"Stone Cold Dead in the Market (He Had It Coming)" is a 1939 song with lyrics and music by Wilmoth Houdini, a Trinidad and Tobago musician who had moved to the United States.
The song is sung in first-person and tells the story of an unnamed woman who killed her husband with a rolling pin, bashing in his skull while in a marketplace after he went out drinking and then came home and beat her.
The narrative shifts back and forth between the wife who repeatedly claims that "he had it coming" and doesn't care about either revenge from his family or facing the electric chair, and the husband who recounts his side of the story apparently from beyond the grave.
Franklin Bruno argued in a piece in the Journal of Popular Music and Society that "Fitzgerald and Jordan's adoption of an exoticized West African accent, as well as their public personae, effectively produced a comic and ethnic "mask" from behind which the song's subject matter could be presented with relative frankness.
"[1] The single was the first of five that Louis Jordan would take to the number-one spot on the R&B Juke Box chart.