Dylan Cover a Day: Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll

By Tony Attwood

The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll is not a Dylan song I would ever feel moved to pick out from the collection and play; it makes an incredibly important point, but it is a point I know, it tells a story I know and musically I know it (as I am sure everyone interested in Dylan does) so well, that I could hear it all the way through in my head, if I wished to.

It is of course an important song, and the writing and recording of it was indeed a considerable achievement, and so it was no surprise that Dylan played it nearly 300 times until saying farewell to the song finally on the Never Ending Tour 11 years ago.

And I guess because I know the song so well, as I imagine you might do, it wasn’t with too much excitement that I started work on episode 145 of this series. Indeed I wouldn’t have been surprised if there had just been two or three cover versions. But how wrong one can be, as I have so often learned in this series. Thus, here’s my selection, but not because I think each is necessarily a stand-out contribution to music, or to understanding Dylan, but because to my amazement the song has been treated so differently across the years and some of these versions really do move me.

Take this as a starter: Roky Erickson.

It blasts out with gusto, changes one of the chords in the repeated opening lines, and continues to belt out the piece throughout. And in a very clear way it symbolises Roky’s incredibly difficult struggle with mental health throughout his life. I’ve chosen to put this up, and place it first, because it seems to me that no one else could consider doing this arrangement to this song, and that was what Roky was about. And there is nothing more lonesome than the sort of mental health issues that Roky suffered from.

Of course that version above is an outlier, so here is a complete contrast. It is an interesting point of debate whether the message of the song, which Roky put across with such vigour being as much an outsider as it is possible to be, can be delivered with violins and gentleness in the accompaniment. I am not sure if this really works… sometimes I think so, others, maybe not.

Moving on, I’m not at all the right person to discuss reggae; it has never been part of my musical life, I don’t own any recordings of reggae (at least as far as I can remember) and when I listen I have the same problem as with Steve Howe: there seems to be disconnect between the meaning of the lyrics and what the music says to me.

So after this I went looking for this song performed in a totally different way, a way which I could find musically interesting, without ever losing the meaning of song. Les Shelleys do exactly that. The harmonies suggest a gentleness of many of those who fell victim to discrimination and hatred, and that incredibly simple accompaniment is just there… whoever could have imagined that one could take a song this long and make the accompaniment this simple.

It does get the chords added around the 2’50” mark for the fade out, and that just seems to make the whole thing even more powerful for me.

But contrasts are everything, so that version above has to be followed by Alias: Zimmerman (Apple sings Dylan)! This is by Winson Apple of whom I know nothing. Please do write in and tell me about him. The accompaniment seems to have nothing to do with the message of the song, and yet somehow, I don’t find that a problem. Maybe that is because I know the song so well, that it doesn’t matter. Or maybe having listened to each of the covers, it no longer matters.

So on to the last recording. Cage the Elephant have been around for 15 years or so, making albums, and have won a couple of Grammy’s on the way. They have, it seems to me, considered the meaning of the lyrics, and recognised that most of their listeners will know the song, and so have reinvented it, but without destroying it. I find this version particularly moving: vocals and instruments merge with the lyrics that I guess most of us know by heart. And they manage to hold the interest they generate, perfectly. If you find it worth listening to, do stay through to the end. If any version captures that last line perfectly, it is this one.

The Dylan Cover a Day series

Leave a Reply