I’ve just been researching Bob Dylan’s The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll for a new essay on my PlanetSlade website, and it’s thrown up a few interesting questions I’d like to get Dopers’ views on.
The song tells how William Zantzinger, a prosperous Maryland farmer, got drunk at a Baltimore hotel dance in 1963, and struck a black barmaid there with his cane when she was too slow to serve him. She collapsed and was taken to hospital, where a range of pre-existing health conditions combined with the stress caused by Zantzinger’s assault to kill her a few hours later. Zantzinger was arrested and tried, but convicted only of manslaughter and given a sentence of just six months.
Dylan’s song is a magnificent work of art, but it does misrepresent the facts of the case in quite a few ways. Dylan says Zantzinger was charged with “first-degree murder”, claims he was held by the police for only “a matter of minutes” before being released on bail and demotes Carroll to “a maid of the kitchen”. Arguably, he also implies that Zantzinger’s conviction was for murder rather than manslaughter and that he beat Carroll to death, pure and simple. None of that’s true, and we know now that Zantzinger (or “Zanzinger” as Dylan has it) seriously considered suing over the song.
So, my question is this: what responsibility, if any, does a songwriter have to get his facts right when adapting a real-life incident into song? And do those responsibilities change at all if the singer repeatedly calls the song – as Dylan has done with Hattie Carroll – “a true story” when playing it live? If you feel free to simply change whatever facts don’t suit your chosen argument, then doesn’t that just leave you with the weasel words “based on a true story”? We’ve all seen that line on a hundred crappy movies and seen for ourselves just how meaningless it is.
Discuss.