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

Caveat – While I will make every reasonable effort to maintain propriety and decorum in writing this post, the language and narrative content of the media herein is decidedly not appropriate for work or school.  Even if you’re reading and listening at home, you may want to skip this one based on the vulgarity, let alone the narrative content.  At the very least, send the kids to play in another room so you don’t get a call next week from the principal about their newly acquired vocabulary.

On the other hand, if you can get past the profanity, this stuff is truly fascinating!

Introduction

As I said in Chapter 1 of this compendium, “Stagolee” in all its variation is a song that’s been considered in thorough detail in print and online.  The current definitive work is Cecil Brown’s Stagolee Shot Billy.   If you’re new to the song and want a quick introduction, check out my first chapter to get the skinny and some links to other good resources.

It’s also been recorded consistently by performers for nearly 100 years, and collected by folklorists for longer than that.  Check out my current Spotify playlist, at nearly 200 tracks, and you’ll see immediately why we’ve chosen at Murder Ballad Monday to create this compendium as our online contribution to what I believe is the greatest American song.

From this point on, I’ll write with the assumption that you have a basic familiarity with the ballad’s source in history  – a murder in St. Louis on Christmas night in 1895 – and its development subsequently as one of the great American folk tales.

In Chapter 1 we considered all but the earliest classic 20th Century recordings of Stagolee, and I disappointed Nick Cave fans by not including his – though I did acknowledge it deserves the title ‘classic’.  In Chapter 2, we looked at Stagolee as a prison blues / work song and found a line reminiscent of Cave’s in Hogman Maxey’s version, but still I didn’t pursue the opportunity to introduce it.

Today, though, it’s time.

If it’s not already obvious, let me now be clear that one reason to treat Cave’s take in a separate chapter of this compendium is so that readers might exercise some discretion and control over choosing a venue to sample the content.  However, there’s another reason – Cave’s version does not stand alone.  It’s a doorway in to another grand room in this musical hall of mirrors we call Stagolee.

“Those were the last words the barkeep said…”

Shaleane introduced us in this blog to Cave in our first year of publishing, and even briefly to his version of “Stagger Lee”.  She said of his performance –

“Cave’s extremely-not safe-for-work cover of “Stagger Lee” is my favorite version of the song… but consider yourself doubly warned about the graphic language. (Language worth noting for more than one reason — in 1959 Dick Clark deemed Lloyd Price’s tame hit version too offensive and insisted that he re-write it. It’s hard to imagine how, in 1996, Cave could have made the song equally worthy of censorship, other than by doing exactly what he does with it.)”

Lyrics for Nick Cave’s version           Music video (You Tube) for Cave’s version

Cave’s and his band’s approach to the music is unique and evocative, and given the popularity of the album on which it is included, Murder Ballads, we certainly have to include it as a classic.  But there’s more to the story.  I came across this Cave fan page when doing basic research for my Stagolee work.  It suggests that Cave’s lyrics are not original and in fact are a lightly edited version from a wholly different part of the Stagolee tradition and folklore.  The page creator offers an excerpt from a 1996 interview with Cave himself that presumably confirms it.

The story goes that Cave was inspired by a set of lyrics he found in a book borrowed from band mate Jim Sclavunos.  With some quick, spare editing and the addition of a line from a different blues, the version we hear above was recorded in rather short order.  Now, a fan page on the Internet is hardly definitive proof – but, beside the convincing interview with Cave, the page includes a citation for the borrowed book.  Though the copyright is not 1986 as stated, the book was easy to find.  The Life – The Lore and Folk Poetry of the Black Hustler, by Dennis Wepman, Ronald B. Newman, and Murray B. Binderman, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1976.  I’ll excerpt directly from its introduction to give a clear idea of what we’re talking about here – the ‘Toast’.

“Out of the black urban experience have come many revealing expressions of a culture with distinct values and a style of its own.  Perhaps none of these expressions is so vivid and illuminating as the folk poems known as toasts…

Toasts are a form of poetry recited by certain blacks – really a performance medium, widely known within a small… community and virtually unheard of outside it.  They are like jokes: no one knows who creates them, and everyone has his own versions.

