Customer Reviews

Stagolee Shot Billy

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Anyone with even a slight acquaintance with the blues knows that Stagolee killed Billy Lyons over a brand-new Stetson hat. Stagolee thus became the prototypic baaad dude, the player who would coolly kill a man over fancy headgear. Until now, however, no one knew the real story, and most of us blues fans wondered if either of the gentlemen existed. In truth, "Stack" Lee Shelton shot Billy Lyons in a barroom in the red-light district of St. Louis on Christmas Day, 1895. The ballad, now known in hundreds of versions, must have emerged soon afterward.
Cecil Brown has researched the full story--he even provides pictures of the death certificates. He situates the event in its full and rowdy context: the roaring, wide-open world of Mississippi River towns in the late 19th century, when liquor, prostitution, gambling, and violence were the order of the day. He goes on to trace the song through its long and chequered history; central to the blues, it has been enthusiastically adopted by hillbilly and folk singers, rockers, and many more.
Good studies of folklore have been rare lately. The glorious days of the 1960s folk revival are long over. It is thus doubly rewarding to see a really fine study of folk tradition. This book focuses on the literature side; it does not deal with the music (someone should write a companion volume). Brown does an excellent job of interpretation, bringing in just enough theory, not too much. His generalizations are useful and interesting. (I don't agree with "Publisher's Weekly"'s sour comments at the end of their note.) The world needs more books like this. I not only got stuck in it and read it in one sitting--I then sought out my worn old record of Long Cleve Reed and Papa Harvey Hull's superb performance from the 1920's, and played it three times over.
Right on, Cecil Brown.

I have to conclude that other reviewers have actually been reviewing their own ideas of what this book might have been. I wish I could give it such a favorable write-up myself. But despite the interesting information Brown provides about the historical background and recording history of this classic American song, the book itself is disappointingly repetitious, contradictory, sloppily edited and organized, and poorly written. At one point, Brown calls Grandmaster Flash's "The Message" (1982) the "first rap" record [page 92]; elsewhere, he speaks of rap's rising popularity "during the 1970s and 1980s" [222]. In one discussion, he attributes the same poem to both Margaret Walker [197] and Gwendolyn Brooks [199]. And in one paragraph, he claims both that "Madame Babe allowed May [Irwin] to adapt" a particular song and - two sentences later - that "May Irwin may have stolen" that song from Madame Babe [107]. Oh, and he extends New Orleans r&b pianist Archibald's stage name to "Archibald Cox," perhaps as a nod to the Watergate prosecutor [172]. Obviously, writing history based so extensively on oral tradition is going to be difficult, but virtually every other sentence in this book is qualified with a "maybe," "perhaps," or "possibly." Those qualifications are representative of Brown's approach to history, in which he bends the facts as best he can to fit his preconceived notions. Brown's study is filled with generalizations and over-simplifications, and his use of theory is heavy-handed and unconvincing. I'm glad that I read this book - I learned a lot about a subject that interests me, and I found many of Brown's speculations provocative - but, unless Brown is assigned a firm-handed editor for the next edition, I can only recommend it with an armful of caveats.

I loved this book, but I share Mark Forrester's distress about the absolutely abysmal editing. The reference to Leon Gross as "Archibald Cox" is just laughable. There's also a name misspelled in the acknowledgements; something I've never run across before. This in a book published by Harvard University Press, for God's sake.

I nevertheless recommend the book with only the one caveat, albeit a rather large one -- don't quote anything you find here as fact without checking it out yourself. It could be something the fact checkers missed...

If you listen to American blues, rock, or folk music, you've heard about Stagolee. The Grateful Dead, the Clash, John Hurt, and dozens of others told a story about the night Stagolee shot Billy in a bar fight. The words may have varied, and the story may have seemed archetypical, but there was something going on here. Cecil Brown has traced the story to its origins: a bar in St. Louis's red light district in 1895, when Lee Shelton gunned down Billy Lyons because Lyons had touched his hat. Brown has done the research and provides interesting insights into urban culture and race relations in a time and place not far removed from slavery. He reviews different variations of the song, looks into the lives of the real-life protagonists, and discusses why the story made such a good source for songs for the next hundred years.

As disappointed as I am by the other reviewers here, is how overjoyed I am, now that I have read this book. Upon coming across this book wandering in a book store (sorry, Amazon), I literally tossed aside the other books in my hands and proceeded to read most of the book in the store, before rushing up to the register and tossing over my hard-earned cash for this incredible story!

I had heard the song - the Lloyd Price version - on oldies stations as a child; it had never occurred to me that it might actually be based upon a true story. And once that possibility came to light, I needed to know everything there was to know about Stagger Lee. But the more the is to learn about Stagger, the more there is to know, as myth and legend are wound together with what we believe we know to be true.

