Blue Song, Red Alert

Before we talk about “Stella Hurt,” let me introduce you to Teddy Grace. 

The subject of a moving nonfiction piece in a 2007 issue of the Oxford American, it’s Teddy Grace who becomes Stella Hurt, and it’s her journey between those two identities where Elvis Costello finds his inspiration. 

I won’t try to summarize the article; you should absolutely read it. (Shout out once again to the indispensable Elvis Costello Wiki for keeping this piece archived.) It’s an incredible story about a socialite who is discovered as a singer, leaves behind a husband to join a series of big bands in the 1930s and 1940s, then shifts gears to help the war effort where she ultimately loses her voice. Teddy vanishes into the dustbin of history, only for a tenacious and curious record collector to discover that Teddy Grace eventually became Stella Hurt. He makes contact with her and is able to learn her story just nine months before she dies. 

Without the context of that story, it seemed like a weird touch to capitalize the word “Hurt.” My immediate assumption was that it was a verb in the chorus, not a last name. From there, my mental narrative extrapolated a story of a wronged woman who sought out her own path from beyond the control of those who would see her fall. 

Instead, Costello collapses the details of Teddy/Stella’s life into a five-minute blistering rock song. It doesn’t always serve the story well; there’s too much rich detail to gloss over, and so there are some inevitable blanks. The remarkable rediscovery of Teddy Grace as an elderly woman in a nursing home named Stella Hurt is barely suggested by the closing verse: 

Somehow it’s both broad strokes and evocative detail; the “cracked shellac” suggests the cratediggers who helped uncover her old recordings and the collector who dove deep into research to finally find her, as “the needle drags her through the static.” You can almost feel the hands of time plucking Teddy Grace from her heyday and presenting her once again to the aging Stella Hurt, so far removed from her moments of great triumph that it feels like another person, another lifetime. 

To answer the musical question, it’s hard to say who made Stella Hurt. Technically it was Teddy Grace, but as you compound time and history onto a woman’s life, the culprit becomes impossible to identify. No one made Stella Hurt, and everyone did.