Dylan had no problem buying into the brutishness of Wood’s account, unequivocally portraying Hattie as "killed by a blow / lay slain by a cane." Actually Carroll died of a massive coronary after suffering for many years from elevated blood pressure and a serious weight problem. Her heart attack may have been induced by some verbal bullying from a drunk Maryland farmer named Billy and a single "tap" on the shoulder with a hollow carnival cane. But even that tap may have never happened. Key witnesses in court claimed the cane had been snapped in four by another guest before Zantzinger began calling Carroll names for being tardy with an order of drinks.
In fact, while Carroll was taken to the hospital suffering from a heart attack, Zantzinger was hauled off by the police and charged with being drunk and disorderly and resisting arrest. Only when Carroll subsequently died were the charges ramped up to murder in the second degree. Such an outlandish charge was always going to be unsustainable, though, and it was reduced to involuntary manslaughter during the trial. Hence the "modest" sentence. Carroll was never "felled from blows," making Dylan’s opening couplet a million-dollar libel case waiting to happen:
William Zantzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll, [no, he didn’t]
With a cane [nope] that he twirled round his diamond ring finger [no diamond ring].
Though that suit didn’t transpire, Dylan didn’t learn his lesson. When he wrote "Hurricane" twelve years later, he again got important material facts in the case wrong, and this time he was sued. Already responsible for two Southern murder ballads featuring material falsehoods—"Emmett Till" and "Only a Pawn in Their Game"—Dylan bought into Wood’s account wholesale, extracting every detail inserted into the song from that original article: the size of Zantzinger’s farm, the "high office relations in the politics of Maryland" (largely a figment of Wood’s imagination), and even the number of children Hattie had (which was nine, not ten). On such shaky foundations, he constructed a scenario to fit a preconceived point of view rather more brilliantly than the prosecution did.
There is no evidence that Zantzinger "reacted to his deed with a shrug of his shoulders / And swear words and sneering." Any bout of swearing came when he was arrested for being drunk (and seems to have come mainly from his wife). How could there be any account of his reaction to Carroll’s death, since he had already been released from jail when the news arrived? Only later did he (voluntarily) give himself up to the authorities. And Dylan’s portrait of Carroll as someone who "carried the dishes and took out the garbage" is no less condescending than his portrayal of Zantzinger.
By the time he came to write "Hattie Carroll" in October, he surely must have begun to realize that he’d got certain salient facts wrong in the earlier "Only a Pawn in Their Game." And the debate with Nelson should have given him cause to pause before trying to shoot another big fish in the Broadside barrel. By snapping the truth into little pieces, he proved himself a masterful poet but a lousy historian. As he recently admitted in Chronicles, "Protest songs are difficult to write without making them come off as preachy and one-dimensional." Here’s hoping Nelson had a wry smile on his face when he read this.
Now if the song had been written in a blaze of fury back in February, or even during the month-long June trial—when the local papers were full of headlines like "Barmaid at Society Ball Dies Following Caning," leading to the trial being moved from Baltimore to Hagerstown—it would be a lot easier to give Dylan the benefit of the doubt. For a while it really did seem as if Zantzinger was the devil incarnate. And the prosecution did its best to stoke such prejudices, portraying Zantzinger in their closing argument as "playing the lord of the manor, presiding over the old plantation." Gradually, though, the facts began to color the pure black portrait drawn by papers like the Baltimore Sun. The actual evidence clearly demonstrated that Zantzinger had no murderous intent, having merely been a belligerent drunk caught up in a tragedy he could not have foreseen even in the sober light of day.
Convicted of manslaughter at the end of June, Zantzinger’s sentence was deferred until August so that he could bring in his tobacco crop (thus saving many jobs on Zantzinger’s farm). When the sentence was finally delivered, the day of the Civil Rights March in Washington, Judge McLaughlin had no need to pound his gavel as he delivered his verdict—six months in jail and a five hundred–dollar fine—along with his measured legal opinion: "Here is an unfortunate set of circumstances. If the deceased had been a well person, we would not have heard anything about it. We don’t feel Mr. Zantzinger is an animal type. Our problem is to . . . [establish] the type of punishment Mr. Zantzinger should have."