The author tries to bring us along the path he took, the journey he made to uncover the real Stagger Lee; this leads to what the other reviewers decribe as "poor editing", when what we thought we learned as fact on one page turns into just another rumor. And when you have a story that grows as organically as this one has and a tale with this many authors who claim to be the original, then this is bound to happen.

At the end, even being able to say, "we think this is how it went down", provides a fascinating case study of late 19th century Negro life, in that post-slavery, post-Reconstruction world in which being black meant anything you were able to claim as your own was tenuous, at best. And sometimes, getting into a fight over a hat was the best choice to be made.

The strength of this book is the historical investigation of the blues/ballad Stagolee and its historical spread in Black and non-Black folklore. Many of the commonplaces and original wisdoms presented here about Black music and culture are intersting and worthwhile. For this reason, this book belongs within the libraries of those interested in Black folk culture and music in particular.

Unfortunately, when he tries to create some revolutionary political character to the song and a view of "the lumpen" which we all thought was safely buried when the Black Panthers became Democratic party ward heelers and sellers of codd pieces, Brown falls flat on his face.

There is no way to transcend the dominant culture except through politics. Stagolee, the lumpen as he preaches them, do not represent any new vision or revolutionary spirit of suffering African Americans, much less our struggle to liberate ourselves, but quite the opposite. They represent a group that even more than the average working person strives to achieve and obtain the goals and values of this corrupt and exploitative society. Rather, than some threat, they are quite useful to those who wish to retain power and vice versa.

What is also interesting is how, contrary to the life styles, Wall street morals, and Washington manners of the real lumpen like Stagolee, the song and the legend were given other clothing by Black working people, farmers, youth, prisoners, struggling for a way out of the racist hell hole of Jim Crow. Instead of a man who never found problems being "bad" and mean to African Americans, and never found much problems with the police, Stagolee is converted into the opposite. The more heroic the song and the image of Stagolee becomes, the more divorced from the reality of who he real was, and what the social scum he came from really represents.


That's the real political and social lesson in what Brown explains of the reality of the Stagolee story. The actual Stagolee was a pimp and hustler who exploited the bodies of Black women. His major interest came in his political pimping for the Democratic party whose task at the time was nothing less than the overthrow of whatever gains remained from Reconstruction and the establishment of Jim Crow segregation throughout the South and beyond. His antagonism with Billy Lyons was rooted in Lyon's attachment to a rival gang of pimps and thugs who preyed on Black people under the auspices of the Republican party.

The murder actually did reach its point after Lyon's alledged disrespect of the hat, an adoption by the lumpen of the ruling class's views that things are more important than people.

Rather than being seen as a challenge to White society, Stagolee was defended by the top lawyer in St. Louis. Even after he was convicted of murder, Stag served only a year or so before being released due to the influence of his friends in the Democratic party. In fact, Brown explains that Stagolee went on to murder another African American, was again convicted of a minimal sentence, and was in prison about to be released early again thanks to the Democrats of Missouri, when he died.

Despite, Brown's silly attempt to claim that the lumpen, or the image is some kind of revolutionary threat to dominance, the behaviors of pimps, theives, drug dealers, and other "lumpen" are if anything an extreme version of the dominant society's worst values. The basic idea is that getting money, having wealth, and using violence and ignoring the solidarity of Black people and other working folks is the road to power. That is nothing less than the thinking that the Rockefellers, the Duponts, the Bushes, and the Kerry's use to justify their exploitation of the rest of us and their barbaric wars against the peoples of the world!

As someone who was quite active in the civil rights and Black power movements, and knew and worked with leaders of the Black panthers in the Bay area and around the country, I never saw much of a response from this layer of the black community to the struggle on any level. On the other hand group composed mainly of African American students and workers like the BPP did ten to be taken in by these attitudes distracted from and turned away from the struggle and diverted into unprincipled deals with the the cops and the politicians, alcoholism, disrespect for women, thuggery against working people and students, drug addiction, and drug dealing, and receive rather serious blows against their ability to struggle for liberation.

In regard to the editorial questions raised previously, I think we are facing a crisis in publishing, even with academic publishing houses, publishing works like this by an academic. This is not the first book that I written on TODAY, where editorial misconduct and confusion is such that mistakes that take not an expert, but a normally literate person should be able to eliminate abound. The press to publish, the press to sell books, to get a book out quick and without too many resources, the tight budgets, and emphasis on promotion and sales and not quality that are more and more at the center of the publishing industry today is devouring the quality of non-fiction books as sources.

Brown can't be blamed for that. In this regard, he is the victim