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

Introduction

Our online compendium celebrating the great American folk song and tale “Stagolee” has grown now and, though I’m not tired of the music, I’m ready to move on to some other topics in my writing for the blog.  But, you don’t just get up and walk out on Stagolee – you have to ask permission. I did, and he told me I needed to do a little bit more before I split.  He said he expected me to come back and see him later as well, as folks have been singing about him plenty in every decade since he did Billy in with his shiny gun.

I said, “Yes, Sir.”

You can start with Chapter 1 if you’re new to the song, though I’ll say again that this compendium is meant to accompany others’ work on the ballad, such as the definitive Stagolee Shot Billy by Cecil Brown.  We’re not trying to reinvent the six-shooter here.  To put things in order this week then, I’m writing two posts.  First, today, we’ll listen into the earliest decade of recordings of the song, after musing a bit about its even earlier origins.  Then, later this week, we’ll close work on our compendium for a while by considering Stagolee in the 21st century, listening to the latest recordings we can find.

Musical Origins

Jerry Garcia mentioned that while strolling about at Woodstock 1969 he felt invisible time-travelers crowding the event. Leaving aside the likely chemical explanations for that particular perception, I’ve been thinking lately that if such a time machine existed, I’d book some trips. Yes, Woodstock – also Bach at composition, the first instance of collective instrumental music in human pre-history, and East St. Louis in the 1890’s. Oh, I could think of plenty of other musical destinations – but if I had to pick only one, even with a longer list I believe St. Louis would win out.  It’s hard to imagine a place where human musicality was more fully engaged.

Historically, we know that the murder of Billy Lyons on Christmas night, 1895, was documented in a local St. Louis newspaper shortly after it was committed by “Stack” Lee Shelton. But the passage below from a black Kansas City newspaper seems to be the earliest known reference to “Stagolee”, the song.  Interestingly, we have even less of an early trace of this most famous of American folk songs than we do of its significantly less well-known East St. Louis cousin, “Duncan and Brady.”

“It is understood that Prof. Charlie Lee, the piano thumper, will play ‘Stack-a-Lee’ in variations at the K. C. Negro Press association. Scarcely any convention held in K. C. is complete unless Prof. Lee is down on the program.” — Leavenworth Herald, August 21, 1897, [p. 2].

“Duncan and Brady”, we saw in an earlier post, showed up in proto-lyric improvisational fragments on the streets of East St. Louis within weeks of the murder of Officer Brady in the autumn of 1890.  The local tension between African-American citizens and Irish policemen certainly nourished those taunts and raps, the policemen took notice, and that made them noteworthy to the local press.  Thus far and unfortunately, we see no such references for “Stagolee”.

Still, East St. Louis was flooded to its highest street with musical and lyric creativity.  It’s no stretch to posit that the song Stagolee’s origins would have been similarly close in time to the murder committed by Stack Lee Shelton.  However, though mention of the murder and its consequences persisted in the paper for years because of local politics, Lee Shelton and Billy Lyons were both black. Young black men improvising in the streets or musicians playing new songs in the saloons about that murder would not have particularly aroused policemen’s ire, and would not have been particularly worthy of mention in the local white press.

Despite this lack of direct, early documentary evidence, it’s clear that the chord Stagolee sounded with black folks rolled like thunder.  Consider – the ‘piano thumper’ referenced above advertised a program for a Kansas City concert based on  *variations* of a single ballad narrative, “Stack-a-Lee”.  But, the murder upon which his show full of variations was based happened only 18 months earlier, and 250 miles away at that!

For such a concert to have been possible, it’s almost certain that black folks on the streets, docks, and levees of St. Louis were already improvising diverse lyrics that we’d recognize as belonging to the Stagolee family, and quite soon after the murder of Billy Lyons.  They were surely not taunts aimed at the local police as with “Duncan and Brady”, but black folks in America have always relied on lyrics and music as a powerful way to define identity in and against a complex world of white privilege and power that imposed its own demeaning definitions.  Stagolee became one of the finest expression of that phenomenon.

Cecil Brown, in Chapter 3 of Stagolee Shot Billy, explores the earliest written fragments we can find of the ballad, starting in 1903.  As his work stands far above anything I might hope to produce on this account, and I’ve already made you wait long enough in this post to get to some music, I’ll let you seek his work out if you’re interested.  I do want to quote from his book though regarding the first collection of the ballad by a folklorist, John Lomax, as it reinforces our educated guesses about the song’s origins.