By the time of the verdict, even the New York Times had toned down the tenor of its coverage. The headline in its August 29 edition—which Dylan presumably saw—read simply: "Farmer Sentenced in Barmaid’s Death." And still Dylan did not turn the story into song. Only after he traveled to California at the end of September, to stay at the Carmel home of Joan Baez, did he decide to make the tale his own. Both Joan Baez and another house guest at the time, her brother-in-law Richard Fariña, confirmed that he wrote the song there—which means that Dylan either retained a photographic recollection of Wood’s article from Broadside or he referred to Baez’s copy of the March issue when writing the song.
Presumably it was being in the company of Baez that prompted Dylan to set the tale to the tune of Child Ballad 173, "Mary Hamilton," a song Baez had already filleted on her 1960 album. In Chronicles Dylan claims he used to do the song himself and that he "could make [it] drop into place like she did, but in a different way." There is no evidence it ever featured in his set, but even if it did, by this juncture he was telling friends, "I can’t sing ‘John Johannah’ cause it’s his story an his people’s story /[ I gotta sing ‘With God on Our Side’ cause it’s my story and my people’s." Back in January he had even questioned why Baez continued to sing songs about sixteenth-century Scottish court intrigues, telling her brother-in-law, "she’s still singing ‘Mary Hamilton’ . . . where’s that at?"
In this instance, though, "Mary Hamilton" served as a rather appropriate choice. The ballad in question, based on the murder of a child conceived by a maid (and a French apothecary) at the court of Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1563, was a thin tissue of lies designed to implicate the queen’s husband, Lord Darnley ("the highest Stuart of them all"), in the child’s murder. The song may well have been instrumental in influencing Mary to pass an act, shortly afterward, making the dissemination of scurrilous ballads punishable by death.
In this libel, the guilty party becomes one of Mary’s ladies-in-waiting,
the "four Maries" as they were commonly known. Yet the common form of the ballad only manages to name two of the four correctly and was probably originally called "Mary Mild." There never was a historical Mary Hamilton (at least not in Mary’s time; there was a Scottish lady-in-waiting at Peter the Great’s court in 1718 named Mary Hambleton, who was executed for a similar crime, which may be how this name attached itself to the earlier incident). Much like Dylan, the original, anonymous balladeer wasn’t interested in the facts, only in implicating "the lord of the manor" in the deed.
Aspiring to make his ballad convincing enough to evoke "the only, true valid death you can feel today," Dylan missed just one trick. He failed to use what were reportedly the last words of Mrs. Carroll. Having slumped against the bar, after Zantzinger’s battery of abuse, Hattie apparently slurred the memorable sentence, "That man has upset me so, I feel deathly ill"— words that could have sprung straight from some sixteenth-century ballad. But Dylan was too fixated on the moral to let the real story seep in.
He almost admitted as much to TV host Steve Allen in February 1964. Making his national TV debut on Allen’s popular show, he chose "Hattie Carroll" as the statement he wished to make to the nation. When Allen tackled him about the song’s source, Dylan replied, "I took [it] out of a newspaper. It’s a true story. [But] I changed the reporter’s view—I used i
t . . . for something that I wanted to say . . . and turned it that way." Allen earnestly asked Dylan to elaborate further. The increasingly uncomfortable singer asked to be allowed to let the song speak for itself.
He duly delivered such a compelling performance that viewers couldn’t help but be convinced of the singer’s civil rights credentials. And though on the verge of detaching himself from the topical song genre, "Hattie Carroll" stayed a favorite of Dylan’s—the one topical song he was (justifiably) proud of on a technical level, it being a remarkable synthesis of words, tune, performance, and philosophy. But when it came to the underlying story, Dylan never sought out the truth. Asked about the song by critic Robert Hilburn in the last couple of years, he was still claiming, "I just let the story tell itself. Who wouldn’t be offended by some guy beating an old woman to death and just getting a slap on the wrist?" And who wouldn’t.