But toasts… have their own conventions of form and content.  Furthermore, they come from a clearly defined subculture and meet all the standard criteria of folk literature: dispersion and longevity as well as anonymity and mutability.  Though some toasts are pure boast or precept, the most common type is narrative – stories ranging from simple anecdote to highly elaborated, almost epic tales.  In all these types, narrative and non-narrative, we see revealed… the special community which creates and transmits toasts: that black urban subculture known as sporting life, or, simply, the Life.”

Here is another definition online.

More to the point, here is an excerpted copy of the parts of the book relevant to the “Stagger Lee” toast the authors collected in 1967 at Auburn Prison in New York from a hustler name Big Stick.  These lyrics make absolutely clear that Big Stick’s toast is certainly Cave’s source.

What does a real toast sound like?  Though I can’t link to full recordings on Spotify, you can download the album Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me (also on iTunes) if you want to hear pure spoken-word delivery of toasts.  These are recordings from prisons in the 1960’s and 1970’s and were meant to accompany Bruce Jackson’s book of the same name.  Track 10 of the electronic version of the album is Stack-O-Lee, collected in the Ramsey Unit of the Texas Department of Corrections on 17 November, 1965.  If what you’re reading in this post is interesting so far, then it’s worth the dollar to download at least that one track.

It will certainly be helpful below to have considered the lyrics – so here they are.

“I sing graveyard songs, and I ain’t lying…”

We should note that Cave’s version (and thus its source, the toast from Big Stick) is not delivered in the first person.  But in many toasts, such as the one linked directly above, the speaker is describing himself – the narrator is Stagolee.  This is not the case in the vast majority of variants in the ballad tradition.  Cave may be speaking in the third person, but as the narrator he certainly delivers in a way that lets the listener know he wishes he was Stagolee.  It’s the same with Big Stick’s toast, and we’ll see it below as well.  This is one key to understanding the power of Cave’s version, but it also unlocks a critical way to better understand the toast as distinct from the ballad.  Cave’s performance by definition is not a toast, but under the hood it packs the same engine.  The horsepower comes from the narrator’s admiration of and identity with the baddest man that ever lived.

The difference in meaning achieved in delivery by a white Australian rock star and a black man in prison may be vast – but then again, perhaps not.  If Nick Cave fans imagine themselves as Stagger Lee when they hear the song, as seems to be the case for the talented artist whose work caps this post, then it’s probably not nearly as different as one might expect. I suppose you’ll have to figure that out for yourself.

The notes linked above regarding Cave’s inspiration also cite his use of a line from an “X-rated blues song called ‘Two-Time Slim’ by Snatch and the Poontangs.”  Apparently at the time of that writing, the track was elusive.  But the advent of streaming media is certainly an advantage in this post.

Snatch and the Poontangs was a project of Johnny Otis and his band, and in 1969 they released Johnny Otis Presents: Snatch and the Poontangs.  “Two Time Slim” is in the first person and is both exceptionally vulgar and exceptionally clever – beautiful even – and no doubt functions for performer and listener in much the same way as the Stagolee toast.  It’s not hard to see why the line Cave lifts from this song (“But I’m the type of…”) is so easily adapted to Big Stick’s toast.  You don’t need lyrics transcribed – every word is clear – but here they are.

You Tube version – “Two Time Slim”

But it turns out that album also includes “The Great Stack A Lee”, another musical version of a Stagolee toast!  Though it follows the broad narrative for typical Stagolee toasts, this one is rather different in its lyric details than Big Stick’s.  It’s not clear whether Cave had access to this particular album or rather, as the notes linked above seem to suggest, some foreign compilation that included only “Two Time Slim”.  We have no reason to doubt that the latter is the case.  At any rate, it’s an awesome version and I offer it for your consideration because it certainly belongs in a post on this particular strain of Stagolee.  Note the warning on the album cover!  I’m sorry I can’t find a YouTube version to offer.