The first Stagolee ballad ever collected consisted of eight stanzas sent to John Lomax in February 1910 by Miss Ella Scott Fisher of San Angelo, Texas, with the following note: “This is all the verses I remember. The origin of this ballad, I have been told, was the shooting of Billy Lyons in a barroom on the Memphis levee by Stack Lee. The song is sung by the Negroes on the levee while they are loading and unloading the river freighters, the words being composed by the singers…”

There is no doubt that the first music fashioned to accompany such lyrics, as they coalesced in the saloons and bordellos of East St. Louis into any number of Stagolee variants, came from a black man playing ragtime piano.  And, though we don’t have anything in the way of 19th century recordings of the song to prove it definitively, the many diverse recordings we have from the early 20th century give us much to think about and, more importantly, some fun listening!

“When they see Stagolee coming, they give him the road…”

Stagolee in the 1920’s – The instrumentals

While I’ll make some brief comments about these tracks, I don’t intend to do much in the way of in-depth analysis of lyrics or history of the performers.  I’ll try to be thorough in covering what recordings are available, but I make no claim that this is exhaustive.  I’ll rely heavily on Spotify, but if I can find a YouTube version, I’ll link to it as well.

As Cecil Brown points out, the earliest two recordings we have were waxed in 1923 by two white dance bands.  The musical treatment they give Stagolee is no doubt far from its authentic ragtime origins, though perhaps there are traces of a melody from the end of the 19th century in there; either way, these are the first!

YouTube version of Waring’s record and Herb Weidoft’s Cinderella’s Roof Orchestra’s version from 1924

We can also find our favorite bad man on some good Hawaiian guitar records as well, as part of the Hawaiian guitar craze that coincided with the spread of Stagolee across America.  For the sake of moving on quickly, I’ll just link to the performances in this paragraph.  Sol Hoopi’s Novelty Trio waxed what appears to be the first in that genre in 1926, though King Queen Jack’s version may have preceded it.  Sam Ku West’s version from 1928 is true to these earlier tracks, but his own approach to the lead guitar shines through.

The great and influential Duke Ellington recorded his instrumental take on Stagolee with his band in 1927, just as his stars were aligning and he was starting to become a national sensation.  For my money, this version blows away any of the other band arrangements, but judge for yourself.

While it has something in common with the other instrumentals linked above, a different jazz approach can be heard in a 1928 recording by Boyd Senter and His Senterpedes.  I’ll still take Duke Ellington’s if you force me to pick just one, but I love that Spotify makes it so I don’t have to choose.

Stagolee in the 1920’s – Blues and Ballads

Some folks include “Skeeg-A-Lee Blues”, found in two 1924 recordings by Lovie Austin and an obscure duo billed as Ford and Ford, as early examples.  However, if you listen to the track by Ford and Ford at least, it’s hard to support the connection.

The first recorded version that includes what we can clearly recognize as lines associated with the baddest man to ever live was cut by the inimitable Ma Rainey in late 1925 and released in 1926.

Partial YouTube version of Ma Rainey’s recording

Though that first line is instantly recognizable, overall the lyrics are conflated with those from other songs – most notably “Frankie and Johnny“, Stagolee’s other famous East St. Louis cousin – likely packaged into a powerful number to fit Rainey’s style.  As well, Rainey’s particular sort of blues seems to me to musically represent something rooted in ragtime but moving on into a wider 20th century world.

So far we’ve seen instrumentals and dance tunes in different styles, and lyrics that only partly intersect with what we recognize as the basic narrative of Stagolee.  We might include the Cliff Edwards version from 1928 as another example of the latter.  (If you’ve got time, click on the link.  It’s a silly version that has nothing to do with Stack and Billy, but you can see why Edwards – aka ‘Ukulele Ike’ and the writer of “Singing in the Rain” – was so popular and able to make a good living in show business.)

We need to remember that the song we truly know as Stagolee was waxed at least three times in the 20’s as well – Furry Lewis and Frank Hutchinson in 1927, and Mississippi John Hurt in 1928, all cut tracks that we consider today to be classic – and so, we included them in our Classics post and won’t again here.

While it might seem that all of these other sorts of recordings from the 1920’s suggest otherwise, it’s clear that the narrative we recognize as ‘pure’ and consistent across the decades was well established by the 1920’s, and is certainly older than the ‘entertainment’ approach that seems to be the hallmark of other recordings in that decade.  Again, I refer you to Brown’s work to get a better handle on it all, and as well to Jerry H. Bryant’s book Born in a Mighty Bad Land to understand the power of the ‘bad man’ narrative in African-American culture, and particularly that of Stagolee.  Dance band jazz and blues were fun for sure, but Stagolee meant more than fun.

