This essay is part of Redemption Songs, a limited-run newsletter that spotlights one song each week by incarcerated artists. Sign up now to get a new song each Sunday afternoon until September:

The Bootlegging, Blues Singing Star of 1930s Prison Radio

Listen if you like: Billie Holiday, Buddy Guy, Robert Johnson

My favorite song on the Oscar-winning soundtrack to the movie “Sinners” is “Pale, Pale Moon,” where actress Jayme Lawson channels the great blues women of the 1920s and 1930s like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. But the song also reminded me of Hattie Ellis, the imprisoned Dallas vocalist who once earned comparisons to Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday.

Ellis is mostly unknown, perhaps because she left behind only two songs, recorded while she was incarcerated in The Goree State Farm for Women near Huntsville, Texas. But almost a century later, her voice remains mesmerizing through the grit of early phonograph technology. I wish someone would make a movie based on what we do know about her life, because the bare facts are so dramatic.

As Texas Monthly’s Skip Hollandsworth reported, Ellis was involved in Prohibition-era bootlegging at the age of 20. One day, she got into an argument with a customer named Henrietta Murphy, possibly over the cost of whiskey. Murphy, who was likely drunk, urinated on Ellis’s floor. After the argument, Ellis drove to Murphy’s house and shot her in the stomach.

At trial, Ellis said the victim attacked her with a razor. The jury evidently didn’t believe her, since she got a 30-year sentence for murder. She was sent to Goree, a segregated facility named after a former slave owner and Confederate officer. Black women worked in the fields while White women worked in a garment factory.

But each week, some of the women were taken to a male prison nearby to perform on “Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls,” a variety radio show broadcast on Wednesday nights. Scholar Caroline Gnagy writes in her 2016 book “Texas Jailhouse Music: A Prison Band History” that most of the performers were White men, so we can assume it was Ellis’ skill during her debut, in March 1938, that earned her a spot almost every week for three years.

According to Gnagy, Ellis received as many as 3,000 fan letters in a single week, singing hits of the era like “Heart and Soul,” “Stormy Weather” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” since “The Wizard of Oz” came out while she was inside.

I found a 1939 clip from The Echo, the state prison newspaper of the era, that says Ellis would perform for the public at “the Texas Prison System’s big Juneteenth celebration,” which also involved a prisoner baseball game. (She also sang for the public at the annual Texas Prison Rodeo.) She was often introduced in public with condescending monikers that focused on her race, like the “blues-singing Negress,” and the “dusky songstress.”

Among her fans was Texas Gov. Wilbert Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, who praised the power of the radio show that featured her every week. “Before the advent of radio, prisoners were exiled; citizens outside paid little attention to them,” O’Daniel said on “Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls” in 1939. “But now you hear them talk; you hear them sing; you find out they are sons and daughters of good mothers. You find out they made mistakes, thus proving that they are human.”

O’Daniel went on to pardon Ellis, perhaps seeing it as a canny political move given her popularity (sort of like how President Donald Trump granted clemency to rappers such as Lil Wayne and Kodak Black). The Echo reported that professional talent scouts were interested in her and she wanted to have a music career, but there is no public record to explain why she never succeeded. She returned to prison briefly in the 1950s, after violating her parole, but that’s where the breadcrumb trail ends.

There are no surviving recordings of the radio show, but in 1939, the folklore researchers John and Ruby Lomax captured Ellis singing “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” a classic of the era, and “Desert Blues,” which she said she wrote. A White guitar player named Jack Ramsey played behind her, which is surprising given how segregated prisons were at the time.

John Lomax had previously found success by promoting the music of Huddie Ledbetter — better known by his stage name Lead Belly, a blues singer in a Louisiana prison who had also earned release at one point through his music.

But he wasn’t as impressed with Ellis. Lomax had a paternalistic, conservative view of authenticity and wanted prison music untouched by popular culture. In field notes preserved by the Library of Congress, he wrote, “Hattie’s singing is fast becoming ‘throaty’ as she strives to imitate the professional ‘blues’ singers.”

But her ability to sound like the greats of her era is precisely why I think she could have had a career. We can only guess why she didn’t.

Liner Notes:

Artist: Hattie Ellis | Song: “Desert Blues” | Date: May 14, 1939 | Location: The Goree State Farm for Women, Walker County, Texas | Guitarist: “Cowboy” Jack Ramsey |Producers: John and Ruby Lomax