This is Chapter 2 of Stagolee: A Digital Compendium.  See also Chapter 1,  Chapter 3, Chapter 4, and Chapter 5

Introduction

In the introduction to the first chapter of this digital compendium, I claimed that today we can all look to Stagolee to find some inspiration.  I called him a shaman, and I called the story magic.  You can plug in to the power any time you want, really.  (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you may want to check out that first post – I’ll assume you have some familiarity with this greatest of all American songs for the rest of this post.)

Stagolee is a black man’s song and story.  So, I’m conscious of the fact that there’s a certain disconnect in my claiming that Stagolee can speak to us *all* now, though it comes very much from a history of racism.  I don’t think it’s naive – I experience it and know plenty of people that do.  What I get from Stagolee is real and powerful, and I strongly disagree that it’s mainly because I can’t find the emotional equivalent from European-American music (see William Benzon’s, Africa Meets Europe.)  This blog can testify to such emotional content, even if we must admit that much of America knows nothing of the intensity of the Anglo-American ballad and ‘love song’ tradition.

I was raised by open-minded parents who chafed at my grandmother’s periodic bigotry. She wasn’t as bad as Archie Bunker, but it would come on her like the flu when she got scared of something ‘out there’ in the big, bad world. I was patterned at a young age by my parents to see that sort of blatant prejudice as old-fashioned and backwards; and though I loved my grandmother, our biggest fights came in those feverish moments.

On the other hand, I’m observant enough to know that I still live in a nation of white privilege, changing though it slowly may be.  I benefit from that privilege in countless ways that depend not at all on my attitudes and to which my vision is blurred at best. Only the young and the foolish think skin color doesn’t matter any more in America, though there’s nothing foolish about the hope it might some day be otherwise.

So to focus our digital compendium only on the power of Stagolee as art today and ignore the roots of the song’s development as a creative survival tool for black men in a racist America would be unforgivably negligent.

Thus, today’s chapter focuses on a time and place where Stagolee’s race meant everything – prisons and labor camps in the Jim Crow South, full of black men and women.  Whether any of us can see our ‘inner bad ass’ in the Stagolee songs those prisoners sang doesn’t matter one bit.  He appeared for them in the way they needed to see him and with the voice they needed to hear, and we can only try to see and hear him that way and understand.  It’s a worthy effort, even if in the end we can’t know their Stagolee as our own.  It’s one of those times perhaps when the journey matters more than the goal.  I hope you’ll join me.

Slavery By Another Name

Let’s be clear.  Despite stereotypes of black ‘bad men’, despite what we know about real bad men like ‘Stack’ Lee Shelton, most black men and women in prison in the Jim Crow South were not there for any other reason than to give economic benefit through their forced labor to the white owners of local farms and businesses.  White folks like my grandmother, born in 1906, found it easy in their fear to believe that the chain gangs and labor camps were full of hardened black criminals.  But Douglas A. Blackmon proves, in his Pulitizer Prize-winning 2008 book Slavery By Another Name, that was a lie.

“…in the attics and basements of courthouses, old county jails, storage sheds, and local historical societies, I found a vast record of original documents and personal narratives revealing a very different version of events…  Altogether, millions of mostly obscure entries in the public record offer details of a forced labor system of monotonous enormity.

Instead of thousands of true thieves and thugs drawn into the system over decades, the records demonstrate the capture and imprisonment of thousands of random indigent citizens, almost always under the thinnest chimera of probable cause or judicial process. The total number of workers caught in this net had to have totaled more than a hundred thousand and perhaps more than twice that figure.

Instead of evidence showing black crime waves, the original records of county jails indicated thousands of arrests for inconsequential charges or for violations of laws specifically written to intimidate blacks—changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding freight cars without a ticket, engaging in sexual activity—or loud talk—with white women. Repeatedly, the timing and scale of surges in arrests appeared more attuned to rises and dips in the need for cheap labor than any demonstrable acts of crime.”

Blackmon maintains a website that links to a great deal more enrichment about the book and the PBS documentary of the same name.  I’m not going to explore that history in detail here, but I present this as evidence of what is essential to know about the environment whence arose the songs we’re about to consider.  You can’t really hear them if you don’t know the truth that Blackmon’s telling.

