Stagolee Shot Billy

by Cecil Brown

Although his story has been told countless times--by performers from Ma Rainey, Cab Calloway, and the Isley Brothers to Ike and Tina Turner, James Brown, and Taj Mahal--no one seems to know who Stagolee really is. Stack Lee? Stagger Lee? He has gone by all these names in the ballad that has kept his exploits before us for over a century. Delving into a subculture of St. Louis known as "Deep Morgan," Cecil Brown emerges with the facts behind the legend to unfold the mystery of Stack Lee and the incident that led to murder in 1895.

How the legend grew is a story in itself, and Brown tracks it through variants of the song "Stack Lee"--from early ragtime versions of the '20s, to Mississippi John Hurt's rendition in the '30s, to John Lomax's 1940s prison versions, to interpretations by Lloyd Price, James Brown, and Wilson Pickett, right up to the hip-hop renderings of the '90s. Drawing upon the works of James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison, Brown describes the powerful influence of a legend bigger than literature, one whose transformation reflects changing views of black musical forms, and African Americans' altered attitudes toward black male identity, gender, and police brutality. This book takes you to the heart of America, into the soul and circumstances of a legend that has conveyed a painful and elusive truth about our culture.

Genres: Music, History, Folklore, Nonfiction, African American

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Benjamin Fasching-Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stagolee has been shooting Billy for over a century now, and if you don't believe Billy's dead, you can come look at the hole in his mother loving head. Cecil Brown fascinates with his portrait of ragtime St. Louis, makes a convincing argument that Stagolee is the primary source for the badman archetype and thus for most of hip hop and all of gangsta rap. Brown is, like, 70s cool, you know, down with Richard Pryor, and, you know, like that. So he actually talked with James Baldwin and Bobby Seale about Stagolee IN REAL LIFE. ... pause for respect ...

Billy Lyon... what a jerk. I guess nobody deserves to be murdered, but still. I wouldn't have cried at his funeral.

I'm surprised to see other reviewers calling this book slow because I thought it was a real page-turner. Many short chapters, plenty of pimps, players, prostitutes and hustlers. But also plenty of Walter Benjamin, semiotics, and scholarly approaches to both folklore and orality more generally and I dig that kind of thing.

I also appreciate that songs mentioned in the text have endnotes that say what albums or which archives have them. I know most people, if they want to hear a song, probably just type it in to the youtubes but I appreciate knowing which Smithsonian Folkways record it is on.

[Graeme · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinated by that great storyteller Mississippi John Hurt's rendition, I picked this up after seeing it in the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. While I'm not sure I'm immersed enough in the culture to judge whether Brown's hypothesis rings true, Stagolee was indeed a baaaad man.

I note with interest that Cecil Brown has also written a book called 'Dude, Where's my Black Studies Department?'

[Tuck · Rating 3 out of 5]

a university press publishing a book about a song from the turn of the 19th century set in st Louis Missouri may not sound all that exciting or compelling, but this is well researched, has good balance of revisionist and feminist viewpoints, is well and entertainingly written, and shows very well, DON'T MESS with a guy's hat.
Plus it's fun to listen to all the different versions of this song.

[Jeff Crompton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is scholarly and readable, just the right length for a layman like me, and full of information and insights. Brown explores the real murder of Billy Lyons by Lee Shelton, the resulting legend, the song (in myriad versions), the "toast" recitation, and Stagolee's symbolic importance in the black community. I was interested to learn that bluesman R.L. Burnside's recorded version of the toast, which had always seemed shockingly violent and foul-mouthed to me, is just one of the standard versions of the recitation. I found that oddly reassuring.

[Max Renn · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book comes out of the gate a little slow and gives up the goods up front. namely that, in 1895, in a bar in st. louis, a man named lee shelton shot billy lyons for taking his hat. and you think to yourself... oh no... this is one of those magazine article books... but no, it is from this rather humble historical revelation that brown slowly starts to build a latticework of rumor and context that before long rolls and rocks steady enough to pull brown's history train to its postmodern denouement.

along the way he comes at his subject -how and why this below the fold murder came to insinuate its way into a hidden history at the heart of an american psyche- from an astounding number of angles; so that by the end you are buying into it, in spite of yourself and the creaky start and damn if it wasnt a good ride along the way...

