William Zantzinger: Subject of Bob Dylan ballad

William Zantzinger was a young white tobacco farmer from southern Maryland, whose loutish drunken behaviour on a winter night in 1963 caused the tragic death of a 51-year-old black barmaid named Hattie Carroll. The incident typified racist attitudes at the time in the American South, of which that part of Maryland to all intents and purposes belonged.

Normally, however, it would have been quickly forgotten. Alas, someone showed a newspaper article about the case to a 22-year-old folk singer named Bob Dylan. The song that emerged – and which legend has it was written in an all-night coffee shop on Manhattan's Seventh Avenue – is one of Dylan's most memorable and powerful, conferring a villainous notoriety on Zantzinger until his dying day.

On 8 February 1963 Zantzinger and his first wife Jane attended a charity ball in at a Baltimore hotel. He was drunk when he arrived, decked out in top hat, white tie and tails, and grew even drunker as the evening wore on. After collapsing on top of his wife during a dance, he went to the bar demanding yet another drink. When it failed to materialise at once, he swore at the barmaid. "I'm hurrying as fast as I can," press accounts quoted Carroll as replying – to which Zantzinger declared, "I don't have to take that kind of shit off a nigger," and hit her with a cane he was carrying.

After her bar duty ended, Carroll complained to a colleague that she felt "deathly ill, that man has upset me so". She went to hospital, where the next day she suffered a massive stroke and died. Zantzinger was charged with murder, but at his trial his lawyers successfully argued that Carroll had a history of high blood pressure which probably caused the stroke, and that she could not possibly have been fatally injured by a single blow from a light dress cane.

The charge was reduced to manslaughter and Zantzinger was sentenced to six months jail on 28 August 1963, by co-incidence the same day Martin Luther King delivered his epochal "I have a dream" speech just 50 miles away in Washington, DC. It was rumoured that the three judges passed so light a sentence in order to keep him out of the state prison, whose large black population might have exacted brutal revenge. It was also noted that his punishment was delayed a few weeks, so that Zantzinger could bring in the annual tobacco crop.

Dylan's "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," a highlight of his 1964 album The Times They Are A-Changin', is almost raw journalism in its intensity, and its closeness in time to the story it tells. The song broadly follows the outline of what happened, but inevitably takes some poetic licence with the facts. Zantzinger's name is rendered as "Zanzinger," while Dylan says she had 10 children, not the true number of 11. Eleven, it was said, did not fit the meter.

The song moreover states that "the cops . . . booked William Zanzinger for first degree murder," nowhere stating the charge was reduced to manslaughter. Indeed, one critic accuses Dylan of "verging on the libellous," in claiming the defendant, a scion of his state's old landed gentry, was treated leniently because of "high office relations in the politics of Maryland". Decades later, Zantzinger himself broke his public silence, telling a Dylan biographer that the singer was "a no-account son of a bitch . . . I should have sued him and put him in jail. [The song is] a total lie."

Unarguably, however, it is a gripping work, infused with a passion that made it an anthem of the later civil rights movement. Outrage drips from every line, from the opening "William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll / with a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger / at a Baltimore hotel society gath'rin'' to its sarcastic refrain of "You who philosophise disgrace and criticise all fears . . . now ain't the time for your tears". From that moment on, Zantzinger was a figure of national infamy.

His conviction, initially at least, had little impact on his status in the local community. He became a member of a country club, and went into real estate. By 1983, he was elected chairman of a Maryland real estate lobbying group, a pillar of the local chamber of commerce. That year, however, he ran into tax troubles that would later bring him more unflattering media attention, all the greater thanks to the unsought celebrity conferred by Dylan's song.

As the Internal Revenue Service pursued him for back taxes, Zantzinger was stripped by the Maryland authorities of various properties – little more than shanty hovels – which he rented to poor blacks. That did not prevent him, however, from collecting over $64,000 in rent on these homes he no longer owned. He was convicted in 1991 of fraud and deceptive trade practices, and given an 18-month jail term and a $50,000 fine.

William Devereux Zantzinger, tobacco farmer and businessman: born 1939; twice married (three children); died 3 January 2009.