Of Lonesome Deaths And Human Arrogance

He was the villain in a Bob Dylan song. He was a rich Maryland tobacco farmer who in his youth caused the death of a poor middle-aged black barmaid. He was condemned for that to a mere six-months in jail by a sympathetic judge. He stirred young Dylan’s anger and led him to write the song “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” in 1964.

Last week, William Devereux Zantzinger died, aged 69.

The song has become a classic of American folk and a standard in Dylan’s repertoire. Most critics and biographers agree that it represents a peak of the singer’s “protest song period”, those initial years in Dylan’s career when he purportedly became the “voice of his generation” singing about political and social injustice and the need for the times to change. Afterwards, his music and career went elsewhere. And farther. But “Hattie Carroll” remained in Dylan’s canon, and versions of it can be found in live recordings of the 70s, 80s and 90s. Indeed, it could be argued that the song was not necessarily a protest song, because its words carry a universal message about the human nature. The arrogance that can naturally derive from power and wealth. (read the song’s lyrics at http://www.bobdylan.com/ )

Some writers, analyzing the song’s quasi-journalistic content, stressed the inaccuracy of some facts or their actual falseness. As reported by Ian Frazier in an excellent article for Mother Jones, then reprinted by The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2005/feb/25/bobdylan : “Zantzinger's actual arrest and trial were more complicated than the song lets on. Police arrested him at the ball for disorderly conduct - he was wildly drunk - and for assaults on hotel employees not including Hattie Carroll, about whom they apparently knew nothing at the time. When Carroll died at Mercy Hospital the following morning, Zantzinger was also charged with homicide. The medical examiner reported that Carroll had hardened arteries, an enlarged heart, and high blood pressure; that the cane left no mark on her; and that she died of a brain hemorrhage brought on by stress caused by Zantzinger's verbal abuse, coupled with the assault. After the report, a tribunal of Maryland circuit court judges reduced the homicide charge to manslaughter. Zantzinger was found guilty of that, and of assault - but not of murder.”

Frazier’s article is well documented and moving: well worth reading. He actually gives justice to the fact that, despite the inaccuracies, Dylan’s song “took a one-column, under-the-rug story and played it as big as it deserved to be”.

Others are more critical. Clinton Heylin, in his book "Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited" (2001), countered that the song "verges on the libelous" because of "its tenuous grasp of the facts of the case" One criticism was that Mr. Zantzinger's "high office relations," as Dylan called them, were overstated: his father had only been a one-term state legislator. The song did not mention that Carroll was black, although listeners could make that assumption. Dylan also did not refer to the reduced charge of manslaughter, only the six-month sentence. And Hattie Carroll had in fact 11 children, not 10, as the song says. And Zantzinger was spelled by Dylan without the “t”, Zanzinger. And so on, and so forth…

Wait a minute. Someone’s missing the point here.

Is it significant to dissect the lyrics and verify the correctness of every fact in a song? Is it really important whether Zantzinger’s cane was a direct or indirect cause of Hattie Carroll’s death? Of course not.

What counts is Dylan’s vivid, exemplary description of human arrogance. The conceit, self-importance and vanity of the rich and powerful of the world. That sense of superiority, that carelessness they often exude and apply in their relations with the less privileged members of the society. Who hasn’t witnessed such behavior in every day’s life? Who cannot relate to and feel anger at the powerful man who “Reacted to his deed with a shrug of his shoulders and swear words and sneering, and his tongue it was snarling”. Simply because he knows that “In a matter of minutes on bail was out walking”?

This is why the song is immortal and will last longer than other so-called protest songs. Dylan captures universally understood concepts: the overlooked injustice, the helplessness of the weak, the extreme human intolerance.

(Photo courtesy of AP)