FolkWorld #79 11/2022
© Dai Woosnam

FolkWorld 25th Anniversary 1997-2022

Dai Woosnam's DAI-SSECTING THE SONG

The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll - by Bob Dylan



»Dai-ssecting The Song«

Dai Woosnam
(13) »No Man's Land« by Eric Bogle
(12) »Road To Dorchester« by Moore & Ryan
(11) »My Country ‘Tis Of Thy...« by Buffy Sainte-Marie
(10) »Three Score And Ten« by William Delf
(9) »Little Innocents« by Vin Garbutt
(8) »Song For Martin« by Judy Collins
(7) »A Proper Sort of Gardener« by Maggie Holland
(6) »Take Me Out Drinking Tonight« by Michael Marra
(5) »Sunday Morning Coming Down« by K. Kristofferson
(4) »City Of New Orleans« by Steve Goodman
(3) »Viva La Quince Brigada« by Christy Moore
(2) »Christmas in the Trenches« by John McCutcheon
(1) »Eye Of The Hurricane« by David Wilcox

Before I tell you about the song I have selected as the fourteenth one to go under the Dai Woosnam microscope, let me preface this article with what has now become part of the wallpaper in this series: if you like, see the following four bullet points below as being akin to the “small print” in this contract between you the reader, and me the writer. Here goes...
  • It is a given that I might be talking total balderdash. After all, I have no monopoly on the truth. And even when my insights are proven correct, that does not stop you dear reader, from finding your own views to be totally antithetical to mine. But here is my news for you... we can both be right.
  • As Bob Dylan famously wrote “You’re right from your side/I’m right from mine”. And (much less famously) exclaimed in a press conference on his first full tour of the UK, when asked the meaning of a particular song... “My songs mean what they mean to YOU... man!”.
  • So don’t please write in vituperative language to the Editor to tell him that Dai is, to use the familiar English phrase, “barking up the wrong tree”. I might well be. And certainly every line of my views here are not endorsed by the Editorial Board of FolkWorld. Nor should they be.
  • Why have they hired me? Not sure. But my dear wife Larissa suggests it’s perhaps because they like the sound of my barking. I must say, I cannot top that conclusion...so I will end my preamble here, and get down to business.
  • After choosing to make a visit to Australia with my thirteenth song, I return to the USA for my fourteenth. And in selecting a song by Bob Dylan, I am almost spoilt for choice: I have quite a bit to say about a number of them. But in the end I came down in favour of what I think is his greatest narrative song: and while you read the lyrics (immediately below), I will be cudgelling my brain to try to remember events of 56 years ago, when I saw Dylan in the flesh for the first time: it was May 11th, 1966, and it was his first visit to my native country of Wales and its capital city of Cardiff.

    Every seat in the 3,158 capacity Capitol Theatre auditorium could have been sold three times over. I felt so lucky to bag a ticket. When I arrived in my train from my hometown of Porth, and walked the short distance to the theatre, I was amazed to find a massive queue stretching for hundreds of yards. And the news quickly went down the queue that as Dylan had not arrived for his soundcheck, they were not letting any of us ticketed three thousand in...!! Yikes...!! Don’t tell us he is ill...??

    But within another 35 minutes, we could hear cheering up ahead... and we started to shuffle our way forward. Success.

    I recall being disappointed he did not sing this - my then favourite Dylan song - in his solo acoustic first half. As for the second half, when he ‘went electric’ with his backing group The Hawks (later to be known as The Band): I am ashamed to say I joined in the mass booing. Pathetic, on my part, given how much I was to grow to love his ‘electric’ recording of songs such as Like A Rolling Stone and Positively 4th Street. But I confess, just like Pete Seeger at Newport Folk Festival the previous year, if somebody had given me an axe, I’d have cut the electric cables too.