{112} LAY DOWN YOUR WEARY TUNE
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, October 24, 1963—1 take [BIO—tk.1].
First known performance: [Hollywood Bowl, LA, October 12, 1963] Carnegie Hall, NY, October 26, 1963 [LACH].
"The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" was not the only song written during Dylan’s stay at Carmel through the first fortnight in October. "Lay Down Your Weary Tune" was also written on the same visit, probably a couple of days prior to Baez’s October 12 show at the Hollywood Bowl, at which he insisted on debuting the song (though I think we can probably take Baez’s claim that "he had just written ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune,’ [so] it was forty-five minutes long," with a truckload of salt).
We actually have Richard Fariña’s recollection of the circumstances of its composition, given to Robert Shelton in 1966, shortly before Fariña’s fatal motorcycle crash: "I recall in Carmel was where he wrote ‘Hattie Carroll’—at Joan’s house . . . [and] that he had written ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune’ [there]. One evening, we were out surfing with a surfboard and he rode the motorcycle back and wrote that tune. I remember that because she was on her way to do a concert at the Hollywood Bowl and he was very keen that she should sing it with him. But she was unsure of the song and the words and didn’t want to do it yet."
Evidently, when he wasn’t swimming and surfing (or nearly drowning, if we are to believe a concert rap he gave in November 1980), Dylan immersed himself in the Scottish ballads of which he and Baez shared a mutual appreciation, working his way through Joan’s personal record collection. It could even be Jeannie Robertson’s deathless rendition of "Mary Hamilton," not Baez’s, that prompted him to appropriate its melody for "Hattie Carroll."
In the notes accompanying Biograph, Dylan suggests that "Lay Down Your Weary Tune" also came about because "I had heard a Scottish ballad on an old 78 record that I was trying to really capture the feeling of, that was haunting me. I couldn’t get it out of my head. There were no lyrics or anything. It was just a melody. . . . I wanted lyrics that would feel the same way." Well, all ballads have lyrics, but precious few are short enough to fit on a ten-inch 78-rpm record.
Predictably Dylan’s remark led to some dispute regarding the song he was recollecting. Harvey suggested "The Water Is Wide," but that is hardly a song Dylan would have needed to hear in such an arcane fashion—a trip to any Anglo-American folk club would suffice. On the other hand, the seventeenth-century Scottish lyric, "Waly, Waly"—of which "The Water Is Wide" is a modern Anglo-Irish derivative—provides an almost perfect combination of sentiment and melody, though it is less well known in folk circles (first published in 1725 by Allan Ramsay, sans tune, it has been anthologized a lot but rarely covered).
Unlike the title of his 1997 collection, Dylan’s source would not have been Ramsay here. But it could well be Robertson again, a singer he almost name-checks in Chronicles (as Jeannie Robinson), and generally regarded as the great Scots traditional ballad singer of the postwar era. Which is not only a fair description of the wee old lass but the title of the 1959 Topic album where Dylan could have found "I Wish, I Wish"—or, as it was called by Topic, "What a Voice"—a variant of the song Ramsay anthologized that retained its ancient air. (It also features some lines Dylan had already appropriated: "I wish, I wish, I wish in vain / I wish I was a maid again.") Robertson’s rendition has no instrumentation save Jeannie’s piercing voice, but the tune is certainly a haunting one, and Dylan knew a good ballad tune when he heard one.
The song would be transformed by Dylan into a ringing rhapsody of rhythm and rhyme—partly by putting the song in a major key and partly by speeding up its dirgelike tempo, but largely through the sheer forcefulness of his singing. The live version performed a couple of days after its studio rendition is even more of a tour de force, Dylan never faltering with his diction or delivery.
