Bob Dylan: The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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This is a tough theme! I can only find a few songs that truly tell a story from history (and two of them are Dylan songs). I look forward to the week. It should be really interesting to see what other contributers come up with.
In 1963 William Zantzinger, drunken at a white tie ball in Maryland, assaulted three black employees of the hotel with a toy cane while spewing racial slurs at them. He assaulted his own wife, knocking her to the floor, the same night. Hattie Carroll was a barmaid at that hotel and one of the victims of his drunken attacks. After being beaten with the cane, Hatite was taken to the hospital where she died eight hours later. The cause of death was a "brain hemorrhage" complicated by high blood pressure and an enlarged heart, but the doctors determined that the stress of the beating exacerbated Hattie's preexisting conditions.
Zantzinger was originally convicted of murder, but following the discovery of the ultimate cause of Hattie's death his sentence was dropped to Manslaughter and he was sentenced to six months in prison.
Hattie was 51 years old and had 10 children.
From Wikipedia:
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."
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