I was travelling back from the Waxahatchee show last month when The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll shuffled on to my headphones, and in a musical reverie fuelled by elegant Americana and a couple of beers, I resolved to write a little about it. So I'll try.
In the canon of early Dylan - the Dylan that is still most people's idea of what Dylan is, the voice of a generation with the acoustic guitar - there may be more famous songs than Hattie Carroll - Blowin' in the Wind, Times They are a Changin', Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, Masters of War, Don't Think Twice, but The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll is, I think, the greatest song. Truly one of the most striking, specific, powerful songs ever written by anyone ever. But how and why?
Apart from the odd one-off like Hurricane in the mid-70s, this was one of the last straight-up finger-pointing from-the-papers topical protest songs Dylan wrote. He wrote it straight after performing at the March on Washington, the height of his genuine in-person involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.
Joan Baez wryly tells the story that for decades and to this day she'd be asked at protest event after protest event she attended "Is Bob coming?" ... "When are you going to understand?" she sighs "he never comes" .... but he went to that one. The biggest one.
Actual Dylan fans don't tend to think of Dylan as a steadfast and truthful protest singer - we think of him as the joker, always hiding, always on the run, always obfuscating, always giving you something other than what you think you want. He was a glib, selfish kid.
But he wrote The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.
And it is fair to suppose that in the moment of writing this song, he cared deeply and found this single injustice representing a million injustices disgraceful.
Not everyone loves the album The Times They Are a Changin', as it is Dylan's most grey, humourless, self-righteous album (until the Christian ones), but I really love that about it. It is mournful, fierce, heavy. Maybe in some places it is phony. Maybe Dylan wasn't actually this guy and maybe he knew it and he decided to pay the Civil Rights Movement the respect of not pretending to be that guy any longer after this.
It is interesting, perhaps, that this album (like Another Side ...) and nothing else, was made in the studio by only Dylan himself, and his black producer, Tom Wilson. It seems unlikely, and not something anyone else has ever suggested, as far as i know, but was there a part of Dylan trying to impress/speak to Wilson?
Two criticisms of ...Hattie Carroll are that a) it's a borrowed tune and b) it's not accurate. I'm not sure either of those things are fair. It's based on an old folk tune called Mary Hamilton, but it's not a copy. You wouldn't know unless you knew - it is definitely a Dylan composition, in terms of top line and structure. Either way, it's one of the most powerful, moving melodies he ever sang.
And it's true enough, you know. William Zantzinger did whack old Hattie Carroll with a cane, that did contribute pretty powerfully to her death, he did only receive 6 months, in a grave, racist, miscarriage of justice. The song doesn't say he deliberately beat her to death. He hit her hard with a cane on the shoulder and head and she died of a brain haemorrhage hours afterwards. The song is honest.
It is a subtle but brave song. It is a bold, controversial thing to imply that, in the scheme of things, the ongoing impunity of the wealthy white men for their crimes is a greater disgrace than the original act of violence.
The song has various memorable details which may be down to luck or genius, but that's rather the point.
The balancing of the names - William Zan(t)zinger and Hattie Carroll, the balancing of the ages, HC's 10 children, WZ's rich wealthy parents, the half-rhyme of level and gavel, of level and table, the repetition of table, slain by a cane, spoke through his cloak ,the way he puts "and she never done nothing to William Zantzinger" at the end of the verse, almost as an afterthought, but which is just devastating.
The songs lives on in history more than most other songs - it's there in the stories of Trayvon Martin, Kyle Rittenhouse, George Floyd, in all of them. Dylan has played it quite a lot - almost 300, not 1000s, but enough to know he still respects and loves this most time-stamped of songs.
He's a strange old being, Bob, but it would be a shame if his capacity for fearsome righteous empathy was written out of his story for all the trickery and wit. If I were to define the greatest songwriter of all by five songs, this would always be one of them. This was the best he, or anyone else, could do at this type of song.
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