Hattie Burleson's Dead Lover Blues
1920's Dallas blues queen killed a prominent publisher before her show biz career
A diminutive blues singer who recorded for Brunswick and Paramount and ran the Green Parrot dancehall, Bastrop-born Hattie Burleson was the queen of Deep Ellum in the 1920’s. But on Aug. 20, 1919, she looked likely to spend that fruitful decade of Texas blues in prison after shooting to death one of Dallas’ most prominent black citizens, Dallas Express founder and editor William Elisha King.
According to a front page story in the Aug. 22, 1919 Express, Burleson was driven to the house at 2811 Flora Street where King was recuperating from a streetcar fall. “The lady of the house” was preparing lunch while King, 51, and Burleson talked in the other room. “As their conversation became intensed, the woman drew a .38 calibre pistol from her handbag and shot Mr. King in the chest,” it was reported. Burleson was identified as King’s former secretary who ran a rooming house at 2516 Swiss Avenue on the same block as the Express offices. There also may have been a romantic relationship. In a May 5, 1942 history of the prominent African-American newspaper, Burleson was described as King’s “female admirer,” but there’s no mention that the killer walked.
Though there has been uncertainty that the Hattie Burleson who shot King was the singer, a recently discovered death certificate makes that connection. The Express reported that Burleson was from Kaufman County, which is where the singer, who also has the middle initial C, is buried. Her occupation on the death certificate was “show business.”
That’s the career she pursued with passion after she was exonerated in the homicide of King. It’s unknown why Burleson was acquitted, as an arrest affidavit request to the Dallas Police Department found “no responsive documents.” But we can assume the grand jury sided with a claim of self-defense by the woman who stood only four and a half feet tall.
The extent of the King/Burleson relationship is purely conjecture, but a July 31, 1918 story in the Express has King and Burleson participating in the Union Station send-off of 500 black soldiers to WWI. King spoke at the event, flanked by Hattie C. dressed as a Red Cross nurse.
Besides singing and running the Parrot, Burleson promoted and performed in “colored” variety shows all over the Texas. While on the road, “Madame Burleson” would scout singers, dancers and musicians and send the really good ones to Ella B. Moore, whose Park Theater in Deep Ellum hosted the “Hot Ella Company” vaudeville revue, as well as singers like Lillian Glinn of Hillsboro, a Burleson protege.
In the book Blues Come to Texas by Paul Oliver and Mack McCormick, musician Black Mack Williams said Burleson “was getting people to record for some company.” That was Columbia, whose famous sessions, conducted by Frank B. Walker in Dallas in December 1927, featured the recording debuts of not only Glinn, but Blind Willie Johnson, Washington Phillips and a singer named Hattie Hudson who sounds a lot like Hattie Burleson on her two tracks- “Doggone My Good Luck Soul” and “Black Hand Blues.” A pseudonym for the notorious “slayress” of eight years earlier? Burleson was listed, under her own name, as the writer of those songs and many others recorded at that session, which most likely took place at the Jefferson Hotel. According to session notes found by Oliver and McCormick, Burleson received $25 per composition. Most likely the biz-savvy Burleson procured the songs, which included Billiken Johnson’s train-mimicking instrumental “Interurban Blues,” but didn’t write them.
Hattie Burleson also took a songwriting credit on 1929’s “Trinity River Blues,” the debut recording of T-Bone Walker when he was billed on Columbia as Oak Cliff T-Bone.
Burleson made the first recordings under her own name in Dallas in 1928 for the Brunswick label, including “Dead Lover Blues” and "Sadie's Servant Room Blues" backed by Don Albert of San Antonio on trumpet. Four more sides were recorded in Grafton, Wis. in ‘29 for the Paramount label. None of them were hits.
William Elisha King’s unsavory death seemed incongruous to the intellectually-uplifting purpose that had guided his life.
Not only the founding publisher of the Southwest’s leading black newspaper, W.E. King was a noted lecturer on the issues of race and politics. Every issue of the Dallas Express contained a photo of “Hon. W.E. King,” with that week’s speaking itinerary. A son of former slaves from Mississippi, King (b. 1866) was a schoolteacher for seven years before starting the Fair Play newspaper, which advocated for Negro rights, in 1889. But that agenda led to threats and he was forced to leave Mississippi.
His first job in Dallas was editing the Western Star religious newspaper. The next year he started the Dallas Bee, then soon changed the name to the Dallas Express. King sold the paper to educator J.P. Starks in 1914, but was kept on as editor. The Express continued to publish until 1971.
Hattie Burleson died in 1953 at which age we’re not sure. The death certificate has her born in 1897, but when she applied for Social Security soon before her death, she listed a DOB of Oct. 29, 1889. Maybe adding a few years to qualify? The truth is somewhere in the middle, with the 1900 and 1910 Censuses listing her DOB as 1894. Her family had moved from her birthplace of Bastrop to Kaufman County by the time she was 16.
No known photo of Hattie C. Burleson exists. Just another phantom who made a huge impact on Texas music.