 This video is brought to you by CuriosityStream. If you sign up to CuriosityStream with the link in the description, you'll also get access to Nebula, where you can watch all of my videos early and ad-free. Oh, hi there. This week's video is going to be a bit different than usual. Bob Dylan is one of my favorite musicians, and for that matter, one of my favorite artists in any medium. I've already done three videos about him, and I'll likely do more in the future, but YouTube's copyright system is particularly harsh when it comes to Dylan's music, and that can make it incredibly difficult to create a proper video essay on him. So this week, we're going to look at Dylan from a purely literary perspective. I won't be playing any song clips throughout, and we won't even talk about the musical arrangements. Instead, we're going to read some Dylan lyrics on their own, as we would any other piece of literature. Dylan is an artist who always rewards close lyrical readings, and I think this way I'll be able to dig into the song. Furthermore, I'm hoping that this can show you a little bit about how to do a close reading of songs on your own, if that's the sort of thing you're interested in. This is something completely different than I usually do, and I don't blame you if you don't like it, but hey, I don't want to live in a world where artists and creators can't experiment with their work. So now that that's out of the way, we can get to the song in question. This week, the song that I want to talk about is The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. I've included links to the original recording of the song, as well as my personal favorite recording in the description, so if you want to pause me and give it a listen, you can go right ahead. In the meantime, I'm going to drop the theme music. Before we can get into the lyrics of The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, we'll need to set the scene a little. Bob Dylan wrote the song in 1963 when he was still on his way to becoming a counter-cultural iconoclast. The world around Dylan was in the midst of an unprecedented social upheaval thanks to the Civil Rights Movement. Dylan had become a part of that movement, and even joined Martin Luther King Jr.'s August 28th March on Washington, performing on the very podium where King gave his famous I Have a Dream speech. The day after that march, as Dylan was riding home to New York, he read this article in The New York Times. The piece tells of the sentencing of William Zantzinger, a white tobacco farmer who killed a black barmaid named Hattie Carroll in February 1963. Carroll had not brought Zantzinger's drink fast enough, and so he struck her with a toy cane. Shortly after, Carroll had a stroke, and eight hours after that, she died in a hospital. Zantzinger went through the court system, and he was tried the very day that Bob Dylan sang in front of Washington, and MLK said that he dreamed of America rising up and living out its creed. Zantzinger's sentence, six months in prison for manslaughter. Reading about this filled Dylan with righteous indignation, and so he decided to put it into song. The first thing to note about the lonesome death of Hattie Carroll is its lyrical structure. It's made up of four verses, each broken up by a short chorus. The first and last verse describe the incident in question and Zantzinger's sentencing, while the middle two characterize Zantzinger and Carroll. On a surface level, each of these verses seems to be a straightforward accounting of the events, modified with a bit of artistic license, including a slight change to Zantzinger's name. It looks like Dylan is mimicking the New York Times article he read, a seemingly factual retelling of a series of events. But upon closer inspection, we can see that Dylan bakes a number of pieces of political protest into his storytelling. And then there's the chorus, an ambiguous set of lines that can almost seem to undercut the very message of the song. Put together, this creates a piece that is very much of its time, but also a song that looks forward and questions the systems we live in today, and the ways that we still go about responding to tragedy. Bob Dylan opens the song right in the middle of the action with his renamed William Zantzinger, caning Hattie Carroll. The first two lines already establish the class differences between Carroll and Zantzinger, as shown by the diamond ring around Zantzinger's finger. Dylan also describes the action as a twirling of the cane. This gives it an air of casual nonchalance, further characterizing Zantzinger as heartless when it comes to Carroll. The rest of this verse is straightforward, showing Zantzinger being taken into custody. There is a change in the facts here. In real life, Zantzinger was not specifically booked for first degree murder, but I think that it's really important to note that, as journalistic as the song may seem, Bob Dylan is specifically not trying to tell a true story. Dylan is creating a fiction based on real events he's turning history into a parable with the goal of conveying a moral lesson, and this lesson is more meaningful and more impactful if Zantzinger's murder is done with intent. In the next verse, Dylan will continue to mold the story to fit his lesson as we learn more about William Zantzinger. One of the small things that Dylan does to distance his story from the real events is modify William Zantzinger's name. In the song, Dylan omits a T from the middle of it. This creates a small level of distance, but Dylan's refusal to modify the name further also shows the spite that Dylan carries for the real man. The portrait that Dylan paints of his Zantzinger character in the second verse shows us how he really feels. By noting Zantzinger's young age, Dylan is implying that his wealth is inherited rather than earned. The fact that it's a tobacco farm is significant as well, tobacco was one of the most important crops in the slave economy. The wealth and status that Zantzinger carry are legacies of slavery and systemic racism in America, and they play clearly into the events of the song. Dylan describes Zantzinger's reaction as shrugging and swearing. By virtue of his wealth, Zantzinger doesn't need to face the fact that he's responsible for the death of an innocent woman. The swearing description of Zantzinger is pulled directly from the New York Times reporting the incident. It drives home the callousness of the man and the fact that it was easy for him to get violent towards Carol because he viewed her as lesser. The final line of the verse explores America's bail system, a structure that's designed to benefit the rich and profit off of arrests. Even today, there are thousands of poor Americans who sit completely innocent in jail because they haven't been able to afford their bail. This verse serves as a criticism of William Zantzinger's character, but it's not simply condemning Zantzinger. Instead, Dylan is using Zantzinger as a symbol. He is what the benefactor of a broken justice system looks like. When your criminal system is built to benefit the rich and