There have been more than 400 versions of the African-American folk song “Stagger Lee”, as well as scores of books, academic theses and retellings on stage and page. But just about the only thing on which they all agree is that the real-life 1895 bar-room killing that spawned the song started with the grievous insult of disrespecting a man’s prized white Stetson hat.
Even the murderer’s name, Stagger Lee, never stays still: it’s Stack O’Lee, Stagolee, Stack-Alee or plain old Stack. This classic murder ballad has morphed into legend, attracting artists from Mississippi John Hurt to Duke Ellington, Woodie Guthrie, Taj Mahal, Bob Dylan, The Grateful Deadand Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, the latter in louche bad-ass mode.
The song has always taken huge liberties with location, motive, blame and political point-scoring, deploying a revolving cast of pimps, saloon lowlifes and corrupt police. The song’s victim, Lyons, even briefly showed up in some folk versions as a white cop, turning Stagger Lee into a proto-gangsta, anti-authority figure.
An account of what was to be the genesis of a ballooning oeuvre was published in the St Louis Globe-Democrat in December 1895, when it reported the murder. William Lyons, “a levee hand”, and Lee Shelton, a pimp who was also known as “Stag” Lee, had been drinking together happily enough on Christmas Day in a bar until a row broke out about politics, the paper said. “Lyons snatched Shelton’s hat from his head”, and when he refused to return it, Shelton shot Lyons, “took his hat from the hand of the wounded man and coolly walked away”. More than a century later, the New York Daily News examined the killing’s musical afterlife, adding the detail that Shelton had exclaimed: “I told you to give me my hat!”
Lyons died in hospital; Shelton was paroled in 1909. The song that emerged from the killing, “The Ballad of Stagalee”, came to the attention of the musicologist John Lomax in 1910, by which time there were already several folk versions travelling up and around the Mississippi.
A clutch of recordings followed in the 1920s, including Ma Rainey’s“Stack O’Lee Blues”, one of the first recorded with lyrics, here echoing Rainey’s version of the ballad “Frankie and Johnny” (“He was my man, but he done me wrong”). Cecil Brown’s 2003 book Stagolee Shot Billy argues that “bad man ballads” had been sung long before Lyons was murdered and that Stagolee became a handy go-to bad-guy figure who could be swapped in or out no matter the plot or setting.
Over the years some versions swore that the fight arose from Billy gambling and winning Stag’s “great big Stetson hat”, or implied that Billy was a white policeman. Ma Rainey’s version had neither Billy nor Stetson hat. Mississippi John Hurt, though, in 1928 unambiguously sang “Stack O’Lee killed Billy Lyons,/ Bout a five-dollar Stetson hat,/That bad man,/ Oh cruel Stack O’Lee!”
A whole sub-genre has Stack in hell — not suffering, but deposing the very devil himself: the white down-home singer Tennessee Ernie Ford’s“Stack-O-Lee”, from 1950, has the very measure of the man’s evil: “Stack-O-Lee grabbed hold of the devil/And threw him up on the shelf,/ Said ‘your workin’ days are over,/ I’m a-gonna run the place myself.”
The R&B singer Lloyd Pricescored the biggest success of all with a number one hit in 1959. The former US serviceman’s exuberant dancefloor filler, with its stonking two-chorus sax breaks, sounds raucously joyous as he narrates the story of Stagger’s fatal gambling debt of “all my money and my brand new Stetson hat”. Legions of girls in bobby socks and poodle skirts whirled across America’s dancefloors as, deaf to pleas for mercy (“three little children and a very sickly wife”), Stagger dispatches Billy.
Nearly a quarter of a century later, yet another Stagger emerged, in the title of American writer James Baldwin’s blistering poem “Staggerlee Wonders”. This opener to the 1983 collection Jimmy’s Blues uses the allusion to a black anti-hero, whose life took on hundreds of other meanings, to talk about — eviscerate — race and power in the US; a landscape where black lives accrue worth, their own narratives, via the value placed on them by white people. And, this unblinkingly frank writer asks Americans — look at where it has brought us: “We tried to make you hear life in our song/ but now it matters not at all to me/ whether you know what I am talking about — or not”.
We’re keen to hear from our readers. Which version of “Stagger Lee” / “Stack O’Lee” / “Stagolee” / “Stack-Alee” is your favourite? Let us know in the comments below.
‘The Life of a Song: The fascinating stories behind 50 of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Resurfaced Records, Columbia/Legacy, Columbia/Legacy, Grateful Dead/Rhino, Mute, a BMG Company, Saar srl, Replay Records, O.L.D Ltd, K-Tel
Picture credit: JP Jazz Archive/Redferns