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

Introduction

He was a bad man – Stagolee.

Folks have been singing, talking, writing, laughing, cussing, and crying about him since 1895, when he shot his friend Billy and grabbed back his Stetson hat from the poor boy’s dying hands. Yeah, Billy Lyons was a drunken fool with a little knife and big mouth.  But it was “Stack” Lee Shelton who did the shooting, friends, in cold blood – and that’s the truth.

Stagolee, oh Stack, what do you think about that?  
Killed poor Billy Lyons ’bout a five dollar Stetson hat.

But maybe lies tell us more.

Stagolee told the Devil:
“Say, come on and have some fun!
You stick me with your pitchfork,
and I’ll shoot you with my forty-one”

Stagolee took the pitchfork
and he laid it on a shelf.
He says: “Stand back, Tom Devil, Lord,
I’m gonna rule Hell by myself.”

Either way he was a bad man, sure enough. The history is compelling, but those lies we tell about him collectively make one of the best stories in the English language.  Is he Iago from East St. Louis with a Smith and Wesson?  No – he’s more.  Folks, I’d wager Shakespeare himself couldn’t write a man better than Stagolee.

Stagolee is a bad-ass shaman made from the magic of a uniquely American people.  He isn’t the first.  Enslaved black folks borrowed Samson from the Bible and made him their own in the light of a Sunday morning. But on city streets near the Big River, their emancipated, hard-pressed children summoned Stagolee from their own blood, sweat, spit, and tears on a cold Saturday night.  All they needed was a spark and some lead from Lee Shelton’s forty-four.  And today, because of such supreme art applied to a simple murder, we can all see ourselves and find spirit in Stagolee if we want.

cataloging truth

What about that murder?  I’ll let the St. Louis Globe-Democrat briefly tell the true story of ‘Stack Lee’ Shelton and William Lyons.  As John Russell David proved in his 1976 PhD thesis Tragedy in Ragtime: Black Folktales From St. Louis, it happened in the same part of town and in the same decade whence came the ballads “Frankie and Albert” and “Duncan and Brady.”  The murder happened on a Wednesday – Christmas night – in 1895.  Billy died early the next morning. Except for misspelling Shelton’s name, this story from December 26 is accurate, if incomplete.

“William Lyons, 25, colored, a levee hand, living at 1410 Morgan Street, was shot in the abdomen yesterday evening at 10 o’clock in the saloon of Bill Curtis, at Eleventh and Morgan Streets, by Lee Sheldon, also colored. Both parties, it seems, had been drinking and were feeling in exuberant spirits. Lyons and Sheldon were friends and were talking together. The discussion drifted to politics and an argument was started, the conclusion of which was that Lyons snatched Sheldon’s hat from his head. The latter indignantly demanded its return. Lyons refused, and Sheldon withdrew his revolver and shot Lyons in the abdomen. Lyons was taken to the Dispensary, where his wounds were pronounced serious. He was removed to the City Hospital. At the time of the shooting the saloon was crowded with negroes. Sheldon is a carriage driver and lives at 911 North Twelfth Street. When his victim fell to the floor Sheldon took his hat from the hand of the wounded man and coolly walked away. He was subsequently arrested and locked up at the Chestnut Street Station. Sheldon is also known as ‘Stag’ Lee.”

In the Coda below I’ll refer you to sources that can give you the complete history, but there’s no need for a load of virtual ink here devoted to all that – the story is well-documented both online and in print.  And the myth of Stagolee has been considered from almost every angle as well.  Others with more experience and insight than I can lead you to the deeper truths they reveal.  And while I may touch upon the facts of the case and some of those insights into the fiction throughout the project, I propose neither original work nor even a summary in that regard.

This series is really about the telling of those lies, musically – that is, it’s first and foremost about hearing the songs that have grown from the myth as it has traveled through the last twelve decades.

cataloging lies

Of course, we keep track of lies as well.  Malcolm Laws identified “Stagolee” as his song group ‘I15,’ and in the Roud Folksong Index it is ‘#4183‘ with over 70 citations.  Online you can find thorough discographies for the ballad, for example here, here, and a most useful one here.  What I find lacking though with regards to “Stagolee” is a select digital collection with links for listening in the moment to full versions of the most compelling examples.  I’ve been listening to much of that music and so I’ll try to give you a worthy compendium over the course of a few well-curated blog posts.