“The Great Stack A Lee” – Lyrics

Cecil Brown, in Stagolee Shot Billy, describes how he first learned the story of Stagolee from his Uncle Lindsey in the late ’50’s or early ’60’s from a toast in rural North Carolina, and he is clear what the Stagolee of that story meant – “In those days, to young black field hands sitting in the shade of a tree at the end of the tobacco road, Stagolee was as impulsive, as vulgar, as daring, and as adventurous as they wanted him (and themselves) to be.”  He goes on more thoroughly to explore the Stagolee toast in Chapter 22 of his book, wherein he makes a simple but essential observation that “the toast looks back to the ballad and forward to rap music.”

Jerry H. Bryant, in Chapter 6 of his Born in a Mighty Bad Land, explores the toast tradition in depth and particularly the Stagolee toast.  His analysis of bad man ballads and toasts leads him to claim that Stagolee is the only developed character from that ballad tradition that directly descends into the toast tradition.  He follows with a keen point that reinforces why these ‘vulgar’ versions of Stagolee are truly worthy of study today.

“To be sure, the turn-of-the-century ballad probably comes to us substantially bowdlerized by the prim collectors early in the century, who were guided by their probably even primmer audience. The collectors of the toast, on the other hand, have had no such limits on what they might publish. Consequently, the toasts are flung at us with all stops out, their poetry of obscenity long predating our public vernacular’s current love affair with the four-letter word.- If we wonder, indeed, where the language and attitudes of the current commercial rap song come from we need only look at the toast. Both are heavily affected by the adolescent need to swagger and to shock by violating accepted standards of adult behavior.”

But rather than pursue imperfectly what both authors already articulate with infinitely more insight than I can muster, I will leave it for you to explore on your own if you’re interested. Instead, let’s move on to some more music.

Two other performances need to be included today, one from the blues tradition and one made popular by Hollywood.  One is delivered in the third person, one in the first.  Knowing what we now know from above, it’s plain to see that both have a clear relationship to the toasts.

“A dirty glass of water, and a tough-ass piece of meat…”

R.L. Burnside is today recognized as a unique voice in the chorus of the blues.  Though he played music most of his 78 years, he did not gain real prominence until his final decades.  He grew up and spent most of his life in rural Mississippi, but spent some tough years in Chicago as well.  He also did six months in Parchman for murder.  You can read much more about it all in this article, but the explanation he gave for killing a man in a dice game could have been uttered by Stagolee himself.  “‘I didn’t mean to kill nobody. I just meant to shoot the sonofabitch in the head and two times in the chest. Him dying was between him and the Lord.”

This version of “Staggolee” is from his album Well… well… well which includes several informal recordings of songs and interviews between 1986 and 1993.  I don’t have the liner notes to know the venue or who he’s performing for in this track, but it’s clearly a very small, informal audience, perhaps only one other person.  (If anyone has the liner notes, please comment below with the information – thanks!)  The context seems very much to be that of informally passing on the story to a younger man.  One imagines being on the inside, with access to the ritual telling of the Stagolee tale.  It’s enlightening – you can hear one younger man laughing nervously as the story goes over the top in intensity.  Burnside delivers in the third person, but at the end of the performance the listener states what is at the core of this family of Stagolee variants – “I hope I’m every bit as much as that man.”

The YouTube version I’ve linked below the Spotify track is the same, but has the worst vulgarity censored.  As well, I’ve included a different YouTube performance of Burnside’s from the album Goin Down South that uses the same basic lyrics, but is delivered as a more standard blues performance.

Lyrics for Burnside’s Staggolee as performed on Well…Well…Well…

YouTube version of R.L. Burnside’s “Staggolee”

“I had old Billy Lyon dead in my sights…”

Samuel L. Jackson grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee during the final, intense years of the death of Jim Crow.  He is as of this writing the highest grossing film actor of all time.  His performance of Stagolee in the 2006 movie Black Snake Moan is outstanding. He learned to play blues guitar for his role in the film, but his vocal delivery is as one might expect from such a man of talent – utterly superb.  The context may be as far away as can be from a hustler rapping a toast into a tape recorder in a Texas penitentiary, but I feel sure that such a man would find Jackson’s performance deeply personal and thrilling to the bone.

