So, down to the jewelry store packing a gun
he said, “Wrap it up, I think I’ll take this one.”
“A thousand dollars please,” the jewelry man said.
Dupree he said, “I’ll pay this one off to you in lead!”

The Grateful Dead told the tale of this robbery and murder in one of their best-loved early ballads, “Dupree’s Diamond Blues.”  In Part 1 we took a closer look at their song and found that it holds a unique place as the final link in a chain of mostly African-American bad man ballads we can loosely group together under the title “Betty and Dupree”.  The Dead’s version is the most well-known of the lot now, but today we’ll trace the song from its first days as a bad man ballad on the threshold between oral tradition and popular recorded music, through the era of Blues, Jazz and the Big Band, and into the Atomic Age where it found rebirth both in Rock and Roll music and that of the Folk Revival.

Before we do that, you need to realize that it’s a true story.  Now, I don’t mean to say that every line of every ballad about Dupree and Betty is true – far from it.  But all of the ballads draw their inspiration from an actual series of events, which we covered in some detail last week too.  You can go back to that post to get the basics, drawn from Tom Hughes’s Hanging the Peachtree Bandit: The True Tale of Atlanta’s Infamous Frank DuPre.  For those who want more, that short and inexpensive book will satisfy any seeker with a engaging history of the crime and its aftermath.  Here’s the skinny again though, in case you’re too busy to dig into it or you’re just looking to get to the music below.

Frank DuPre, an eighteen year old who’d just begun trying his hand at petty theft in Atlanta where he found himself out of work, fell hard for seventeen year old Betty Andrews.  He spent a good deal of his recently ill-gotten gains on her over the course of a week, and she told him that if he wanted to keep courting her that she expected more nice things, even a diamond ring.  On December 15, 1921, Frank downed a half-pint of moonshine and soon thereafter paid a visit to Kaiser’s Jewelry, where he managed to get a manager to show him an immensely expensive diamond ring.  He snatched it and ran for the door, where he slammed in to Irby Walker, a Pinkerton agent the store manager had just hired for extra holiday security.  After initially falling backwards into the store, DuPre produced a .32 Colt ‘hammerless’ from his pocket and dispatched Walker, a young father of one, to an early grave.  He bolted down Peachtree Street and wounded another man badly before finally making good on his escape and skipping town that evening by promising a hefty sum to a taxi driver with a Packard Twin Six.  After pawning the ring in Chattanooga and spending several weeks on the run, the law caught up with Frank.  He was quickly tried and convicted, and eventually hanged  on September 1, 1922 after failed attempts for both appeal and clemency.

The case was a nine month media spectacle, in a way we today might find familiar.  Indeed, Frank gathered quite a following of advocates and well-wishers before his execution.  They sometimes expressed something in common with the singers of the ballads we’ll hear today – Dupree was a good man lead astray by a bad woman.  However, Tom Hughes proves with all available evidence that this is at best a misguided interpretation of how it all went down.  It is, at worst, a downright lie at least as old as the story of Adam and Eve.

Betty Andrews knew about the robbery after the fact and didn’t report it, but she had nothing to do with planning it and she cooperated with police in apprehending DuPre.  She was a troubled, dull youth.  But she didn’t ask Frank to rob or kill for her.  And yet, that is exactly the rap she got.  I’ll deal with that angle in the coda below, but for now it’s time to get to the mechanism of that popular indictment – the long string of ballads that make up our digital discography of “Betty and Dupree”.

Betty and Dupree – A Digital Compendium, Part 2 – The Classics

Earliest Printed Sources – “Jelly roll’s gonna be your ruin…”

As we know the date of Frank DuPre’s crime and execution, we can zero in pretty well, if not precisely, on the origins of this ballad.  Interestingly, though the event that inspired it came in the early days of widespread recorded music, this ballad has one foot squarely in the world of the oral tradition.

I’ll get to that in a minute, but let’s get the catalog information down first.  Waltz and Engle’s Traditional Ballad Index links to this ballad as “Dupree“ and provides citations for many of the print collections that include it.  Malcolm Laws gave it catalog number I11 in the most well know of these, his seminal work Native American Balladry. As for the 21st century, the Roud Folksong Index catalogs it today as #4179 with 13 citations, and Jerry H. Bryant includes “Dupree” as one of the thirty “prototype” bad man ballads (of the “police” type) in his 2003 work Born in a Mighty Bad Land: The Violent Man in African-American Folklore and Fiction.