harm the poor, a rich man can murder a poor woman and walk away with a mild six month sentence. Once we've seen the life and privilege of the wealthy William Zantzinger, we turn to his victim, Hattie Carroll. To parallel the previous verse, Dylan introduces Hattie Carroll through her job and her age. It's important to note that while race is undeniably a factor in the story, given that in real life, Zantzinger dropped racial slurs at Carroll, neither Hattie Carroll nor William Zantzinger's race are mentioned once in Dylan's story. Instead, Dylan focuses on the fallout of that fact, Zantzinger's privilege as shown through the criminal justice system and Hattie Carroll's oppression as shown through her day to day life. In some of the strongest songwriting of the entire piece, Dylan uses the form of the song to reflect the content. Form and content are two different avenues through which you can look at art. Form is the way that a piece is composed, the techniques used to create it, and content is the story that a piece is telling, the message that it's sending. In this case, the content is showing how simple and repetitive Carroll's work life is, clearing one table after another. But Dylan uses the form of the song to drive home this monotony. The lyrics themselves are repetitive when he talks about the table. More than just that, Dylan's emphasis on the table shows how the rich view Hattie Carroll. They view her not in terms of her humanity, but in terms of her relationship to the table. This is a reality that anyone who has ever worked a service industry job is more than familiar with. All too often, the wealthy only care about the working class so far as it benefits them. After his repetition of table, Dylan shows this by explicitly saying Carroll is on a whole other level. Once we've learned of Carroll's life, we get to her death at the end of the verse. Dylan's internal rhyme here creates momentum, imitating the cane swinging through the air. Toward the end of the verse, the cane takes on a more symbolic meaning. It's not just Zanzinger's cane, it is the violence that is doomed to destroy all that is gentle. Then the verse ends on a reiteration of Hattie Carroll's innocence. In the true story, all that Hattie Carroll did was tell Zanzinger to wait a moment for his drink. For that, she was harassed, called slurs, and ultimately lost her life. Dylan's final verse makes incredible use of irony. Irony can mean a lot of things in a literary sense, but in this case, it's when the surface level of a text is undercut by a shared understanding of a deeper meaning. In this case, Dylan opens the final verse with elaborate descriptions of how just and equal the courts are. The use of level here calls back to the previous verse, where Carroll is said to be on a different level than Zanzinger. Dylan goes at length to describe the theater around equality in the American justice system. Then he brings things around to Zanzinger, once again characterizing Zanzinger's callous and careless murder. In the final lines of the verse, we get the punchline, the moral lesson of the parable, when Zanzinger has handed a mild jail sentence of six months. While Dylan never explicitly says that this sentence is short, it's put in sharp contrast with how he has described the murder throughout the song. And so, at the end of the verse, we're left with a clear image of a broken justice system that allows the wealthy and powerful to abuse the lower classes indiscriminately. Through telling the story of Hattie Carroll, Dylan has shone a light on what he views as a corrupt and unjust system. The verses of the lonesome death of Hattie Carroll are brilliant songwriting, but they're also fairly straightforward. The chorus, on the other hand, has been a topic of debate among Dylan fans ever since the song was released. Part of this is owing to the suspect grammar. The turn of phrase philosophize disgrace in particular is grammatically ambiguous. But Dylan's music isn't about grammar, it's about aesthetics and poetics. And this ambiguity encourages the listener to do a deeper reading of the chorus. The first three choruses are nearly identical. In my mind, they seem to be calling out those who would use Hattie Carroll's death as a tool, a cog and a greater political platform. Those who philosophize about the wider implications of Carroll's death are losing the fact of her humanity. In a sense, by viewing Carroll as nothing more than proof of an unjust system, they are doing what so many people in Hattie Carroll's life did. Viewing her simply as a means to an end, not as a complex human life that was prematurely snuffed out. Bob Dylan tells these would-be philosophers to take the rag away from their face and hold off on their tears. He doesn't want them to get caught up in the politics of the moment and forget the human tragedy at the center. At first glance, it seems like there's a level of hypocrisy here, seeing as that's exactly what Dylan is doing throughout the entire song. Dylan is the master of the turn. It's not uncommon for a seemingly incongruous Dylan song to be tied together in the final moments. In the case of the lonesome death of Hattie Carroll, Dylan does this by shifting two lines in the final chorus and ending with now's the time for your tears. In this last line, Dylan admits that once the justice system has failed, it is time to weep over the ills of society. Because in the end, while there was a human story at the core of Hattie Carroll and the snuffing out of her life is a tragedy, it's a tragedy that is created by and thus necessarily linked to the broader political systems. I don't think by any means this is the only possible reading of the chorus, but it's one that's cogent to me, especially in the world that we're living in today. By now you can probably see why I chose to analyze this Dylan song in particular. I think that the lonesome death of Hattie Carroll has a lot of relevance to the current political moment in the United States, but I also think that on its own, it shows the brilliance of Bob Dylan as a songwriter. I'm hoping that this close reading helped you better understand what Dylan does to make his song so unique and so powerful. In my mind, the lonesome death of Hattie Carroll remains one of the best songs in Dylan's entire oeuvre, but it's honestly just one of dozens. If you like this format, it's something that I'd really be open to trying again, so let me know in the comments if there's any Dylan songs in particular that you think I should do this with. And thanks for going along with this, it's really fun for me to experiment, and I hope this video helped teach you something new. YouTube's copyright system makes it very difficult to talk about music on their platform. It's completely skewed against creators to the point where thousands of dollars of my ad revenue each month go to record labels. That's part of the reason why myself and a number of other creators started Nebula, a streaming service where we can create and experiment free from the bounds of YouTube. 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