Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan's recording of “Stone Cold Dead in the Market” was a major R&B and pop hit in 1946. In narrating a woman's murder of her abusive husband from a sympathetic first-person point of view, the recording's depiction of domestic violence raises the question of how it achieved mass popularity in a cultural milieu that discouraged frank discussion of this topic. This article accounts for this popularity by tracing the musical and lyrical changes between the hit recording and its sources, the Caribbean folk ballad Payne dead/Murder in the market and calypso performer Wilmouth Houdini's 1939 adaptation He had it coming.
"This paper examines the tradition of misogynistic picong or satire in calypso songs recorded as artists moved from Trinidad to Britain during the period immediately after World War II. I argue that, while these traditions of anti-woman representation began in conflicts around race and class inequalities within Caribbean culture during the Depression, they came to take on an anti-colonial animus when translated to the mother country. Calypso singers' tales of their exploits with hapless wealthy Englishwomen thus functioned not simply to express superiority over other men from the Caribbean, but to challenge the forms of racial subordination that black male migrants encountered in Britain during the 1940s and 1950s." --The Author
