“Murderer’s Row” (jk)

You’re now saying, “Wait a second! What happened to the fun?” Well, we’ll get back to it momentarily. The fun is important. 

I was surprised by the possibility that, over the long haul, domestic violence might be lower, while murder among spouses higher. Just exactly how that’s true is a complicated story, and a tangent away from our focus on the music, but it did make me wonder how a song like “Stone Cold Dead in the Marketplace” might “function” for audiences in the mid-20th century, as significant changes in women’s roles in society and in society’s views of women’s autonomy, equality, and freedom expanded through world-historical changes, global wars, and the “rights revolutions” of the 60s and 70s, and beyond.

I had been thinking about grouping a few songs with the theme of women killing abusive husbands, and I will get to some of them later, perhaps later this week. The ones I had in mind are pop/country songs from the last 10-15 years. I can’t remember how I first came across “Stone Cold Dead,” but it was likely in some Google searching for something else for the blog. It caught my attention. A song like the Dixie Chicks’ “Goodbye, Earl” has a similar humorous bent, but others, like Martina McBride’s “Independence Day” or Miranda Lambert’s “Gunpowder & Lead” are serious and full of a kind of righteous empowerment. “Stone Cold Dead” was from a different milieu, and unlike those other songs, preceded enormous cultural changes that would come decades later, creating greater openness in discussing issues like domestic violence seriously.

“Stone Cold Dead in the Market” was a big hit for Louis Jordan and Ella Fitzgerald in 1946.  It was on top of the Billboard Rhythm & Blues chart for 5 weeks and spent several weeks in the top 10 on the U.S. pop music charts.

Franklin Bruno (photo by Carol Lipnik)

Franklin Bruno discusses this song and its popularity in an article in Popular Music and Society, entitled “‘Stone Cold Dead in the Market’: Domestic Violence and Americanized Calypso” (Vol. 34, No. 1, February 2011). Bruno notes that the mid-century decades were a time when people didn’t openly discuss domestic violence. He traces the history of the song, which we’ll also do in the next post. Bruno reminds film buffs of the scene from Jake LaMotta’s kitchen in 1947 in Martin Scorsese‘s masterpiece, Raging Bull, where “Stone Cold Dead” plays in the background. LaMotta seems unduly preoccupied with his wife’s off-handed description of his prospective boxing opponent as “good looking,” and the song on the radio is just one subtle piece of the scene presaging the violent jealousy that overwhelms LaMotta and their marriage. 

Bruno observes that while it was somewhat controversial at the time, being banned on several networks, it was a popular success nonetheless. With a humility we would do well to emulate, he acknowledges “that attempts to account for a given song’s popularity necessarily include elements of speculation and conjecture.” But, he wants to understand how this song got away with telling the story it tells. He argues that the song effectively wears a “mask.” American audiences, particularly white American audiences, were more open to it because it contained signals of origins in an alien and rather nonthreatening subculture. Through the singers’ affected regional accents and dialect, it was less serious and thus safer.


This kind of lighthearted take on domestic violence (or at least corporal punishment) and/or gender relations is not unique to this song, certainly. You can hear a similar tone in songs like “Man Smart, Woman Smarter,” and Harry Belafonte’s performance of “Mama, Look a Boo Boo.” Even “Rum and Coca-Cola,” cited above, became a big hit for the All-American Andrews Sisters, despite the song’s thinly-veiled references to prostitution.  

Bruno goes on to comment that the changing nature of gender relations in post-WWII America were likely influential in the song’s popularity. This was my theory about some of the song’s popularity as well. The period in America following the war involved a re-calibration of gender roles in light of the significant advances American women made in the workplace during the war years.

However much the song may have opened a serious conversation through a seemingly frivolous treatment, there was still a ways to go.