Stagolee – Two Classic Prisoners’ Songs

Not surprisingly, most of the versions we can hear of Stagolee in the prisons and labor camps come from the recordings made by John and Alan Lomax over several collecting trips made through the South.  We don’t have easy electronic access to all of those recordings, but two tracks of Stagolee as performed in prison need to be added to our compendium.  They represent two different forms of the song.  One was recorded by Alan Lomax, and the other by Harry Oster.

This short clip from Lomax the Songhunter gives a bit of an introduction to the importance Alan Lomax assigned to the music they found in the prisons and labor camps.

As well, I think it’s important to include a primary source regarding just why singing was so important for black folks who’d be forced in to this new form of slavery.  I’ve used this recording in my classroom for years, and was happy to find it on Spotify.

“What Makes a Work Song Leader?” – transcription

This prisoner – whom Cecil Brown identifies in his book Stagolee Shot Billy as ‘Bama’, the same singer of our first example below – suggests two good reasons to sing while at hard labor; to keep your mind busy so as not to think about how miserable and long your day is, and to coordinate complex or potentially dangerous work such as we see near the end of the Lomax clip above.  However, Bama is leaving out another critical reason to sing, and this is not surprising given that he was no doubt being recorded within sight and earshot of prison guards.

There is no doubt that the lyric content of many songs we can hear in the Lomax and Oster recordings (here, and here) mattered a great deal to black prisoners who had mostly done nothing truly wrong to get where they were.  As in many of the songs we know from slavery days such as “Juba” and “Old Bill Rolling Pin“, the lyrics of the prisoners’ songs worked to empower black folks without their white oppressors knowing it.  They provided the singer with double-entendre, extended metaphor, and narratives that functioned essentially as coded expressions of hope and just about every other feeling one might imagine.

The white power structure of the Jim Crow South could take everything away from black folks, the due process and freedom that The Constitution supposedly guaranteed them and even their lives by the tens of thousands, but it couldn’t erase their songs and stories.  As in the days of de jure slavery, songs became some of their most important survival tools in a new world of de facto slavery that must have seemed very much like another circle of Hell on Earth.

Again, I don’t propose to make this a study of prison blues and chain gang songs.  And Stagolee the song neither starts nor ends its days in this context.  But the point must be made.  As Cecil Brown describes it, John and Alan Lomax were exploring “a new musical genre and a repertoire that voiced the feelings and fantasies of the inmates and spoke tragically and ironically of the brutal conditions in the prisons.  In every prison they visited, at least one work song was about Stagolee.”  (emphasis added)

1. “I have found a foul dice” – W.D. Stewart, aka ‘Bama’, 1947

According to Cecil Brown, Lomax and ‘Bama’ had known each other for years by the time Lomax came back to Parchman Farm in 1947 with some state of the art recording equipment.  Though the performance is an A Capella solo, it’s not hard to hear that this is a work song such as Bama describes above and as we see in the Lomax clip.  The quality of the recording and the power of the performance make this one of two well-known Stagolee versions from the southern prison system.

Lyrics for Bama’s version Stackerlee

Both Lomax and Brown comment on missing verses about scared deputies and such, as well as a trip to hell, which again may have something to do with the guards.  As well, they comment on the last verses in which Bama sings about what he’ll do to a woman, Alberta, if she doesn’t give him what he needs.  Such longing and masculine violence is easy to understand; as Brown describes it, he “used the cliches of the bad man to express his own feelings.”

What strikes me is the way Bama relates to Stack – Billy took all his money in a rigged game with ‘foul dice’ and so Stack’s bound to kill him.  It’s not hard to imagine that Bama is speaking about them that cheated him, and the ‘rigged game’ that had him and his brethren trapped in a system of forced labor.  One need only look at the pictures above to imagine the emasculation that comes regularly in such a system, and there can be little doubt that Stagolee, the baddest man that ever lived, helped black men keep a vital part of their identity intact under such conditions.