    Bob Dylan

    William Zantzinger (1939-2009)

     The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll 
    
     (Bob Dylan )  
    
    William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
    With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
    At a Baltimore hotel society gath'rin'
    And the cops were called in and his weapon took from him
    As they rode him in custody down to the station
    And booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder
    
    [Chorus] But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
    Take the rag away from your face
    Now ain't the time for your tears
    
    William Zanzinger, who at twenty-four years
    Owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres
    With rich wealthy parents who provide and protect him
    And high office relations in the politics of Maryland
    Reacted to his deed with a shrug of his shoulders
    And swear words and sneering, and his tongue it was snarling
    In a matter of minutes on bail was out walking
    
    [Chorus] And you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
    Take the rag away from your face
    Now ain't the time for your tears
    
    Hattie Carroll was a maid of the kitchen
    She was fifty-one years old and gave birth to ten children
    Who carried the dishes and took out the garbage
    And never sat once at the head of the table
    And didn't even speak to the people at the table
    Who just cleaned up all the food from the table
    And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level
    Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane
    That sailed through the air and came down through the room
    Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle
    And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger
    
    [Chorus] And you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
    Take the rag away from your face
    Now ain't the time for your tears
    
    In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
    To show that all's equal and that the courts are on the level
    And that the strings in the books ain't pulled and persuaded
    And that even the nobles get properly handled
    Once that the cops have chased after and caught 'em
    And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom
    Stared at the person who killed for no reason
    Who just happened to be feelin' that way without warnin'
    And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished
    And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance
    William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence
    
    [Chorus] And you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
    Bury the rag most deep in your face
    Now's the time for your tears
    

    Bob Dylan

    Artist Video Bob Dylan @ FROG

    www.bobdylan.com

    Here is my favourite YouTube live version from a Toronto TV studio in March 1964... when the song was still new and positively searing in its impact. It had been released in the January as the penultimate track on his The Times They Are A-Changin’ album...

    Some viewers may not be won over by the curious choice of background location for this version: I will explain to you after you have seen it, why it adds to - rather than subtracts from – the greatness of the song...


    ... What do you make of that studio set of a workers’ lodge? (Lumberjacks, perhaps? Look at the trees at the window.)

    It comes from a Canadian TV series called Quest. Presumably Dylan isn’t supposed to be one of the gang, but a troubadour that the wind has just blown in? The men are doing various activities: playing solitaire, reading, pipe-smoking, writing a letter home, etc... and never begin to turn their attentions to Bob: alas, his words fail to hit home.

    How I wish such a powerful song had halted these streetwise, hard-bitten guys in their tracks...!! But they did not. And that degree of verisimilitude is really what wins me over here.

    Look... be realistic folks. There was hardly going to be a two minute Damascene conversion in that workers’ lodge, was there? After all, over 57 years after Hattie Carroll was killed in hot temper, George Floyd was killed in the coldest of blood.

    And the very fact that Dylan was clearly not ‘preaching to the converted’ here, gives the song additional oomph somehow. It would have been an easy option to sing it in the contemporaneous American TV series Hootenanny, with a dozen teenagers behind him with tear-filled eyes. But it would not have rung as true.

    However, should you, dear Reader, have found that background took something away from the song, then please try this next link on for size... it is Dylan filmed by the great DA Pennebaker in 1965 in England, and he is in commanding form. How I love his harmonica solo, around the 3 minute mark...


    Okay, preamble over. Let’s get down to looking at the song... first the melody, which although it doesn’t exactly dazzle, I still never tire of.

    I recall being told years ago that he had lifted it from a traditional Scots ballad. And I checked it out back then, but could not see the link between the two.

    Maybe I’d been given the wrong song title. Not much more to say on the melody.

    But as for the lyric, ah, that’s different.

    Here is the opening verse...

    William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
    With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
    At a Baltimore hotel society gath'rin'
    And the cops were called in and his weapon took from him
    As they rode him in custody down to the station
    And booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder
    

    Now, Bob does not start too well by misspelling the killer’s name...!! He misses out the T in Zantzinger. And he takes a bit of a liberty by implying that Zantzinger’s hitting her with his (implied, to be ‘thick’?) stick, killed her on the spot. Not so.

    My investigations show it was actually a 25 cent toy walking cane, and he slapped her with it - get this – because she was too slow in pouring his bourbon. (I find that truly appalling: and I have discovered he had a history of slapping other folk from racial minorities.)

    This drunken behaviour upset Hattie greatly: not so much the slap, as his snarling use of the N and SOAB words.

    Bob Dylan & Joan Baez

    She left the bar room and sped to the kitchen area for sanctuary, feeling very sad indeed. She told a fellow worker what had happened: she said "I feel deathly ill, that man has upset me so". Her arm went numb and her speech became slurred, and she collapsed. She was taken to hospital with a suspected stroke, and eight hours after the assault, a brain haemorrhage proved to be fatal.