That’s not as easy as it sounds – my Spotify playlist for the ballad boasts nearly 200 recordings as I type this and, based on those lists I linked above, much of what might be heard is not yet hosted by that online service.  YouTube fills in some of gaps.  The sheer amount of good material is vast; even derivative performances have great energy!  So, I’ll try my best and hope this will be the start of a meaningful contribution to the living legacy of the ballad in the digital age.

The hangman put the mask on,
tied his hands behind his back
sprung the trap on Stagolee
but his neck refused to crack

He’s still alive today.  I can prove it.  Just grab a looking glass, friends, and lend me your ears.  Yeah, he was a bad man. But I didn’t come to bury Stack, I’m here to praise that man Billy Lyons called a “cockeyed son of a bitch” – you know, right before Stack shot Billy.

You bet I’m gonna praise him…  Amen.

“Stagolee” – The Classic Performances

The best way to start this compendium is with the classics.  It gives the neophyte a solid foundation and the elder fresh access to the ‘sacred texts’.  The rest of today’s post will be dedicated to bringing together those recordings that best define “Stagolee” to post-modern listeners.  It includes a few tracks from before World War II, but we’ll leave the bulk of those classics for a different post.

The performances linked below represent both black and white interpretations and range in time from 1927 to 1993 – but  I’m not interested in chronology or provenance here.  That all seems silly with Stagolee, because the threads that hold it all together are woven in to the fabric of the ballad itself.

Cecil Brown (see Coda), unquestionably the top scholar today of both the Stagger Lee history and myth, argues convincingly in Stagolee Shot Billy that –

“…the structure of Stagolee remains stable.  Although each performance of Stagolee produces a different version even when several performers use the same motifs, the sequence of events and the kind of figure created through the narrative remain essentially the same.”

The proof is in the listening though, so please comment below if you’ve got something to say about his claim after you’ve heard it all!  I present them in no particular rank or order.

1. “Police officer, how can it be?” – Mississippi John Hurt

Many would argue that Mississippi John Hurt’s recording is definitive.  I think that’s not quite the right word, really – though many covered Hurt, there are plenty of other versions that represent entirely different branches and are not ‘defined’ by his approach at all.  His 1928 recording for Okeh was certainly not widely influential in its time. Still, because of his ‘rediscovery’ in 1963 during the Folk Revival, and the music he made in the three years prior to his death, Hurt’s is one of the best known and most influential versions.  And though such perceptions are obviously subjective, I rank it among the most beautiful.

We have his original 1928 recording, but also several from the 60’s.  To echo Dave Van Ronk’s homage, to hear any of these performances is to want to shake the ‘little old fella’s’ hand.  Perhaps hearing a man whose voice evokes the wish that he was your grandfather makes it, in turn, easy to meet that bad man Stagolee and invite him in to your life as well.  Much of white America met Stagolee this way.

Lyrics for the 1928 version   YouTube version

This version from the mid-60’s adds some back-story to Hurt’s interpretation.  Stack and a partner robbed some gamblers in a coal mine, and Stack shot Billy Lyons’ hat off before he killed him.

Lyrics and story for this ’60s version

Here’s one more take on that coal mine robbery.  I can’t find the lyrics and story transcribed, but you can get him without it.  The first line is great – “Stagolee was a desperado.”  I also love the added element of Stack crying – not because he killed Billy, but because he missed his shot.  He hit him between the eyes when he was aiming square for his right eye!  He was a bad man.

2. “When you lose your money, learn to lose.” – Furry Lewis and Dave Van Ronk

In 1962, Dave Van Ronk recorded “Stackerlee” and amplified another voicing of the ballad in the Folk Revival chorus.  He reproduced a version cut by one of his guitar heroes, Furry Lewis, called “Billy Lyons and Stack O’Lee”

Lewis waxed his cut for Vocalion in 1927 to commercial success, and it was reissued in 1947 on Alan Lomax’s and Dave Kapp’s compilation LP Listen to our Story – so, like John Hurt, Furry was also ‘rediscovered’ in the Folk Revival.  However, he was rediscovered earlier and lived longer than Hurt, and so was performing well into his old age even as a new generation of musicians like Van Ronk was trying to figure out how to play just like him.