[Dustin Arbuckle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really, I wish I could have given this about 3.5 stars. Really fascinating subject matter from a few perspectives. I loved learning about the origin and evolution of the song "Stagolee", which is up there with a song like "John Henry" as far as it's place in the American folk song pantheon. It was also very interesting to learn what the theme of the song and story represent in African-American culture in ways that go beyond music. Unfortunately, it was a bit of a slow read for me. Brown is a good writer, but there were times when I felt the book became pretty academic and it seemed like I was reading a research paper. Despite the occasional "dryness", I still enjoyed this book quite a bit. If you're into history and American roots music, it's definitely worth a read.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brown provides a spectacular historical lineage of the Stagolee ballad through the many contexts under which it evolved from its inception. There is a great deal of historical information provided surrounding Stagolee's significance to different groups within the United States and the book does a tremendous job of making the reader realize why Stagolee is such an important cultural object. My only significant criticisms of the book are that A) the organization from section to section is a bit awkward in places in ways that make it difficult to understand why one subject is transitioning to another and B) there is an underlying promise of the book that there will be discussion of Stagolee's importance to contemporary culture and, while there is to some extent, it is incredibly brief and does not quite feel like it was explored as much as one might like. Of course neither of these are major issues, especially given the phenomenal quality of the book as a whole.

[Jason Rabin · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was a time when I collected versions of this song, mostly out of fascination with their breadth and variety. I had no idea about the depth--that Stagolee is a complex mythic figure with vast webs of cultural influence. Cecil Brown blends dramatic storytelling, historical research, literary theory and a splash of memoir to reveal rich stratum of contexts for this important piece of American folk music.

[Sonya Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great music history book.

3.5 stars. Mostly fascinating, if a tad dry and academic at times. Some great insight not only about ragtime and blues, but rap and hip-hop as well. While reading, I made a list of various versions of the song to check out later.

[Matt Sautman · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent cultural history exploring one of the most famous “badmen” in Black American toasts and folklore. I suspect this significance of this book may be lost more on readers who do not understand Stagolee’s legacy in Black American communities.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very thorough exploration of the Stagolee story with an in depth look at the actual history of St. Louis and the African American oral culture in which the story developed.

[Nicole Bosse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really cool idea for a book but it reads like someone's grad school thesis.

[Wren · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very odd book in a couple respects. First of all, I have to commend the author for putting in what was clearly a lifetime of work to trace the path of the song throughout American history. Part of the reason the book can be confusing is that it's very difficult to follow a folktale like that, and the way it changes and recombines makes it difficult to tell sometimes what even ought to be considered part of the Stagolee corpus. By the end of the book, it's pretty clear that Stagolee means everything to everybody, and that it's still changing even today. Maybe that's not exactly what the author intended to convey, but it's intriguing in itself and makes for a good understanding of how folklore works in general.

The thing you ought to know about this book is that it is, contradictorily, both the best and only authoritative text on the Stagolee legend and also a very scattered and incredibly poorly-edited collection of random anecdotes. It surprised me at first to find so many basic spelling/grammar mistakes and even factual errors (Archibald's name is extended to "Archibald Cox," the text mentions 9/11 as occurring in 2002 instead of 2001), but these don't seem to conflict with the main narrative of the text, which is the attempt to follow the story of Stagolee from its inception with the actual events of Billy Lyons' murder in 1895 all the way to its vestiges in rap music today. Essentially, if you're looking for a lot of facts or an immaculate text that is well-written and carefully considered, you will not find it here; if you're looking for a fascinating and thought-provoking exposé on American folklore and African-American culture, you will not be disappointed.

This book taught me a lot about the idea of the "bad nigga" that is so common in black culture, and the surprising ways that the pimp came to be lauded in America. Most of all, it taught me a lot about oral tradition and the ways a narrative can change over time.

I would recommend this book heartily to anyone who's familiar with the original song and wants to know more about its origins, anyone who is interested in American folktales and oral narrative traditions, or anyone (black, white, or any race) who is a little perplexed by the ideas of masculinity in black culture today. I would definitely not recommend it, though, to anyone who cannot move past the constant errors in the book due to the poor editing. Be forewarned that you will have to resist the urge to whip out a pen and start correcting things. Ordinarily, because of that, I would give this book a two- or three-star review, but I'm feeling lenient today. The book may not have been up to the academic standards I was expecting, but it certainly informed me and held my attention. Four stars.

