A song with a story of its own: scholar Cecil Brown's search for the oft-sung exploits of Stagolee underscores the indelible power of our oral culture - Bibliomane

Black Issues Book Review, July-August, 2003 by Angela P. Dodson

The artful use of words spoken or sung to entertain or inform is embedded in our culture. The ballad has been particularly important. By definition, ballads tell stories. The verses frequently travel over great distances and through many generations in time--growing, sometimes mutating, sometimes picking up fragments from other cultural traditions.

As a male child growing up on a tobacco farm in North Carolina in the late 1950s, Cecil Brown became fascinated with one particular ballad about Stagolee, Stagger Lee, or Stack O'Lee, to cite a few variations. "The legend survives because black men pass it on," Brown writes in his new book, Stagolee Shot Billy (Harvard University Press, April 2003, $29.95, ISBN 0-674-01056-6). "Stagolee" is a song about a particularly bad fellow, one who kills a man in bar without mercy, merely because the victim had "dissed" him by touching his fine Stetson hat, according to some versions. The unfortunate soul may have won the hat at cards and took it, batted it or held onto it after repeated warnings to return it:

You have won my money

And my brand new Stutson [Stetson] hat.

Brown explores the meaning and metaphors of "Stagolee" as most scholars might. Then he goes much further to track down the so, origins. He convincingly ties it to a particular crime, the killing of William Lyons by one Lee Shelton, nicknamed Stack Lee, in St. Louis on Christmas night in 1895.

Here, Brown's work is reminiscent of Colson Whitehead's exploration of certain steel-driving ballads in his novel John Henry Days (Doubleday, May 2001, $24.95, ISBN 0-385-49819-5), which follows a freeloading journalist's sojourn to the story's sources in Talcott, West Virginia. John Henry is a character from the Paul Bunyan-esque legends; a 19th-century black laborer who won a contest with a steam drill, then promptly dropped dead of exhaustion. Nevertheless, he had labored well to stave off the coming Industrial Age and the tyranny of machines that would take the jobs of good men.

Brown is also a novelist, known for his best-selling The Life and Loves of Mr. Jivass Nigger (HarperCollins, September 1996, ISBN 0-880-01517-9). He previously wrote Coming Up Down Home: Memoir of a Sharecropper's Son (HarperCollins, August 1992, ISBN 0-880-01293-5). His storytelling abilities are showcased in this history of the man and the ballad of Stack Lee. Mr. Shelton was a successful "maquereaux"--a word that transmuted to "mack" or more simply put, a pimp. In the St. Louis of the 1890s, he was a prominent man among black folks. First, his enterprise was considered unique because it offered working women safer conditions than other bordellos that served an interracial netherworld of crime. He also ran a dub, or bar, that was a center of political activity in black St. Louis.

Brown uses the written articles, court documents, prison records and other papers to establish the facts of the crime and the identity of this particular Stack Lee. Brown shows that the song in all likelihood derives from this case. The mercilessness shown by Stack Lee helped make this the stuff of folklore.

Brown documents that at least one version of the song was sung as early as 1895 and written or recorded versions began showing up by 1910. He notes that its roots "coincide with the origins of the blues in the 1890's" From there the trail gets more complicated as the song migrates to different parts of the country and the world. The antihero himself shows up as sometimes white, sometimes black and occasionally as a cowboy. The words were often passed on as verbal "toasts" or rhymed, oral performances at social occasions. (Sound familiar?) Throw in the atmosphere of a bar or blues club where no one is taking notes and minds may be clouded by alcohol, and the setting is ripe for ad lib and "sampling" from other ballads. The song is frequently told in a bawdy or obscene way and was even occasionally banned in places where decent folks might hear it.

As the ability to make sound recordings developed in the early 1900s, "Stagolee" versions were among the earliest, and most often recorded, beginning with records by white dance bands in 1923. Folklorists began recording prisoners' versions in the 1930s, and at least a dozen of those survive at the Library of Congress, according to the book. Everyone from Ma Rainey to Bob Dylan has sung, if not recorded, a version. Brown writes that at least 20 jazz and more than 100 blues recordings of it are known, long before it enjoyed a revival in numerom rock 'n roll, rhythm and blues or hip-hop versions from the 1950s to the present. (See "A 'Stagger Lee' Discography," page 60.)

Stack Lee legends and this admixture of language, humor and performance is also explored in an upcoming work Yo' Mama: New Raps, Toasts, Dozens, Jokes, and Children's Rhymes From Urban Black America by Onwuchekwa Jemie (Temple University Press, July 2003, ISBN 1-592-13029-1). Jemie teaches literature at Howard University and is a former editor and columnist of The Guardian, Nigeria's leading newspaper. He is the author of Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry (Columbia University Press, June 1985, ASIN 0-231-06161-7). He is alsocoauthor of Toward the Decolonization of African Literature: African Fiction & Poetry & Their Critics (Howard University Press, March 1983, ASIN 0-882-581228). The examples of verbal culture he cites were collected in the late 1960s and early '70s and includes simple children's gaming rhymes, other epic ballads and extemporaneous street slurs.