Both tracks are deeply evocative and belong on our classics list, but I feel sure Van Ronk would rank Lewis’s version well above his own – in his own words, “there’s no point in messing around with something that’s already perfect.”  You can see an interview with Dave Van Ronk about it all on YouTube.

Furry’s lyrics rely on a refrain that reinforces one line of interpretation of the ballad that doesn’t square with history, but resonates with many – that the violence was the result of gambling.

Lyrics for Furry Lewis’s version        YouTube version

Even though Van Ronk saw Lewis’s version as musically perfect and claimed he didn’t take many liberties with it, he did add several verses from other variants in the tradition and so in a sense completes the story Furry starts to tell.  The lesson he and Furry make from Stack’s story is one of the most essential – not just in gambling, but in life.  ‘When you lose, learn to lose.’

Van Ronk’s classic 1962 cut is here, but I like the version below better.

Lyrics for Dave Van Ronk’s version       YouTube version

3. “All about that John B. Stetson hat” – Frank Hutchinson and Bob Dylan

One of the founding ‘documents’ of the Folk Revival was Harry Smith‘s Anthology of American Folk Music.  Its release in 1952 was a watershed event, and the source material it provided to a generation of musical seekers was invaluable.  The nineteenth track in Volume 1 was a unique version of “Stackalee” cut for Okeh Records in 1927 by Frank Hutchinson, a West Virginia coal miner and an early authentic white performer of the blues.  Because of its inclusion in Smith’s anthology and the influence it had, we have to elevate Hutchinson’s track to our classics list.

Lyrics for Frank Hutchinson’s and Bob Dylan’s version     YouTube version

It’s hard for a post-modern listener to see how the ‘hillbilly’ sound of someone like Hutchinson or Dock Boggs fits in to an understanding of the blues, or of African-American folk music generally.  Thankfully, consciousness of such things is rising these days with the help of numerous scholars and musicians such as Dom Flemons, and we might be inching further away from the stifling limits that conceptions of race put on our ability to hear those strings in our history that resonate with vibrant and meaningful cross-cultural synthesis.

It wasn’t just beatniks and hippies who dug Stack’s story.  A West Virginia coal miner heard something a generation earlier than Harry Smith to which he could relate.  We’d be fools to think he was the only white picker back in the day who wanted to know about Stack.

Bob Dylan’s evocative 1993 version is a tribute to Hutchinson’s influence on the troubadours of the Folk Revival.  Though we can’t really say yet that this track itself is a classic, well, it’s Dylan, so he gets a pass.  There’s something in the way Dylan intones that refrain about Stack’s Stetson that is critical.  Of course many versions make more or less of the hat, but something about this one just puts that element over the top.  See Dylan’s take on it below the track.

“STACK-A-LEE is Frank Hutchinson’s version. what does the song say exactly? it says no man gains immortality thru public acclaim. truth is shadowy. in the pre-postindustrial age, victims of violence were allowed (in fact it was their duty) to be judges over their offenders-parents were punished for their children’s crimes (we’ve come a long way since then) the song says that a man’s hat is his crown. futurologists would insist it’s a matter of taste  they say “let’s sleep on it” but they’re already living in the sanitarium  No Rights Without Duty is the name of the game and fame is a trick. playing for time is only horsing around. Stack’s in a cell, no wall phone. he’s not some egotistical degraded existentialist dionysian idiot. neither does he represent any alternative lifestyle scam (give me a thousand acres of tractable land & all the gang members that exist and you’ll see the Authentic alternative lifestyle, the Agrarian one) Billy didn’t have an insurance plan, didn’t get airsick yet his ghost is more real and genuine than all the dead souls on the boob tube – a monumental epic of blunder and misunderstanding, a romance tale without the cupidity.” – Bob Dylan, from the liner notes for World Gone Wrong

4. “And the leaves came tumbling down…” – Lloyd Price and ‘Archibald’

It’s hard to imagine a complete picture of modern Rock or Rhythm and Blues without the inclusion of Lloyd Price‘s classic hit, released in 1959.  I reckon that the plurality of my Spotify playlist consists of performances derived from Price’s.  If there is a superior in influence to John Hurt’s version, this is it.  Here are two recordings, first the original hit and then a mellower, more mature version presumably cut in the 1960s.