    A fellow barmaid later reported that the bar at the plush Emerson Hotel in downtown Baltimore where the ‘society gath’rin’ was taking place, was a hive of activity and Carroll felt rushed. When Zantzinger pressed her to make the drink he'd ordered, she replied, "I'm hurrying as fast as I can."

    "I don't have to take that kind of shit off a nigger," he hissed back, and slapped her hard with his toy cane, across her shoulder and neck.

    Sickening.

    But hey, in a narrative song, there has to be a limit as to just how much medical – or other – information you can impart in a song lyric. And anyway, let’s be clear: Zantzinger clearly did kill the lady with a double blow of vicious words and a humiliating slap. So don’t get mad at Dylan for telling us that a rich white man with a diamond ring has killed a ‘poor’ – both in terms of fate and economic status - black barmaid/waitress.

    Interesting that Dylan obviously has no need to tell us that Zantzinger is a white man. Why not? Well, look at the date of the event: 9th February, 1963. LBJ’s Civil Rights Act was not passed into law until July the following year. That says it all... particularly seeing racial segregation still had a big hold around the city of Baltimore, where this crime occurred.

    And similarly, he never tells us Hattie is an African-American. Again, he does not need to, does he? We just knew it in our bones.

    And then we come to the chorus, where he tells us not to cry superficial tears to show how ‘right-on’ we are. Instead, he tells us to save our tears just now: implying real tears will flow when we know all the facts.

    But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
    Take the rag away from your face
    Now ain't the time for your tears
    

    And now we come to the next verse...

    William Zanzinger, who at twenty-four years
    Owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres
    With rich wealthy parents who provide and protect him
    And high office relations in the politics of Maryland
    Reacted to his deed with a shrug of his shoulders
    And swear words and sneering, and his tongue it was snarling
    In a matter of minutes on bail was out walking
    

    Dylan, in those seven lines, says all you need to know about race discrimination in the USA of 1963... and to some extent - looking at the vast number of black Americans incarcerated in today’s America – it is still a factor in the minds of prejudicial judges and prosecutors.

    And he tells us that Zantzinger at just 24, has this massive tobacco farm, which was not the result of his entrepreneurial genius, but rather, had been handed him on a plate. (Note, by ‘parents who provide and protect him’: Dylan makes those six words so damning. He could have said that they ‘helped and encouraged him’, but instead spits out the naked truth: inferring that their ineffectual son is their creation... in every sense.)

    And then we come to an eleven line verse telling us about Hattie’s life and death: where curiously, we have three successive lines ending with the same word... ‘table’...

    Hattie Carroll was a maid of the kitchen
    She was fifty-one years old and gave birth to ten children
    Who carried the dishes and took out the garbage
    And never sat once at the head of the table
    And didn't even speak to the people at the table
    Who just cleaned up all the food from the table
    And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level
    Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane
    That sailed through the air and came down through the room
    Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle
    And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger
    

    Now, some people might think this ‘table x 3’, a sign of lazy lyric writing: but not me. Rather. I see it as inspired.

    Bob Dylan

    Why? Well, the table dominated her working life... as it dominates this verse. I’d guess her white bosses never encouraged her to speak conversationally to any of what they regarded as ‘her betters’, so efficiency became the watchword: all social niceties were sacrificed to ensuring the table operation ran smoothly.

    Thus one does not need to be a genius to figure that such a job can become monotonous: and what better way to capture that relentless repetition, than to repeat the same word, three line-endings in a row?

    And before we leave this verse, let me gloss over Dylan’s somewhat hyperbolic description of the toy cane flying through the air, but instead zero-in on that deliberately ungrammatical last line. He says ‘She never done nothing to William Zanzinger’.

    I like that line so much since it reminds me of the lines of childhood, when you’d see the school bully punch a smaller kid, and the weaker kid (in amongst his sobs) would say ‘I never done nothing to him’. It is the classic line of the impotent against the powerful. And that’s why Dylan’s use of it here, is so telling.

    Again, verse over, we have that chorus, still urging us not to cry premature, superficial tears...

    And you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
    Take the rag away from your face
    Now ain't the time for your tears
    

    And now we come to the last verse...

