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.
Develops data from interviews about stereotypes of Jamaican and Barbadian men and women. The popular music from Jamaica and Barbados is used as a lens for understanding the cultures within which the respondents develop their gender stereotypes. The stereotype data is then compared with the music that is popular during the interviews.
Pages: 1-17., Examines the songs of the insular Caribbean as a contribution to the oral literature of the Caribbean region, with particular reference to the songs and singers of Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and to a lesser extent, Barbados. Among the artists discussed are Trinidad's African Queen of Song, Ella Andall, Dominica's Nascio Fontaine, and Carolyn Cooper's perspectives on the Jamaican dancehall and Kittitian legend King Ellie Matt, 'De Hardest Hard', who reigned supreme during the 1970s and 1980s. He influenced the late Daddy Friday, whose songs still receive significant airplay today. Trinidad's chutney soca songs speak to the presence of its East Indian singers while Jamaican sisters Tami Chynn and Tessanne Chin of Chinese, Cherokee, European, and African descent have become known, respectively, as pop and rock reggae singers.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
402 p, Exploration of the musical heritage of Latin America and the Caribbean, arranged by region, focusing on the major countries/regions (Mexico, Brazil, Peru, etc. in Latin America and Jamaica, the Virgin Islands, Haiti, etc. in the Caribbean). In each chapter the author gives a complete history of the region’s music, ranging from classical and classical-influenced styles to folk and traditional music to today’s popular music.
Colorism and skin bleaching is evident in contemporary Jamaica as expressed in some dancehall songs which praise skin bleachers, and the explanatory narratives of skin bleachers that bleaching makes them pretty and sexually attractive to potential spouses. Similar themes are reflected in the criticism that the browning Dancehall Queen Carlene was deemed sexually attractive and choreographically talented only because of her brown physicality. Some spouses request that their partner acquire the bleached physicality because they find it sexually attractive similar to many male clients in 'massage parlors' who only request female sex workers who bleach their skin.
Caribbean identity is informed by the condition of being islands and also by its sociopolitical conditions of colonialism, (e)migration, and pluralism. The uncertainty of not being grounded to the specificity of place is in conflict with generalized notions of nation and cultural identity. As people migrate, they create shifting identities following the process of addition and flux that has characterized the region. Cultural identity and migration are central issues in songs, which play a key role of lending continuity to culture and reconstructing symbols.
