Friends, I’ve got a confession to make.  I’m white, but I love Stagolee.  And I don’t just mean the Grateful Dead’s “Stagger Lee”, which was my gateway to the story – I love to hear them all.  

I’ve been too busy this week to do this song justice with another solid chapter.  This Stagolee compendium project I’m working on is going to take longer than one week anyway.  We’re going to try something different this coming week and continue with this same ballad over two.

But I haven’t stopped thinking about it – not at all.  The busier and more stressed out I get, the more release I find in coming back and listening to and thinking about Stack and Billy’s story.

“Bully of the Town” – Elizabeth LaPrelle

Something I’ve been wondering about this week is *why* this story hits me so deeply even though it’s clearly a ballad that is almost wholly shaped by the dynamics of racism and white privilege in America for the last century.  I grew up in the country and working class, but never wanting for anything essential and never exposed to any real violence or even much of anything particularly harsh in life.  It’s not *my* story, but I experience it that way.

Is it just a good outlaw ballad, like “Jesse James”?  No doubt there’s *something* there along those lines, but Stagolee isn’t Jesse James either.  He just isn’t.  

Anyway, I never heard “Jesse James” until I got more deeply in to folk music – I’d come to know and love “Stagger Lee” well before that.  And I don’t feel any outlaw’s song the way I feel Stagolee’s, except maybe Richard Thompson’s “1952 Vincent Black Lightning“.

“Bad Leroy Brown” – No More Kings

I don’t mean to get into it deeply here.  But I got to thinking about what my earliest exposure to the bad man in music might be. Through the constant Stagolee choruses that have been going through my head these past several weeks, another one just popped up while I was reading something this morning about “Bully of the Town” and Tom Turpin‘s ragtime in Cecil Brown’s book Stagolee Shot Billy.  I imagined the appropriate piano music and it hit me just like that! 

One of my earliest memories of music is of a song that moved both my mother and my older siblings and that was shared with me in joy repeatedly.  Just after I turned five in 1973, Jim Croce released a song that must have been played five hundred times in my home over the next few months.

Bad Leroy Brown was the first “bad man” I ever met and, given the way we were introduced, I couldn’t help but love him.  I remember even back then thinking something along the lines about how it was funny that my mother thought it was ok that he was a ‘bad boy’ when I was supposed to be a ‘good boy.’  I knew I wasn’t supposed to play with a razor, but he could keep one in his shoe!  I’m sure I didn’t get hung up on it though, because it was just more fun to dance around with her.  What Leroy Brown meant to my mother is another week’s work altogether, but we’ll let that go for now too.  

So, here he is folks, the first ‘bad man’ I met in my life.  He wasn’t as bad as ol’ Stagolee of course – but maybe knowing the baddest man in the whole damn town made it easier for me to relate to the baddest man in the whole damn country.

 Enjoy, and I’ll see you next week!