Interestingly, Waltz and Engle’s online database fails to cite the earliest known print reference to the ballad, in Howard Odum and Guy Johnson’s 1926 Negro Workaday Songs, now in the public domain and available at Internet Archive (see pp. 55-59.)  This is a most interesting starting point, as it’s clear from their inclusion of two vastly different but clearly related variants that this song was already being mixed, matched, and reassembled in ‘the folk process’ within four years of Frank DuPre’s execution.  Notably, this was happening exclusively among African-American balladeers though Frank and Betty were both white.

Now, there is an Anglo-American ballad based on the robbery and execution, which Malcolm Laws cataloged as E24.  “The Fate of Frank Dupree” was recorded by Blind Andrew Jenkins and released in 1925 on Okeh Records #40446, as the B-side to another ballad about famous contemporary Georgia murder we have yet to cover in this blog, that of Mary Phagan (recorded by Rosa Lee Carson.)  Hughes tells us that Jenkins wrote the lyrics, inspired by local headlines, soon after DuPre’s execution, and he prints them in full in his 2014 book.  It is entirely clear when one reads them that, as indeed Odum and Johnson noted in 1926, they are not at all related to the African-American bad man ballad.

Clearly then, Odum and Johnson collected an independent ballad inspired by DuPre’s crime and hanging – a ballad born in the waning days of the oral tradition. Luckily for us, it was also born in the early days of commercial recording and the ballad found its place on wax only five years after the publication of Negro Workaday Songs.  Where Jenkins’s nearly extinct Anglo-American ballad more accurately blamed DuPre’s affinity for alcohol and the ‘sporting life‘ as the cause of his downfall, this black man’s song tells a better tale, unfair for sure but as old as the Bible, about a wicked woman that turned a good man to the bad.

Dupree was a bandit
He was so brave and bol’
He stoled a diamond ring
for some of Betty’s jelly roll.

Earliest Recordings, 1930 – 1939: “I give you most anything…”

The two earliest commercially recorded versions of the Dupree ballad were both waxed in late 1930 and released in 1931.  One features a piano and the other an acoustic guitar.

Kingfish Bill Tomlin cut his track “Dupree Blues” in November 1930, and so his is technically the earliest version on record.  It was released as the a-side of Paramount 13057.  Hughes claims in his recent book that the track is lost but, thankfully, such is not the case.

“Dupree Blues” by Kingfish Bill Tomlin – YouTube

Lyrics for “Dupree Blues” by Kingfish Bill Tomlin

Though the singer blames Betty (or Bertie) for the crime and so perpetuates the key falsehood of the case, the lyrics include at least two interesting scraps of truth from the story of Frank DuPre.  Kaiser’s jewelry store was indeed the scene of the crime (on Peachtree Street though, not Decatur) and the real DuPre did gun down a “one-eye”, which Hughes found was contemporary slang for a Pinkerton (with an obvious double-entendre, I might add.)

Blind Willie Walker, a widely respected Piedmont blues player with almost no recorded legacy, in December of 1930 cut the early ‘Dupree’ track that became most influential.  Hughes notes that Walker played with Sam Brooks for this session in Atlanta, at Columbia’s studio on Peachtree Street of all places!  The record was released as Columbia 151063.

“Dupree Blues” by Blind Willie Walker – YouTube

Lyrics for “Dupree Blues” by Blind Willie Walker

Interestingly, while the Mudcat citation I linked above with the lyrics has Dupree taking a taxi back to “Main” (street), Hughes transcribes the lyrics in his book as “Hired him a taxi, said ‘Can’t you drive me back to Maine?'”  This is the better transcription and reflects something of the true history – Frank DuPre hired a taxi to take him to Chattanooga where he pawned the ring for which he killed.  Maine, Hughes argues convincingly, gives the flavor of the historically accurate long flight from Atlanta, but makes for an easier rhyme. Again then we see the truth echoing in the ballad even alongside the consistent and unfair blame assigned to Betty.

This wasn’t strictly a man’s ballad though.  Georgia White recorded it twice, once in 1935 as “Dupree Blues” (on YouTube –  with lyrics) and once in 1936 as “New Dupree Blues” (on Spotify – with lyrics) backed up with some excellent guitar work by Les Paul.  Hughes points out some of the interesting lyrical changes in her versions, with a taxi ride to Memphis (not quite his true destination of Chattanooga, but closer than Maine) in the 1935 cut, and Dupree’s arrest in Detroit while checking for mail in the 1936 variant, which squares fully with history.