    In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
    To show that all's equal and that the courts are on the level
    And that the strings in the books ain't pulled and persuaded
    And that even the nobles get properly handled
    Once that the cops have chased after and caught 'em
    And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom
    Stared at the person who killed for no reason
    Who just happened to be feelin' that way without warnin'
    And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished
    And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance
    William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence
    

    That ‘caught em/bottom’ rhyme always makes me smile at Dylan’s linguistic playfulness. But that rhyme apart, there is nothing else to smile about in this eleven line verse.

    Bob Dylan

    In his first six lines, he tells us that the American legal system, in theory, has unimpeachable credentials. It is a ‘courtroom of honor’ not just because we Brits – just like them – call the judge ‘your honour’, but because its integrity sees to it that there is no favouritism when it comes to social class. (You note I said ‘in theory’: the final five lines see ‘theory’ go out the window.)

    For disturbingly, despite the stern words of rebuke from the (pompous?) judge, he sentenced Zantzinger to what was (with prison time reduced for good behaviour) just six months behind bars, and spared him being sent to a tough prison (presumably on the grounds that black prisoners could have physically attacked him). And, irony of ironies, the very same day that the filthy racist got his soft sentence, in nearby Washington DC, Martin Luther King made his glorious ’I have a dream’ speech. What can you say regarding that coincidence? Other than the Master of our Fates must have a perverse sense of humour.

    One’s left feeling sick.

    And now Dylan changes the chorus, this last time, to...

    And you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
    Bury the rag most deep in your face
    Now's the time for your tears
    

    For, faced with the judge accepting a ‘manslaughter’ plea, Dylan pulls no punches. He still thinks that this particular prison sentence is obscenely lenient. And what decent person could disagree with Dylan here? Such an indictment of American society, back then, and maybe today still.

    And now, Dylan tells us – as we are knowing the facts as he has presented them – we armchair philosophers can no longer find mitigating circumstances that somehow in a tiny way, lessen the crime of the racist Zantzinger, nor the nauseating Jim Crow laws that still applied in so many US states in 1964.

    No more a case of the ‘take the rag away’, and ‘now ain’t the time’: instead, says Dylan, it is now imperative we ‘bury the rag most deep’... for this moment assuredly really is ‘the time for your tears’.

    Bravo!... Mr Dylan. You have given us a song that touches our nerve endings as much today, as it did almost sixty years ago.

    [Dai Woosnam... November 2022.]


    And here is a footnote to the above article.

    Cardiff’s Capitol Theatre was demolished in the 1980s, and is now The Capitol Shopping Centre.

    And interestingly, the same night Dylan was performing at the Capitol, his buddy Johnny Cash was performing just a mile away at Cardiff’s Sophia Gardens Pavilion.

    And guess what? It turns out that they apparently spent the afternoon and early evening in one of their hotel rooms, 'shooting the breeze' and working on a song together.

    No Direction Home

    Cash (with a slightly later concert time?) even accompanied Dylan backstage to The Capitol Theatre where they lost themselves working on possible duets (with Dylan on piano) and they were so infatuated with each other that time flew. And when Dylan was reminded that he was still needed for his soundcheck, he allegedly basically said 'let them wait'. Hence the almost-unheard-of queue at a venue which was normally so slick when it came to entry and exit.


    Now fast-forward to 2005 and the release of that magisterial three-and-a -half hour documentary from Martin Scorsese... No Direction Home. Towards the very end of the film, we see a car going at pace, filming an extraordinary queue for a Dylan concert: a queue which started at the theatre box office and goes along the main street, then the queue (and car filming it) turns left after 150 yards, and goes straight on for a few hundred yards, and then turns left again.

    I thought to myself... ‘I know that place and that queue: it is Queen Street in Cardiff, with its left turn into Churchill Way...!! Gosh, it is that May night in 1966. Ye gods...!!

    So I paused the DVD and ran the 25 second scene over again. And believe it or not, by going frame-by-frame... hallelujah...!! ... I found the skinny, jet-black haired, 18 year-old me. Albeit, the pause button on the TV makes me very blurred and seemingly someone totally removed from my current near-bald, morbidly-obese, 75 year old self: but it is me alright. (I ought to know: I was there... and I was him... although, it seems almost in another life now.)



    Photo Credits: (1) Dai Woosnam, (2ff) Bob Dylan (unknown/website).


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