The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll composer Bob Dylan
Song
Zantzinger was convicted of manslaughter on August 28, 1963, and was not tried by a jury of peers but by a panel of three judges. The sentence was handed down on 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, aged 22 at that time, was one of the celebrities at the march and on the journey home to New York City he read about the conviction of Zantzinger and decided to write a protest song about the case. According to a 1991 Washington Post report, Dylan wrote the song in Manhattan, sitting in an all-night cafe. A recent radio documentary on the song said rather that he wrote it both in New York and at the home of his then-lover, Joan Baez, in Carmel. According to Nancy Carlin, a friend of Baez who visited: "He would stand in this cubbyhole, beautiful view across the hills, and peck type on an old typewriter... there was an old piano up at Joan's... and peck piano playing... up until noon he would drink black coffee then switch over to red wine, quit about five or six." He recorded it 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, 1964.The song juxtaposes Zantzinger's wealth and connections with the brevity of that sentence. Despite the song's topical nature, Dylan has continued to perform it in concert as of May 2009.  His live-audience renditions of it appear on the albums The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975, The Rolling Thunder Revue (2002; recorded November 21, 1975), The Bootleg Series Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall (2004; recorded October 31, 1964), and Live 1962-1966: Rare Performances From The Copyright Collections (2018; recorded October 26, 1963).  In 2019, five live performances of the song from the 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour were released on the box set The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings.
In Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan includes "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" in a list of his early songs which he feels were influenced by his introduction to the work of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. He describes writing out the words of "Pirate Jenny" (or "The Black Freighter") in order to understand how the Brecht–Weill song achieved its effect. Dylan writes: "Woody had never written a song like that. It wasn't a protest or a topical song and there was no love for people in it. I took the song apart and unzipped it—it was the free verse association, the structure and disregard for the known certainty of melodic pattern to make it seriously matter, give it its cutting edge. It also had the ideal chorus for the lyrics."Literary critic Christopher Ricks considers the song to be "one of Dylan's greatest" and the recording on The Times They Are A-Changin' to be "perfect". He devotes an entire chapter to it, analyzing both the meaning as well as the prosody in his book on Dylan's songs as poetry. "But here is a song that could not be written better."Dylan's song ("The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll") contains at least two inaccuracies. Zantzinger was not booked for first degree murder, but for second degree murder. Dylan also misspells and mispronounces Zantzinger's surname as "Zanzinger".
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