‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’: Bob Dylan’s prescient look at the inequality of corrupt modern society
If cancel culture was real, then half of those trying to cancel it would be doing so from behind bars. For the most part, modern society’s bid for greater accountability has been derided by design by the powers that be with plenty of blood on their hands. Bob Dylan was wise to this gathering inequity in the 1960s and he played out the corruption clearly in his classic track ‘The Lonseome Death of Hattie Carroll’.
There isn’t a great deal of narrative to ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, but what it lacks in plot points it makes up for with Dylan’s sagacious societal wherewithal. Essentially, in his own poetic prose, Dylan tells the tale of how a rich man clubs a servant to death for no good reason. He is quickly caught and whisked off to court.
The judge then avows “to show that all’s equal and that the courts are on the level” and “even the nobles get properly handled”. But after boasting that he will bring the hammer down on this crooked lord, Dylan presents a punchline to a problem that has looked increasingly less like a laughing matter in all the years that have followed, as a measly “six-month sentence” is dished out for this heinous crime.
Dylan’s story is based on the shocking events that took place at the Spinsters’ Ball at the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore in 1963. William Devereux Zantzinger apparently grew agitated with Hattie Carroll, claiming that she wasn’t pouring his drink quickly enough. In a reprehensible act, he struck her with a cane. She died seven hours later of a brain haemorrhage, having never regained consciousness after the attack. Despite all the irrefutable evidence, Zantzinger was only sentenced to six months for manslaughter.
He was only 23 when he wrote this song for his 1964 album, The Times Are A-Changin’. However, despite his tender age, tackling injustice was his bold agenda. Dylan’s years of writing about death and injustice began with ‘Ballad for a Friend’ in 1962, when he was only 21 years old. The unwashed phenomenon was holed up in New York’s Greenwich Village with a thousand other urban vagabonds, and although the breadline was forever looming, he didn’t seem to be searching for a big break, but rather a beacon to illuminate the flaws of society.
As he puts it himself: “It wasn’t that I was anti-popular culture or anything, and I had no ambition to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window, and you had to have awkward footgear to walk with.”
Dylan was certainly not the first to stand aside from the stream of songs about holding hands and dancing the jive, but he was certainly one of the most prominent and prescient. Not long before ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, he had already written songs like ‘The Death of Emmett Till’ as early as 1962, where he looked at the slaying of an innocent black man in 1955.
Flash forward to 1975, and Dylan would show the flipside of justice. In ‘Hurricane’, he looks at how a poor boxer was “falsely tried” in a racially-biased “pig circus”. It’s a true story that saw Reuben Carter, an innocent man, serve 19 years and four months in prison. The contrast between the two tales of injustice highlighted the gross inequity in society that has only worsened since the release of the songs.
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