[Kurt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just finished reading this book for a second time. As mentioned in other reviews, there is some sloppy editing here, but the book remains engaging and readable, especially if you're into reading about folklore, American history, the Blues, Jazz, and the origins of mythos. I find it particulary intriquing that African American culture mainfested in an subversive, alternate cultural world to that of white society, a culture that not only survived, but thrived, hidden in plain sight, so-to-speak. The very foundation of a culture that, from its conception and inception, has the same words meaning different things to different people, according to the color of their skin, position in society, their politics, and their economic status, creating an entire way of living that runs parallel to accepted white society, but as a way of enduring and surviving. No wonder "bad" means "good"! I find these things incredibly and endlessly interesting. I also find the origins of myths to be fascinating, and getting the back-story of the real characters and settings behind this song/story/toast, and tracing the changes and mutations as it travels geographically, and over time, is rewarding to me as a reader. However, one of the things I find so interesting about myths is that it almost doesn't matter if there is a "real" person, or situation, about it at all. The power of the story (the characters, the situations, the adversity and their meanings) are carried along through oral tradition, and they gain and retain power regardless. This book is well researched and well written and is filled with interesting information, editing quibbles aside.
I had one minor qualm; at one point Brown is discussing a variation of the song and the word "bully" and he describes either Stagolee or Billy as being the "bully" in different versions. However, he didn't seem to consider that the word "bully" may have been a mishearing of the name "Billy", as in Billy Lyons. Since the story or song or toast is taken from an oral source and that there could have been an accent (verbal, dialectical), it seemed to me that it was a possibility to consider.
Good book!

[David Keaton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating true-crime stories behind the epic tune(s), as well as discussions about the violent allure of the famously murderous story song. Weird editing hiccups throughout though, some of them really distracting as the ever-evolving murder ballad ("Stagolee"? "Stacker Lee"? "Stagger Lee"? or whatever name that musicians have given this gloriously nasty tune throughout the years) already has its own creative spellings due to the vocal tradition/telephone game that passed the song along for so many decades. And these mistakes with the names (and nicknames) of some of the major players make it even harder to keep all the variations straight in your brain. The biggest disappointment for this reader was the lack of page time given to Nick Cave's recent version, seeing how Cave's "Stagger Lee" is an amazing example of combining the folklore, the true-crime case, and at least five previous versions of the song. I was already impressed with Cave's version as a wonderfully profane little romp, but now I realize what a carefully crafted masterpiece it really is. The biggest thrill was the epic version of the song that takes up the final third of the book, all the lyrics and stories within stories, which are dissected line by line by line, a beast of a ballad that's only slightly shorter than The Iliad, but equally dramatic and action-packed.

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stagolee was a real person, according to Mr Brown. Lee Shelton lived in St. Louis in the 1880s and 90s and killed Billy Lyons. What is it of this event and society that turned this, once must assume, all to common event into a song that has been recorded by over 100 artists, numerous "toasts", and a character who appears, maybe not in name but in type, in all aspects of society? Mr Brown traces the story and the mythology around it through music and culture. Stagolee was the "bad nigger" that became a hero in African American society for doing what couldn't be done at the time - he stood up for himself. "Bad" became the slang "baaad" for something that was good or desirable. Mr Brown's writing of folkloric and other literate traditions is a little beyond me and the idea of holding up a murderer as a baaad man is beyond my experiences so I don't always get it or follow the reasoning but it is interesting, nonetheless. Not having many black friends and having grown up in a very white area, I am not in a position to question what Mr Brown writes but I wonder how common the name or term Stagolee is among the black community. "Common" can mean so many things and what is common to one is not common to others.

[Kathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't quite buy Brown's investigatory powers, mainly because I noticed some errors: Joe Folk was never Mayor of St. Louis, for instance. In addition, he tends to wander off into speculation that seems to have little to do with his subject.

However, the last chapter of the book is a really interesting discussion of these "baad niggers" in relation to rappers. By no means my favorite musical form, rap (and hip hop or whatever) is part of folk culture and therefore has its own value. I was glad to see an intelligent discussion of it.