Jackson delivers in the first person.  In terms of the narrative, his version is stripped down and only gets as far as the death of Billy Lyon, but the lyrics leave no question that he’s performing yet another take on the Stagolee toast.  Though I haven’t found specific evidence that this version is derived from Burnside’s, it seems more than likely – the movie’s musical director made clear in a press release concerning the soundtrack that “R.L. was definitely the zeitgeist of the film…”  Whatever its origin, it works – and quite well at that.  We’ll close our sampling today with this powerful performance.

“Stack-O-Lee” by Samuel L. Jackson (Spotify)     Lyrics for Jackson’s version

Coda – “But anyhow, that tale ain’t new…”

If you’ve made it this far, I know you’ve already accepted that the vulgarity of these versions should be no impediment to an open-minded consideration of their value.  But what then can we best learn from the Stagolee toast and its relatives?  And what of Nick Cave’s version; is it truly a legitimate addition to the Stagolee milieu, or is it a white rip-off of a black man’s song?

The answers to both of these questions intersect in the realm of self-image and deep identity.

We saw already, in Chapter 2, that a black man’s ability to identify with Stagolee meant the difference between psychological survival and utter defeat in the Jim Crow prison system; a system designed to extract his labor and demean him in a way that was negligibly different from chattel slavery.  It’s not hard to see that the toast – whether intoned in a prison cell, a poverty ridden street of some inner city, or the tobacco road of a southern farm – was a similar survival tool, though more flexible and offensive in the pure sense of the word ‘offense’.  The best defense…  You know what I mean?

Rudy Ray Moore in 1972 mixed elements of Lloyd Price’s ballad, the toasts we considered above, and his own unique creativity and vision.   It is offensive in *every* sense of the word, and quite evocative.

In the broader picture, both Jerry Bryant’s and Cecil Brown’s work prove beyond any doubt that the diversity of expression of the Stagolee tale, and its remarkable flourishing in the last twelve decades, has everything to do with a constant, hyper-creative redefinition of black male identity in the context of an intractably hostile world of white privilege and violence. In that context, the toast has one foot in the world of Jim Crow and one in the world of the Black Panthers; or, to echo Cecil Brown, one in the world of the ballad and one in the world of rap.

Nick Cave took a toast with a deeply racial context and turned it in to something new, something divorced from race.  Does Stagolee have to be reinterpreted strictly within the bounds of African-American culture to have value?  I don’t see how the answer to that question can possibly be yes.  True art, true beauty, is always about more than race, even when race is the context.

We assign value based on our own needs and desires.  The very concept of race itself is such a construct, albeit one grander than the Philistine temple that Samson tore down.  And see, there it is – right?  Samson, Moses, Jesus… none of their stories come from black America, but black folks made them part of their identity, as hot, deep, and vital as their own blood.

Why not Nick Cave and Stagolee then?  Well, let’s be a little more precise.

I don’t really care what Nick Cave thinks of Stagolee.  I love his version of the song, but I don’t care what he was thinking or not thinking when he was inspired, or when he recorded it, or when he performs it.  What matters is what Stagolee – Nick Cave’s or John Hurt’s or Taj Mahal’s or whomever’s – means to me.  Does it matter that I’m white?  Perhaps – but I don’t think so, not in the ways that matter most.

I’m lucky, or privileged I guess.  I’ve only endured one thing in my life that truly called for Stagolee’s power.  I was thrown, upside down, in the lion’s den.  I was made to walk among the waking beasts because the royal princes declared as Holy Law what I knew to be deeply wrong and I said so. They said I sure as Hell better not say one thing more about it or everyone I cared about might just get thrown in after me to be the lion’s dessert.

Daniel offered faith – it was strong, but it wasn’t enough.  And Samson said he wished he could give a hand but he could only take one lion at a time.

So I begged Stagolee for help.  And, sure enough, that bad motherfucker gave me his shiny forty-four.

Said I’d have to find my own Stetson though.