Shortly before the tragedy at the Emerson Hotel, Zantzinger had already drunkenly assaulted several employees of a prestigious Baltimore restaurant. He was arrested and charged with murder. During the autopsy the doctors discovered that the victim suffered from atherosclerosis, and the cause of the death was a brain hemorrhage (presumably caused by insults rather than by the hit of the cane). Zantzinger’s defense succeeded in reducing the charge to manslaughter, causing death without intention to kill. Zantzinger, a white, twenty-four-year-old “gentleman farmer” and son of a wealthy Maryland family, was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment with a fine of $125 for assault and the death of Hattie Carroll. He served his time in the Washington county jail and not in the state prison, where he could have been a target for abuse in revenge. The sentence was handed down on August 28, 1963, 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, one of the celebrities in Washington, was revolted by the three-day trial for the death of a black barmaid. His feelings were shared by Reverend Jesse Jackson, who in one of his sermons states, “There is something wrong with our city when a white man can beat a colored woman to death and nobody raises a hand to stop him.”
After reading the press accounts about the conviction of Zantzinger, Dylan decided to write his feelings and resentment into a protest song about the case. “I wrote ‘Hattie Carroll’ in a small notebook in a restaurant on Seventh Avenue. There was a luncheonette place where we used to go all the time… a bunch of singers used to go in there,” he said in 1985.12 He wanted to speak out on behalf of all those who, like him, did not accept this tragedy. “I just let the story tell itself in that song,” he told Robert Hilburn in 2004. “Who wouldn’t be offended by some guy beating an old woman to death and just getting a slap on the wrist?”20
The song was influenced by Bertolt Brecht’s “Pirate Jenny” number from The Threepenny Opera, just like “Only a Pawn in Their Game.” “The set pattern to the song I think is based on Brecht, the ship, the Black Freighter,” he says in the Biograph notes.12 Curiously, Robert Shelton asserts that Dylan was inspired by the French poet François Villon. The song follows a drama that crescendos. “Take the rag away from your face / Now ain’t the time for your tears,” sings Dylan in the first three choruses, and then in the last, “Oh, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears / Bury the rag deep in your face / For now’s the time for your tears.”
“The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” is one of the greatest protest songs by Bob Dylan, and also one of his favorites. In just under six minutes, he provides an implacable indictment against early 1960s America, condemning the benevolence of judges toward defendants when they are white.
“The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” was the first song recorded on October 23. Only four takes were necessary to record the final master. This lament in three tempos, accompanied by a chorus, is strangely close in style to Dylan’s future “Mr. Tambourine Man” and has a surprising emotional strength from the first verse. With a discreet reverb on the voice, strumming guitar, and harmonica solo (E) full of feeling, Dylan plays again the card of sobriety. He treats carefully its effects, which can be seen from the third to the last verse (around 4:25), where he suddenly speeds up the tempo to enhance the judgment scene. Dylan kept a higher tempo for the live versions of the song as well.