One of the enchantments of folksong, no matter the era, is the element of the half-told tale, the details left out. Yet we always want to know the rest of the story, don't we, risking the loss of some enchantment.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Out of ward politics emerged the career politicians who used gangs to keep political opponents from the polls, guard ballot boxes, and manipulate political elections. But although the career politicians controlled the votes, they lacked ready cash to oil the political machinery. In order to get cash, ward politicians resorted to bribery and extortion of saloons, gambling dens, and houses of prostitution.'

This is a book about a song about a murder about a hat.

Apparently the building at 911 North 12th Street was not really Stagger Lee's house.

If I get a chance, I'm going to try to get a copy of the unpublished dissertation 'Tragedy in Ragtime' when I'm in St. Louis next week.

[Anne Holcomb · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a favorite nonfiction book of mine. After hearing many versions of the song "Stagger Lee," I was definitely curious about what prompted so many artists to cover this song. This book provides the historical context behind the song and looks at the possible events that may have inspired song. For me, the descriptions of African-American culture in 19th-century St. Louis were eye-opening. Definitely a fun read for anyone interested in music and/or history.

[Jpaflas · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting history of the song Stagolee or Stackolee, based on the actual events of Lee Shelton shooting and killing William Lyons in 1895 in St. Louis. This book explains how the word "mack" entered the lexicon. I picked it up cause I saw the title and thought of the line from Taj Mahal's version of the tune.

[Tom · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is some first-rate scholarship uncovering the roots of the Stagolee legend in the book, which is marred overall by sloppy editing and odd errors (e.g. repeatedly referring to New Orleans pianist Archibald as "Archibald Cox," name of the Watergate case's special prosecutor). Still, it's worth reading for what Brown presents about the song's backstory.

[Rory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brown traces the origins of the Stagolee/Stagerlee/Stack o'Lee legend and the hundreds of songs based on it. He also discusses why the song still has power today, esp in the african-american community. A great look at a fascinating piece of american folk music.

[Monica · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think it's neat that this song is based on an actual event. I'm familiar with the song and love it. Even though I finished it, I don't think I love it enough for a full book. I think I love the song enough for an article.

[Stacy · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of our local theaters is about present the world premier of Staggerlee based on the legend of Staggerlee (Stagolee). I had never heard of Staggerlee nor was I familiar with any of the music that has resulted in this legend. Good back story and opened my eyes to a whole new world.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just a wonderful look into the historical origin of the song "Stagolee" and its role in African-American life.

[Stephen Conti · Rating 4 out of 5]

the history of the song is entertaining....

[Donya Ann Leeman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Non-fiction account of the development of the myth of Staggolee and its effect on the development of music from the late 1800's to present.

[Mills College Library]

813.54 B87746 2003

[Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a really fascinating look at the legend behind "Stagger" Lee Shelton, AKA Staggerlee, Stagolee, Stag'olee, Stackolee, et al., the real-life man who spawned a century's worth of "bad man" stories. I initially began reading it for my hip hop class this semester, though the discussion of Staggerlee's influence on hip hop is rushed and confined to the end. But, it's a great examination and discussion of the actual shooting of Billy Lyons by Shelton, and probably the only book that actually addresses the historical reality behind this legend.

Brown does a terrific job of connecting the Staggerlee story to the blues, to Black power (in the form of Bobby Seale in particular), to hip hop, to literature (Baldwin and Wright especially), to the law. I'd like to reread it someday!

Some lines that really stood out: "As an integral part of the black oral tradition, black music was 'underground' in the slaves' work songs. Music becomes not just something to do, but a way to do it and an attitude toward life. ...Black music had the responsibility of carrying the spirit, the history, and the story of black people" (219). I kept thinking of Langston Hughes' "Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" when reading this; in that essay, he celebrates the "so-called low down folk...may they be praised!" The ability to be the "bad" man (substituting man for another word Brown uses in the book) is permitted because he moves outside the margins of the law, of society, and of ideas of right or wrong, which we see in the Black Panthers, hip hop artists, in Bigger and Invisible Man, in the novels of Toni Morrison, and in comics (e.g. Luke Cage).

There's also more research to be done on this, which Brown acknowledges. Some of this is rushed--he briefly mentions oral tradition scholars--but this is a rich area worth mining in the future.