I note one other most curious point as well.  Dupree robs the jewelry store because “he didn’t want Betty to know he didn’t have a thing.”  She never asked him to steal in this version and she is not overtly painted as “wicked” except by Dupree himself.  She brings him lunches to “Big Rock Jail“, the place of the real DuPre’s incarceration as Hughes points out, though he mistakenly attributes the lyric to Teddy Grace, who actually covered White’s version.  Dupree asks for whiskey instead and mourns that Betty has made him “her doggone slave”.  Says him!  To my mind, White (or the writer of the lyrics, if they were not her own) put a careful spin on the tale that is sympathetic to Betty.  It’s really not even that subtle.  Dupree stole because he didn’t want to show Betty his poverty, but then he blames her for his own violence after the fact, while she’s bringing him meals no less.  This version of the tale makes it clear – it wasn’t Betty’s fault!

Interestingly, White’s 1936 cut leaves out both the murder and Dupree’s subsequent execution altogether.  It adds the bit about Dupree’s arrest, and gets right the fact that he combed the newspapers for information about the police manhunt. However, the gains it makes in historical accuracy are lost in the incomplete and bowdlerized narrative.  That one is really more about the music.

By 1937 at the latest, the ballad was making its way into white musicians’ repertoires. Woody Herman cut a version that year (on Spotify) that sparingly mixes and matches lyrics we’ve heard so far and ends with the unique and rather sterile line “Now Dupree’s going so far away, he’s never gonna see the light of day”.  His record is mostly about the music as well, and his orchestration is anything but sterile.  Teddy Grace recorded a cut in 1939 (on Spotify, on YouTube).  Her lyrics match those of Georgia White’s first cut exactly.  Given that we also find a similar version in a women’s prison that same year (see below), it seems more than coincidence; women sang this ballad differently, in a way that saw Betty in a more accurate and sympathetic light.

Prison Blues 1926 to 1939 – “She’s trying to make ninety-nine…”

Even before World War II this ballad was crossing both geographic and racial boundaries, and we’ll see below that it did so for decades longer.  Hughes supports an argument made by others that part of the staying power of the ballad is that it transcends race with deeper universal themes.  This obviously must be granted, but I think it misses something about race and the ballad’s origins that’s hiding in plain sight, and which in part explains why a ballad about the exploits of two white teenagers spread so quickly, and almost exclusively at first, among African-American songsters.

To illustrate my point, note that Odum and Johnson’s second variant cited above was collected on the chain gang.  We’ve already seen the deep significance of black prison blues and bad man ballads on the chain gang in this blog both with “Stagolee” and “Little Sadie“.  No doubt, the “Betty and Dupree” narrative fit well in that genre as another coded expression of resistance to the corrupt and unjust system of de jure slavery that endured in the south for a century after the Thirteenth Amendment.  If you’re interested in that code in detail, you can go back to the other two posts I’ve linked.  Suffice it to say there was great use for any song that lyrically placed blame at another’s feet – in a way armed white guards would let pass – for African-Americans who found themselves at hard labor for petty misdemeanors or often for no legal reason at all.  The ballad’s literary themes may transcend it, but its application in the hell of a southern prison was all about race.

Indeed, even while it was finding its way onto records and radio waves in the 1930s, John and Alan Lomax discovered at least two more examples of the ballad behind bars with black folks during their famed collecting tours of southern prisons.  They included an example from 1936, transcribed from the singing of Walter Roberts at the old Raiford State Prison in Florida, in their classic Our Singing Country (starting on page 328 linked here, but make sure to go to the next page to get the rest of it.)

Their recording of Buena Flint (aka Buena Flynn) from 1939, also at Raiford, has been digitized and is available online (click ‘play mp3’) from the Library of Congress.  (Lyrics)  It’s worth the click because you’ll hear that even in prison it wasn’t just a man’s song; Flint was an inmate in the women’s dormitory. The lyrics are likely derived in part from White’s 1935 recording or Teddy Grace’s cover from 1939 – Dupree robs the jewelry store because he doesn’t want Betty to know he’s poor.  The narrative diverges after that though.  When robbing the jewelry man, Dupree fingers Betty as the cause of his crime.  Then in the last verse, we assume that Betty is waiting out Dupree’s ninety nine year sentence.  But there can be absolutely no doubt that Flint is really singing about herself and mourning her lot.

Bernice said she wanted
A diamond or two.
I said, Baby,
I’ll get ‘em for you.

Bernice said she wanted
A Packard car.
I said, Sugar,
Here you are.

Bernice said she needed
A bank full of cash.
I said, Honey,
That’s nothing but trash.

I pulled that job
In the broad daylight.
The cashier trembled
And turned dead white.

He tried to guard
Other people’s gold.
I said to hell
With your stingy soul!

There ain’t no reason
To let you live!
I filled him full of holes
Like a sieve

Now they’ve locked me
In the death house.
I’m gonna die!

Ask that woman-
She knows why.