And yet the song was destined to be forgotten before his guitar strings ceased to hum. A perfect album closer, it was superseded by "Restless Farewell." Dylan’s desire to nail Newsweek to the mast of his black ship took precedent over what was clearly the superior composition—even though "Lay Down Your Weary Tune" was brand-new and had been recorded in a single take, usually factors which would have worked in its favor. It would be some time before Dylan rekindled such pantheistic patterns again, perhaps because he had to wait another four months before he got to enjoy the preternatural power of Carmel’s vistas again. By then, he was already thinking on "Mr. Tambourine Man."
{113} ONE TOO MANY MORNINGS
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, October 24, 1963—6 takes [TIMES—tk.6]; Studio A, Nashville, February 17, 1969—11 takes; February 18, 1969—2 takes; Studio B, NY, May 1, 1970—1 take.
First known performance: BBC Studios, London, June 1, 1965.
One can imagine how well Suze took the news, doubtless delivered as Dylan stood at "the crossroads of my doorstep," that her supposed live-in boyfriend was heading off to California to spend a couple of weeks with a woman who could shatter glass with her voice. In fact, this announcement would result in Suze deciding to move out on her man and in with her "parasite sister." Dylan’s conflicted loyalties, held in check for most of the nine months since Suze came back, now produced a song that was almost the exact reverse of "Don’t Think Twice," with him now the one who is "one too many mornings / and a thousand miles behind."
Dylan might well have composed this particular restless farewell while sunning himself out West. If so, it was a song he kept close to his chest, not performing it at Carnegie Hall and not even including it on the initial test-pressing for The Times They Are A-Changin’ LP. Even after the breakup signposted in this song got its decree absolute, the following March, the song enjoyed none of the favor its predecessor continued to enjoy. Only belatedly did Dylan come to realize what a concise classic he almost discarded. All those conflicted feelings, offset by an uncertain future, make this song an epitome of romantic restraint—a trait he only rarely emulated in the songs written in the following six months.
The song ultimately benefited from two of the man’s best electric arrangements, on the highly charged 1966 and 1976 tours. On the latter tour it also acquired a brand-new coda that suggested faults on both sides: "You’ve no right to be here / And I’ve no right to stay / Until we’re both one too many mornings / And a thousand miles away." Its inclusion in the set, at a time when Dylan had reached much the same point in his relationship with wife Sara as he’d reached with Suze in October 1963, suggests its return to favor was no coincidence. Subsequent performances, which have tended to be (semi-)acoustic, suggest it is a song Dylan can plug his inspired self into at will, as anyone who caught performances at New York’s Beacon Theatre in October 1990, or at the second Supper Club show in 1993, can readily testify.
{114} RESTLESS FAREWELL
Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 200
4.
Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, October 31, 1963—9 takes [TIMES—tk.9].
First known performance: Quest Show, Toronto, February 1, 1964.
About twenty years ago I’d do interviews. You’d be honest with that person. Then you’d see the article and it would all be changed around. . . . You really felt like you were suckered or something. —Dylan at a Sydney press conference, February 1986
On either October 23 or 24, 1963, Columbia publicist Billy James arranged for Dylan to meet a Newsweek reporter named Andrea Svedburg, who had been sniffing around, sensing a story in the way that the Bar Mitzvah boy from Minnesota had reinvented himself as the prince of protest. Dylan quickly "clocked" Svedburg’s agenda, grew irate, and stormed off into the night. Svedburg still posted her story, which appeared in the following week’s edition, hitting the stands on or around October 29 (Svedburg mentions Dylan’s parents attending the Carnegie Hall show, so the story was probably not posted until the twenty-seventh).
Dylan’s response was fast, furious, and unsparing—a song initially called "Bob Dylan’s Restless Epitaph" but released as "Restless Farewell." It marked the end of Bob Dylan’s separation from Robert Zimmerman. He booked a studio the following afternoon. He was going to record the song while still fuming. And record it he did, though his unfamiliarity with the words and an uncertain hold on the melody meant it took nine takes to nail it. He finally felt he had the album closer he’d been hunting for all along (and writing the album closer last would become another pattern within the man’s quixotic quilt).
Revolution in the Air Page 20