Dr. Brown links to some samples of some of the other Lomax recordings at his site.  Of note is one performed by Buena Flynn in 1936 in Raiford State Prison in Florida.  The conversation with the Devil (at times a clear metaphor for white men) is there, but also there is the line repeated “I’m in a world of trouble.”  As Dr. Brown so clearly puts it, “‘I’m in a world of trouble’ would have conveyed to any black living in the South that that speaker was in jail.”

2. “Just look what a hole in his head” – ‘Hogman’ Maxey, 1959

While Lloyd Price was making a hit of Stagger Lee on the pop charts in 1959, the song was still alive in the southern prison system. By then the worst excesses and brutality of the pre-war forced labor system were waning in some parts of the South.  Such was not the case at Angola Prison, where Maxey recorded this track as an inmate.  Cecil Brown notes that this recording is from 1959, but several less scholarly online sources date it to 1952.  We should note in 1952 Angola was cited in Collier’s Magazine as the “Worst Prison in America”.  Thirty two inmates that year, the Heel String Gang, cut their own Achilles’ tendons in protest of the conditions there.  I’m not sure if the difference between 1952 and 1959 matters in Hell.

This is not a Lomax recording, and it is not a work song but a blues with guitar accompaniment.  It delivers straightforward emotion as you’d expect in acoustic blues, and the lyrics follow closely the version that Price made popular in the mainstream.  However, Maxey sings a last verse that would have kept Price’s version off the air!

Some folks don’t believe,
Oh Lord that Billy dead .
You don’t believe he gone,
Jus’ look what a hole in his head.

Now you Nick Cave fans, who felt slighted when I left his classic version out of my first chapter, will recognize instantly the imagery of looking at the bullet hole in Billy’s head to verify Stack’s bad and dirty work.  Cave’s version introduces the image in the middle of the narrative and it’s in relation to the bartender instead of Billy, but the motif is clear enough.  We’ll see in a later chapter that this very much fits with a part of the Stagolee tradition we haven’t considered yet.  Cave’s version came from a ‘toast‘ in a New York prison.

I don’t know whether Maxey was dressing down Price’s or his source Archibald’s version from the radio to be more suitable to a venue like Angola Prison, if he was dressing up a more vulgar blues or toast version to suit the ears of folklorist Harry Oster who made the recording, or if the version as Maxey sang it was simply the way he’d done it for years. I doubt I’ll dig in to it because I’m not particularly interested in provenance here, though I think the question of adjusting the lyrics for audience is always an interesting one.

Lyrics for Hogman Maxey’s version “Stagolee”

Coda

It’s worth noting that “Stack” Lee Shelton, the historical ‘bad man’ whose murder of Billy Lyons in St. Louis in 1895 gave rise to the myth of Stagolee, died of tuberculosis on March 11, 1912 in the Missouri State Penitentiary serving a five year sentence on a different charge.  He had robbed and pistol-whipped one William Akins, and cracked his skull.

Yes, Stagolee was a bad man, everybody knows…

But Lee Shelton died like so many of his brothers in a penal system that simply worked black men to death and made little or no effort to care for even their most basic needs.  ‘Stack’ Lee Shelton couldn’t possibly be the Stagolee men like that needed.  No, they borrowed Stagolee from the folk tradition and recreated him for themselves, and added him to the expansive tool kit they fashioned to give them some chance at survival – tools made in great beauty during the ugliest of times.   It’s been noted often that by the time Lee Shelton died, the ballad had already been collected by folklorists and was spreading quickly, and well beyond the Mississippi.  You have to wonder what he felt when he heard it, if he even recognized himself in the song.

I try to teach my young students that to begin to understand slavery in America, they need to start with the simplest understanding that it’s all ‘upside down’.  Whatever the master says is bad is really good, and vice versa.  I don’t think it’s a stretch to take a first look at the southern penal system between the Civil War and World War II in the same way.

Everything about the Stagolee those prisoners created was a white man’s nightmare.  He had the biggest gun.  He killed a man over a Stetson hat.  The law men were too scared go after him.  When they caught him and finally  tried to hang him, his neck wouldn’t break.  And when he did die, he even took over Hell from the Devil!

He was that black man my grandmother kept trying to warn me about.

But if you want to understand Stagolee, you’ve got to turn it all upside down and start over.

Stagolee was a good man, everybody knows…