The Maryland farmer who inspired a Bob Dylan classic

The Maryland farmer who inspired a Bob Dylan classic

W.D. Zantzinger

1939–2009

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On Feb. 8, 1963, a young white farmer named William Devereux Zantzinger struck and killed a black Baltimore barmaid with his cane. The incident might have remained a footnote of the civil-rights era. But with his folk song “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” Bob Dylan ensured that the ugly death would enter the popular imagination. Zantzinger died on Jan. 3, his family providing no further details.

The son of a one-term state legislator, Zantzinger oversaw his family’s 630-acre tobacco operation in southern Maryland, said the Baltimore Sun. On the fateful night, “dressed in tails and wearing a carnation in his lapel,” he was attending the Spinsters Ball, an exclusive social event at Baltimore’s Emerson Hotel. Zantzinger had already been drinking at another venue and smacking waitresses “with a 26-cent, lightweight, carnival-style cane.” After arriving at the Emerson, he demanded a bourbon from 51-year-old Hattie Carroll. When she responded, “Just a minute, sir,” Zantzinger uttered a racial slur and slammed her on the shoulder with his cane. Carroll moaned, “I feel deathly ill” and died of a brain hemorrhage eight hours later.

Though Zantzinger was charged with murder, his lawyers argued that Carroll could have died from her enlarged heart and hypertension, said The New York Times. “A three-judge court agreed that the caning alone could not have caused the death and reduced the charge to manslaughter.” When Zantzinger was sentenced to six months in prison that August, Bob Dylan was inspired to set the story to music. “Some accounts say he wrote the song in an all-night coffee shop on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, others that he wrote it at Joan Baez’s house in Carmel, Calif.” Dylan simplified the narrative, not mentioning, for instance, the reduced charge. Nonetheless, the powerful lyrics—“William Zanzinger [sic] killed poor Hattie Carroll / With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger”—yielded one of the singer’s most memorable early tunes.

Zantzinger made headlines again in 1991, when he was fined $50,000 and sentenced to 18 months “for collecting more than $64,000 in rent on properties he had not owned for more than five years,” said The Washington Post. He rarely spoke of the Carroll incident, but in 2001 he called Dylan’s song “a total lie” and declared, “He’s just a scumbag of the earth. I should have sued him and put him in jail.”