DocRock1007 - Stagger Lee [Americana] at the Velvet Note 6 4 25

"Stagger Lee" also known as "Stagolee" and other variants, is a popular American folk song about the murder of Billy Lyons by "Stag" Lee Shelton, in St. Louis, Missouri, on Christmas 1895.

The song was first published in 1911 and first recorded in 1923, by Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians, titled "Stack O' Lee Blues". A version by Lloyd Price reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1959.

The historical Stagger Lee was Lee Shelton, a St. Louis pimp living in Missouri, in the late 19th century. He was nicknamed Stag Lee or Stack Lee, with a variety of explanations being given: he was given the nickname because he "went stag" to social events, or that he took the nickname from a well-known riverboat captain called Stack Lee; or, according to John and Alan Lomax, he took the name from a Mississippi riverboat, the Stack O'Lee, a floating brothel, owned by the Lee family, known for its on-board prostitution.

The folk song has been covered by everyone from Ma Rainey to Nick Cave — and it inspired a blistering poem by James Baldwin. There have been more than 400 versions of “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 ... 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.

On Christmas night 1895, a barroom argument between two men—one named Billy and another named "Stag" Lee—takes place, leading to murder. The killing would inspire an iconic blues song. Murder and mayhem inspired many popular songs over the years, though more often than not, the tales around which such songs revolve tend to be wholly fictional. Johnny Cash never shot a man in Reno, and the events related in such famous story songs as “El Paso” and “I Shot The Sheriff” never actually took place. The same cannot be said, however, about “Stagger Lee”—a song that, while it has drifted from the facts somewhat over the course of its many lives in the last 100-plus years, was indeed inspired by an actual murder that took place late in the evening of December 25, 1895, in a St. Louis, Missouri bar. Billy Lyons died early the next morning.

The murder, reportedly motivated partially by the theft of Shelton's Stetson hat, made Shelton an icon of toughness and style in the minds of early folk and blues musicians, and inspired the popular folk song "Stagger Lee".
The song tradition embellishes the story with sometimes inaccurate or fantastic details. The songs play up the importance of Stagolee's Stetson hat as a symbol of manliness. he is often said to have received a death sentence for his crime, which he accepts stoically. Some versions add an additional section in which Stagolee goes to Hell and usurps it from the Devil. The 1995 version by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds paints Stagger Lee as a sociopathic, bisexual sexual predator who forces a foe to perform fellatio on him before shooting the man to death.

The song and myth of Stagger Lee have been immortalized in music for over a century. Duke Ellington, the Grateful Dead, Woody Guthrie, Ike & Tina Turner, Ma Rainey, Jerry Lee Lewis and Tom Jones all sang it. The Stagger Lee Project has documented 538 recordings and interpretations. On Christmas Eve, 1895, in a St. Louis saloon, "Stag" Lee Shelton, a black pimp, shot William "Billy" Lyons. Eyewitnesses say Billy snatched Stag's Stetson hat. Boom, boom, boom, boom went Stag's forty-four. You don't mess with a man's hat.