Lyrics for Lloyd Price’s version       YouTube version

Price’s version seems clearly derived from the first side of an earlier 1950 recording by Leon T. Gross, aka ‘Archibald’, which was waxed on two sides of a single but can be heard in its entirety on YouTube.  The second side sees Stack down in Hell, and includes some other interesting elements.  It reached #10 on the American ‘R and B’ chart in the year it was recorded, and proved to be a jewel in Archibald’s slim discography.

But Price brought undeniable personal energy, a new, evocative Doo-Wop lead in, and a cutting Rock-and-Roll edge to Archibald’s simpler New Orleans piano romp, and so his single hit #1 on both the U.S. Pop and ‘R and B’ charts in 1959.  This is *the stuff*, friends, and it must be on any short list of classic versions of “Stagger Lee”.

James P. Hauser penned an essay, which you can read here, regarding a possible reading of deeper messages in Price’s version.  There is much else of interest at his site, The Stagger Lee Files.

5. “Could be on a rainy morning, could be on a rainy night.” – Taj Mahal

If hearing John Hurt makes you wish he was your grandfather, hearing Taj Mahal works somewhat similarly.  The gentleness that characterizes Hurt’s delivery of “Stagolee” is there, but so is something just a little bit rough.  You get the sense that Taj is passing down this story lovingly but on the sly, the same way that your favorite uncle teaches you how to cuss properly when you’re old enough, even if your parents don’t think you are.  And maybe when you’re a bit older, he’ll walk you into The Lion’s Club to buy you your first beer, make sure you don’t get too drunk, and show you the spot where poor Billy got shot.

Lyrics forTaj Mahal’s version      YouTube version

Cecil Brown writes about a time he spoke with Taj Mahal about the ballad backstage at a performance.

Backstage, sitting in a folding chair, Taj told me how he came across the legend. “The first I heard of Stagolee was from Lloyd Price,” he said. “I was a Lloyd Price fan. I was always dancing to him. Then by the 1960s, I kept hearing it on blues anthologies – Mississippi John Hurt, and Furry Lewis’s versions. As a child, I’d heard these stories about the bad man – bad man Stagolee – from my mother, who was from the low country in South Carolina. Then there was the other side of my family, my father is from the Caribbean, and from him I heard about ‘bad John’. They would say, ‘Bad John, stay out he way, man!’ ”

Taj laughed. This was great fun for him. He was Stagolee. As long as there are living historians like him, Stagolee will never die.

6. “As Stagger Lee lit a cigarette, she shot him in the balls…” – The Grateful Dead / Robert Hunter

If someone knows “Stagger Lee” but didn’t get the story from one of the sources above, then it’s almost certain that, like me, he or she first heard the version told by the Grateful Dead.  According to the Dead’s website, their main lyricist Robert Hunter “wrote a version that he performed solo, and Jerry Garcia subsequently re-ordered the lyrics and rewrote the music for the Grateful Dead’s version”, released in 1978.

This is not the only reworking of a blues standard that the Dead penned, but I think it is their most successful.  I’ve already touched on this version in an earlier post, so I’ll paste in some of the work I did then to explain why.

“…the violence is effectively integrated with the narrative to make art that works well aesthetically and, I believe, as social commentary.  Even if only the former is true, the Dead then should be counted as true “integrators” when it comes to this widespread traditional American murder ballad.

For Robert Hunter… I think [the “Stagger Lee”] history and catalog mattered only as fodder for his imagination, as he was going after a new angle to the story; an angle which Garcia’s arrangement helps sharpen beautifully. After the first verse, we begin to move beyond the traditional narrative and into Hunter’s revision – Delia DeLyon, Billy’s widow, brings Stagger Lee to justice when the sheriff won’t do the job.  Elements of the traditional lyrics never wholly disappear, but the big picture is a new one.

“You arrest the girls for turning tricks but you’re scared of Stagger Lee?”

Lyrics for The Grateful Dead’s version        Album version         YouTube version

In this song violence begets violence, but also brings justice.  And yet, despite how Delia brings down Stagger Lee (or maybe because of it?), this tune is lighthearted. It is certainly no longer properly a murder ballad like its inspiration.  I can’t help but see it as an allegory sympathetic to the rising of the women’s movement after the Sixties, but maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe it’s just a creative retelling of an old murder ballad.  Whatever the hell it is, it works (though admittedly not for one Mr. Stagger Lee… and never for poor Billy.)”