Bruno writes, “In the 1930s and 1940s, the American legal system was loath to treat spousal abuse as a criminal act. When such ostensibly private matters came before the law, it was usually in the domestic courts system that arose in the 1900s and the 1910s, which explicitly aimed at preservation of the family, discouraging separation or divorce, even when legally justified, in favor of reconciliation.” Steven Pinker echoes this point in the studies he cites in his book, Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Focusing on more recent decades than Roth or Bruno, Pinker cites a 1974 study that in which almost two thirds of test subjects (students) were likely to intervene in a staged incident of stranger violence, but fewer than one in five would intervene in the same incident when the participants in the staged incident identified themselves as married. 


Pinker observes that this, along with trends in domestic abuse, relationship violence, and murder between romantic partners is heading in a better direction. He cites a 1995 survey that suggests that 87% of respondents believe intervention is necessary when a man attacks his wife, even when there’s no injury; 99% if there is. (Although, it should be noted that these data points are a survey of what people think, compared to the experiment above, where the students thought they were witnessing something real, and looked what they actually did.)

I rehearse these statistics, not only because they’re interesting in and of themselves, and send a somewhat hopeful message of a positive trajectory, but because they also illustrate that much of “Stone Cold Dead in the Market Place” buys into the kind of private/public distinction one would assume is operating in the minds of people reluctant to intervene. Our perpetrator defends herself saying, “I killed nobody but my husband.”

Another point in Pinker’s book that surprised me was that researchers have found that women and men are essentially equally prone to at least certain categories of domestic violence–which he describes as the “squabbling” type, arguments gone too far. This he distinguishes from the “controlling” type, which is a more systematic attempt to curtail the freedom of the partner through violence and intimidation. (Pinker suggests it might be tied to the broader biological phenomenon, observed in other species, of “mate guarding.”) Men are much more likely to engage in the latter. Pinker finds that both types of violence have gone down, and some of this has to do with women’s increasing ability to seek protection and start over. There has been a decline in the number of murdered abusive husbands, as more and more women find themselves with practical, legal, viable, and non-lethal ways out.

OK, again, what does this have to do with the music? Well, many of the songs we listen to on the blog which involve male-female violence, are not just sorting out the tragic consequences of romance gone wrong, but part of an ongoing unraveling of the irrational, but persistent, notion that women are property. It’s not at all difficult to see the idea of men’s ownership of women, whether those men are fathers or lovers, as constraining the fates of many a doomed heroine in the stories we look at. 

In the case of “Stone Cold Dead in the Market,” within the broader context of contest between the sexes that is common in Calypso music, a woman stakes out her autonomy in a decisive way. And, apparently, a lot of people liked to hear her sing about it. My bet is that this tale appealed to both men and women in the popular music audience, perhaps especially because it appeared at a time when both men and women were making sense of a changed and changing world of social, economic, and domestic relations. The song is like a court jester in the midst of a shifting and evolving political, economic, and social democracy–a comic escape valve, obliquely revealing some hidden truths. It doesn’t take any of it too seriously, but gently opens up ground for more direct and open discussions later on.

Next Up

In the next post, we’ll explore the history of “Stone Cold Dead in the Market.” First where it came from, and then where it went after its turn with Fitzgerald and Jordan.

Before going, though, I’ll add one more performance. This one is by Gracie Barrie, and is a “Soundie,” essentially a 1940s equivalent of a music video. It was produced as a short film to be shown on Panorams, or video jukeboxes. If we agree with Bruno’s assessment that Fitzgerald and Jordan were able to achieve acceptance for their version by projecting the story onto a foreign subculture, then watching the Barrie performance and its somewhat confusing cultural references is particularly interesting. 

I can only guess as to the production circumstances on this video, which appeared the same year as Fitzgerald and Jordan’s recording. Perhaps it intended to capitalize on the success of their recording, but couldn’t get them to record it for a Soundie. It’s possible that the producers wanted an all-white version, but African-Americans were not as a rule excluded from Soundies. Given the Soundies’ reputation for incorporating “cheesecake” segments, it’s more likely that the producers wanted the opportunity to include the dance segment performed by the woman in the background of the image below.