The horrifying real-life murder that Bob Dylan turned into a folk song in 1963
In the 1940s and ’50s, the leading voices in folk music specialised in what was termed as newspaper songs, which seems a strange concept in 2026 in a post-print age.
These are pretty much exactly what they say on the tin: songs that aren’t expressions of the inner feelings of the singer or a fictional story, but a real thing that happened. More than that, they’re real things that happened in recent memory, rather than centuries back, like with many modern classic folk songs. It’s the reason that the likes of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie were termed to be “singing the news”. In a way, they were journalists as much as anything else.
So, it makes sense that a man like Bob Dylan, who was a devotee of both of those singer-songwriters, would have started out making that kind of folk music himself. While his first foray into folk music was built on an array of covers, both of traditional folk standards and songs written by his contemporaries, it soon became apparent that Dylan was a songwriting prodigy. His voice was just as important as anyone else’s, and one of the first songs to really stake that claim was one of the best and most chilling newspaper songs of the early 1960s.
In the early hours of February 9th, 1963, 24-year-old William Devereux ‘Billy’ Zantzinger arrived at the Emerson Hotel to attend a white tie event called the Spinsters’ Ball. Zantzinger was already drunk from a night out and set out continuing the appalling behaviour that he’d shown the entire previous night.
Racially abusing the Black serving staff of the hotel and also physically assaulting them with a toy cane he’d received earlier that night. He ordered a bourbon from Hattie Carroll, a 51-year-old barmaid, and when he didn’t immediately receive it, he berated her with a tirade of racial abuse and struck her on the shoulder with the cane.
Eight hours later, Carroll was dead. Zantzinger’s behaviour had caused a brain hemorrhage and he was arrested for her murder. However, Zantzinger was both rich and white. His lawyers managed to argue that since it wasn’t the blow from the cane but his behaviour that caused the haemorrhage, this was grounds to lower the charge from murder to manslaughter. Despite the fact that his behaviour directly led to her death.
For those keeping track, this is just over 60 years ago, not the 160 years ago that it might feel like.
This sentence came through the same day that Martin Luther King delivered the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a march that a 22-year-old Dylan walked as well, and on the journey home, he read about the case and the travesty of justice it represented and decided to write a song about it, finishing it within days and immediately adding it to his live repertoire.
The song followed Zantzinger for the rest of his life, which came to an end on January 3rd, 2009.