7. “Don’t you know it is wrong to cheat the trying man?” – The Clash / The Rulers

We’ll close out our short list with another truly unique take on this old ballad, a version from The Clash which probably mops up most of the remaining readers who are looking for the version which first introduced them to that bad man.

The Clash introduced a new generation and a new sort of listener to this old tale, and by their reckoning Stagger Lee isn’t really a bad man anymore – Billy was a liar and a cheat and he got what was coming to him.  It’s hard to understand this element without placing the song in historical context.  It was released in late 1979 on what would become one of the greatest albums in Rock history, and as only one of several songs of cutting social commentary in the wake of the “Winter of Discontent” and the stunning victory of Thatcher and the Tories in the British general election.

And yet, it was not an original.  The strong message of egalitarianism and social justice pulled seemingly out of thin air from the ‘bad man’ narrative was not penned by the group in response to any of this.  Neither is the clever ‘start over’ from a Price-like version to a reggae beat original.  I mean, it’s *great* and it *works perfectly*, but they’re actually covering an older version that didn’t catch on nearly as well.  Check out the Clash’s first.

Lyrics for The Clash’s version      YouTube version

The inspiration for The Clash’s version was a Jamaican Ska / Rocksteady take on the Stagger Lee tale by The Rulers in 1967.  I don’t intend to dig deeply into it at the moment and so I may be making too many assumptions, but as Rocksteady musicians relied heavily on American R and B for inspiration, it seems most likely that Price’s version was the jumping off point for this highly original take on the tale.

While it may no longer fit neatly into a standard framework for understanding “Stagger Lee”, the fact that a rewrite wherein the American ‘bad man’ is transformed to a Jamaican ‘rude boy‘ and then without much effort at all is transformed into a symbol meaningful to a disaffected British ‘punk’ speaks volumes about the power and flexibility of the narrative, the music, and what the common people across the Anglophone world might share regardless of their race.

Coda

Now, before all you Nick Cave fans do me like Stack did Billy, let me just say wholeheartedly “Yes, Cave’s is a classic too!”  But for a couple of reasons I’m going to cover it in a separate post.  The lyrics deserve a little more digging – Cave wrote very little of them – and they actually come from an authentic, if non-musical, source, and therein lies a tale and a different theme worth musing about.

All of the versions we’ve considered are unique – truly different from one another – and yet rely on the same archetypes and psychic energy.  This no doubt secures them their place at the top of the impressive heap of songs one must consider to become a full Stagolee initiate.  But judge for yourself!  If you’re up for it, once more I’ll point you to my ever-growing Spotify playlist and you can have at it as you will.

To close, let me fulfill the promise I made early in this piece and suggest to you the following sources for digging deep into the Stagolee story and myth.

In print, Dr. Cecil Brown’s Stagolee Shot Billy is the standard, hands down.  You can start and end there and gain a definitive understanding of the history and the legend.  It can also be had in Kindle format.  Dr. Brown also maintains a website offering enrichment regarding the ballad and connecting those interested to his impressive body of other art and work.

A recent original graphic novel takes on both aspects of the story as well.  Derek McCullough and Shepherd Hendrix produced what one might logically see as a companion piece for Dr. Brown’s book.  Titled simply Stagger Lee, it is only available in print.

Online, Paul Slade’s long essay summarizes much of Brown’s work and introduces some interesting original perspective.  If you want more than a basic understanding but you don’t have time for a full book, that’s your best bet.  Slade is a British journalist and so adds new perspective as he sees things from an angle that is not intuitively accessible for an American.

I’ll re-link from above as well to the free chapbook by Timothy Lane, and James P. Hauser’s website Stagger Lee Files.

The fact of the matter is, really, you can just type “Stagger Lee” in to Google and be on your merry way!  Still, there is a danger, insofar as this topic is so popular online that sifting through the many options might lead one into incomplete understanding or outright falsehood.

My advice?  Start searching, but get Dr. Brown’s book and read it. That’s what I’m doing, and as I process his excellent work, I’ll use his insight to help me craft some more meaningful contributions to this online compendium.

Up next?  Well, I’ve got a few ideas – you’ll just have to wait and see later this week!  Until then, thanks for reading and listening.