I was a young folksinger in the sixties, a time when being a girl with a guitar was enough to get you some pretty goood gigs. In those days Bob Dylan and Len Chandler were my heroes (duh!) and when Bob put out an album I would grab it and learn songs in the morning that I presented on stage the same night. Hattie Carroll was one of half a dozen Bob songs that stayed in my repertoire for thirty years, including the two I spent singing all over Britain - 1964 and 65. (Martin Carthy and I were friends then, but I don't remember him singing any Dylan songs. Mind you, maybe I wouldn't have noticed. For me Martin's magic was in the way he discovered/invented/interpreted elaborate versions of the bloodiest Child ballads.) I still sing Hattie Carroll because it still speaks to me of the continuing North American caste system. True, we don't bow down to lords and ladies, but we have our subtle ways of letting people know they are not worthy to sit at our tables. Without a snobbery based culture to support him, Billy Zantzinger could not thrive. I fell in love with The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. It epitomized everything I hoped to become as a songwriter. I once wrote a whole essay on the line, "William Zantzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll with a cane that he twirled round his diamond finger." I thought it was a miracle of succinct descriptiveness, that it told us everything we needed to know about William, that it was the best single sentence I had read anywhere outside William Shakespeare, my first love. I'm grateful to have come upon this thread because it has reminded me of why I write.