If you want more proof of this, let me introduce you to Long ‘Cleve’ Reed’s recording with Little Harvey Hull, from 1927, from the short-lived and black owned Black Patti label.  “Stack Lee was a bully…”

YouTube version of Reed and Hull’s recording

Though we might be tempted to relate this to Mississippi John Hurt’s version because of the country blues finger picking and some similarity of lyrics, this recording was made in March of 1927 while Hurt waxed his in December of 1928.  I’m finding it hard at the moment to dig in to Reed’s and Hull’s biography so I can’t say for sure, but this seems to me like a related variant in the folk tradition and not a recording from which Hurt took his material.  It’s worth looking in to some more, as it’s just a guess; but given how awful many versions we see of Stagolee, it’s no stretch.

Finally, we have a ‘white blues’ version of Stack-O-Lee by the Fruit Jar Guzzlers, whose 1928 version seems related to Frank Hutchinson’s 1927 cut.  The tune is certainly the same, as is the overall delivery, and the lyrics at time intersect greatly and share the over-emphasis on that Stetson hat.  On the other hand, this isn’t the same song. There’s just too much difference.  Again, without having the time right now to dig in to it I can’t say for sure.  But, given that the mysterious ‘Guzzlers’ seem to be West Virginians like Hutchinson, it seems possible again that we’re looking at a locally related variant rather than a derivative.

YouTube version of the Fruit Jar Guzzlers’ recording

Coda

Well, I said I wasn’t going to be comprehensive but, if you go by The Definitive List of Stagger Lee Songs, between this post and Chapter 1 we’ve got fifteen of nineteen possible tracks from the 1920’s covered.  I say that neither to brag nor to extol the virtues of post-modern digital media delivery.  The point rather is this.  What other songs do you know that can boast a tally of nineteen recorded variants from the first true decade of commercially recorded music, from diverse artists and in diverse styles?

What does that suggest?  We might be tempted to take the position that this flurry of early recording activity accounts for the song’s immense popularity in subsequent decades through to today.  But, while no doubt later artists benefit immensely from the gift of such copious amounts of source material, I think that’s putting the cart before the horse.

Don’t forget that Professor Lee in 1897 already was presenting variations of the song in concert.  And if you look into Cecil Brown’s book, you’ll see the versions from 1903 and 1910 mentioned above, as well as others, show great diversity well before the days of widespread recording technology.

It’s clear then that the diversity of recorded material concerning Stagolee we see in the 1920’s is a reflection of the fact that they already had plenty of source material to work with, and that the experimentation with the ballad done in the name of producing more and better entertainment during those first years of popular recordings is a testament to the ballad’s ability to adapt itself.  In one decade, we find this song in a dozen different musical settings down the length of the Mississippi to the hills of West Virginia and the streets of Chicago.

But what then sets apart the three versions from the 1920’s that we decided to call ‘classic’ from the rest we see here?  That, I think is a harder point to consider.  But let me suggest that it might have something to do with why we write this blog in the first place.

Let’s put it this way.  Ma Rainey’s version is great, but it just doesn’t bring you face to face with the elements of life and death that force you to consider your own short time on this Earth and how to use it.  Obviously, the same is true of the instrumental versions we heard, and I think for all the other versions with lyrics as well.  Of them all, only Reed and Hull’s version almost gets there, though they really sound like they’re just having too much fun with it for me to take it more seriously in the end.

Something about the way John Hurt and Furry Lewis deliver this song gets me ‘there’, I mean ‘there’ to that place that makes me want to write about the things we do in this blog.  I think the same is true to some extent of Hutchinson, but I know it’s true of Dylan’s take on Hutchinson’s version, which is why I included that one in the first chapter as well.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they are the three from the ’20’s that are still widely known.

I do not mean to diminish the importance of Stagolee in the context of the history of making African-American identity.  I’m only saying that I believe such existential depth is at the core of why this song survives and flourishes today, outside of that historical and racial context.  Though it fit well into what would come to be ‘the music industry’ even in its infancy in the 1920’s, and we can see that it made for good entertainment then and that makes it worthy of our study today, it’s what Stagolee says to us when we aren’t having fun that matters the most.

We’ll see if that position holds water later this week when we consider the latest recordings we can find of Stagolee.  Until then, thanks for reading.