Errata

As firmly rooted, in the annals of U. S. folklore as Steamboat Bill is the mournful ballad of Frankie & Johnnie. Last week the Frankie of the song popped up larger than life and blacker than Johnnie's two-timing heart. Before she was through telling her story, fleshy, 60-year-old Frankie Baker had poked holes enough in the time-tested legend to scuttle any folksong. It was not Johnnie she shot, but a man named Albert. He was not her man but an intruder in her bedroom. There never was any manstealing Nellie Ely. Self-defense, not jealousy, was the motive. Acquitted, not guilty, was the jury's verdict.

It was at 3 a. m. on the morning of Oct. 15, 1899 (goes her story), that drunken, 18-year-old Allen Britt (or Albert), a sturdy downriver buck, strode into Housemaid Frankie's St. Louis bedroom with another woman. When Frankie ordered him to leave, he drew a knife. As Frankie edged toward her pistol she warned him: "You're trying to get me hurt, and I don't want me to hurt you. The best place for you to go is your mother." When Britt failed to take the hint, she shot him. Groaning on the floor, he gasped: "Oh, you have me." Frankie couldn't believe it. "You're just wanting to get up onto me to cut me," she exclaimed. But she was wrong; he was done for.

Black, barrelhouse cabaret singers were not long in converting Frankie's exploit into a torchy part of the St. Louis saga, but Britt's mother somehow influenced them to leave her son's real name out of it. In the face of the publicity, Frankie fled St. Louis. To Kansas City, to Portland, Oregon, the song still pursued her. When eventually it began blaring out of the radio, she went a-lawing. By last week she was suing, among others, Mae West, Paramount Pictures, Republic Pictures, Robbins Music Corp. Her complaint: defamation of character; invasion of the right of privacy.

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