In "Stagolee," one of history's best-known blues songs, a dispute between Billy Lyons and a "bad man" called Stagolee ends in a shooting; variations of the ballad have been recorded by hundreds of musicians, from Mississippi John Hurt and Champion Jack Dupree to Peggy Lee, Ike and Tina Turner, Bob Dylan and Nick Cave. But for all the song's incarnations, little is known definitively about its origins: Who was Stagolee-or Stacker Lee, or Stack-o-lee? Scholar and author Brown (The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger) sets out to answer that question by presenting Lee Shelton, a.k.a. "Stack Lee," a pimp who shot Billy Lyons in a barroom in 1895; probing the seamy St. Louis milieu that served as the murder's backdrop; and tracing the song's history through the decades-from the eight stanzas sent to music archivist John Lomax in 1910, through 1920s white "hillbilly" versions and 1940s prison renditions and up to its influence on present-day rap music. Yet the book is more than a musical history; it considers "Stagolee as a black oral narrative and the rich relationship it reveals between oral literature and social life." Brown addresses the legend's place in an evolving African-American consciousness and draws upon the works of luminaries like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison (he skillfully employs Freud, Levi-Strauss and Walter Benjamin as well). Brown's tone at times becomes dry and academic, and his occasional generalizations are jarring in such an otherwise thoughtful work. The book is intelligent and illuminating-and a smattering of illustrations livens it up-but it will likely be of more interest to serious musicologists and historians than casual blues fans.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
In
Stagolee Shot Billy...Brown revisits the archetypal story of "someone who was willing to defend himself if transgressed against, if his dignity was at stake." Songs about Stagolee have long been a staple of African-American music, with recordings by Ma Rainey, Duke Ellington, and Fats Domino...To analyze the legend, Mr. Brown draws on structuralist and formalist thinkers such as Mikhail Baktin, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Vladimir Propp...But where another scholar might explicate a few symbols and call it a day, Brown has pursued the tale to its origins--a bar fight in St. Louis in 1895, during which a saloonkeeper named Lee Shelton shot William Lyons when a friendly game of cards went wrong. (Scott McLemee
Chronicle of Higher Education 20030315)
In a St. Louis tavern on Christmas night in 1895 Lee Shelton (a pimp also known as Stack Lee) killed William Lyons in a fight over a hat. There were other murders that night, but this one became the stuff of legend. Songs based on the event soon spread out of whorehouses and ragtime dives across the country. Within 40 years, Stagolee had evolved into a folk hero, a symbol of rebellion for black American males. With commendable scholarship and thoroughness, Brown shows how we got from the murder to the myth. (Leopold Froehlich
Playboy 20030323)
Novelist and professor Brown...delves into the historical and social underpinnings of the Stagolee myth, which has inspired numerous songs and shaped American culture. Tracing the source of the legend, he describes in detail the shooting and killing of bully Billy Lyons by flashy pimp Lee Shelton (a.k.a. Stagolee) for snatching his hat in a St. Louis bar...and Shelton's subsequent trial and imprisonment. He links the incident to the swirl of corrupt St. Louis politics embodied in violent and warring black social clubs that controlled bootlegging, gambling, and a flourishing prostitution trade...Thoroughly researched, fast moving, and well written, this is the first book to unearth the basis of the Stagolee legend (others mostly deal with its social implications) and will appeal to those interested in understanding American cultural history. (Dave Szatmary
Library Journal 20030427)
You don't have to know the ballad about Stagolee, the black anti-hero who shot and killed his old friend Billy over a hat in a bar one Christmas night in 1895 in Deep Morgan, the vice district of St. Louis, to enjoy Cecil Brown's telling of the story behind the song...Brown, who grew up on the myth in the 1950s and 60s on a tobacco farm in North Carolina, reconstructs the very night when Lee Shelton dressed like a pimp in St. Louis flats and a "high-roller, milk-white Stetson"...wandered into the Bill Curtis Saloon in the Bloody Third District. Brown's reconstruction of the bordello culture in St. Louis is reminiscent of
fin de siècle Vienna, portraying a kind of hysteria that played out on the stage and in the streets. (Susan Salter Reynolds
Los Angeles Times Book Review 20030829)
In
Stagolee Shot Billy, the novelist Cecil Brown tracks the history of the song "as a black oral narrative and the rich relationship it reveals between oral literature and social life." Along the way he has a lot to say about how music functions as a form of memory, advancing through the popular culture...Brown's industrious research begins at the primal event...In his reconstruction of the legal events that sent Shelton to jail, Brown shows how the black Tenderloin district functioned in white ward-heeling politics of the day...Brown also trains his lens on Stagolee as a mythical presence in literature...By surrounding the Stagolee figure in a constellation of ways, as part of folklore, music history, literary scholarship and culture studies, with a supporting cast of writers and scholars whose words are given fair and generous use, Brown puts on a good postmodern show. (Jason Berry
New York Times Book Review 20031201)
Stagolee Shot Billy provides a fascinating biography of the song ['Stagolee'], from its shadowy birth in the ragtime era to its afterlife in the age of hip-hop--an evolution, by way of innumerable variants and alternative readings, that shows how vividly a single item of oral culture can reflect changing times. (Gerald Mangan
Times Literary Supplement )
This entertaining book is the first to rigorously explore [the song's] origins in the St. Louis gang underworld. Brown paints a rich picture of the incident, traces the song's virus-like spread from blues to ragtime to pop, and figuring that it still moves people because, like most potent ancient black ballads, it is stark reportage with no moralising. Stagger Lee is not condemned, so he is free to live on in every badass to follow. (Paul McGrath
MOJO )
[A] probing and prescient and staggeringly well researched study...The historical revelations here are consistently--and insistently--fascinating; the voices brought in as chorus to help Brown vamp into theoretical detour range from Walter Benjamin and Bob Dylan to James Baldwin and Schooly D. (Ian Penman
The Wire )
Stagolee Shot Billy constitutes a most valuable examination of African American folklore and folkways. It offers extremely well-documented facts and a conscientious scholarly approach, while, like the narrative itself, being highly entertaining. (David Diallo
Journal of American Folklore )
Stagolee Shot Billy is one of the finest works in the field of cultural studies. Brown provides the reader with a fascinating narrative and an innovative analysis. This book is a must for anyone interested in the intersection of race and popular music in the 20th century. (Stanley Arnold
Popular Music and Society )
