thanks for all your help. peace, ted alvy

STAGGER LEE was a #1 Billboard Hit by LLOYD PRICE in January-February 1959

Two Versions with The American Bandstand version having been sanitized:

-start-

THE OFFENSIVE LYRICS: Here are the words that made Dick Clark nervous:

The night was clear and the moon was yellow
And the leaves came tumbling down

I was standing on the corner when I heard my bulldog bark
He was barkin' at the two men who were gamblin' in the dark
It was Stagger Lee and Billy, two men who gambled late
Stagger Lee threw seven, Billy swore that he threw eight

Stagger Lee told Billy, "I can't let you go with that"
"You have won all my money and my brand new stetson hat"
Stagger Lee started off goin' down that railroad track
He said "I can't get you Billy but don't be here when I come back"

Stagger Lee went home and he got his fourty-four
Said "I'm goin' to the barroom just to pay that debt I owe"
Stagger Lee went to the barroom and he stood across the barroom door
He said "Nobody move" and he pulled his fourty-four

Stagger Lee shot Billy, oh he shot that poor boy so bad
Till the bullet came through Billy and it broke the bartender's glass

-end-

-start-

Here are the lyrics to the Bandstand version:

The night was clear and the moon was yellow
And the leaves came tumbling down....

I was standing on the corner when I heard my bulldog bark
He was barking at the two men who was arguing in the dark
It was Stagger Lee and Billy, Billy took poor Stagger's date
He said you did me wrong Billy and that's one thing that I hate

Stagger Lee told Billy
I can't let you go with that
Because I loaned you my money
and my girl I want her back
Look out Stag

Stagger Lee went home and he fell down on the floor
He said Billy did me wrong and I don't wanna see him no more
Oh Billy felt bad because he hurt his poor friend Stag
I'm gonna give him his girlfriend and everything that I have

Stagger Lee and Billy never fuss or fight no more
Because he got back his girlfriend and Stagger Lee was no more sore

-end-

If you're interested, get a hold of a book on African-American
folklore and check out the "The Legend of Stack-o-Lee," from which the
Lloyd Price hit was adapted.

Evan

If you're interested, get a hold of a book on African-American
folklore and check out the "The Legend of Stack-o-Lee," from which the Lloyd
Price hit was adapted. Evan

Mike Mooney posted this additional info on rec.music.rock-pop-r+b.1960s. peace,
ted alvy

Subject: Which version of Stagger Lee?
From: "Mike Mooney"
Newsgroups: rec.music.rock-pop-r+b.1960s
Date: Tue, 1 Jun 2004 09:30:29 +0100

I was going to post a URL to this, but it's no longer online. So please
forgive the long post:

Godfather of Gangsta

In the red-light district of St Louis in 1895, a pimp shot a man dead
in an argument over a hat. The ballad telling the story has been
recorded by hundreds of bluesmen and jazzers - and even the Clash. It
also helped create modern-day rap. Cecil Brown tells the remarkable
tale of Stagolee

Friday May 9, 2003
The Guardian

I was standin' on the corner
When I heard my bulldog bark;
He was barkin' at the two mens
Who gamblin' in the dark.
It was Stagolee and Billy,
Two men who gamble' late,
Stagolee throw seven,
Billy swore that he throwed eight.
Stagolee told Billy,
"I can't let you go with that;
You have won my money
And my brand new Stetson hat."
Stagolee went home,
And got his forty-four,
Says, "I'm goin' to the bar room,
To pay the debt I owe."
Stagolee went to the bar room,
Stood four feet from the door
Didn't nobody know when he
Pulled his forty-four.
Stagolee found Billy,
"Oh please don't take my life!
I got three little children,
And a very sick little wife."
Stagolee shot Billy,
Oh he shot that boy so fas'
That the bullet came through him,
And broke my window glass.
Some folks don't believe,
Oh Lord that Billy dead
You don't believe he gone,
Jus' look what a hole in his head.
These are the words sung by the black prisoner Hogman Maxey to the
song collector Dr Harry Oster at Angola state penitentiary in
Louisiana in 1959.

I first heard the ballad of Stagolee around the same time, sitting
under the shade of a tree at the end of the tobacco road in North
Carolina. The way my Uncle Lindsey recited the legend, Stagolee was a
young god of virility, as impulsive, as vulgar, as daring and as
adventurous as the young black field hands wanted him to be. My uncles
and their friends recited their rhyming, obscene praise of Stagolee's
badness and, at the day's end, gathered in JC Himes's jook joint to
dance with girls, drink whiskey and fight. Their nocturnal activities
seemed to me to be merely an extension of Stagolee's.

The origins of Stagolee coincide with those of the blues, which sprang
up in the 1890s. The first expression of it was as a field holler of
former plantation slaves, who carried it with them as they migrated to
the work camps along the Mississippi.

Since then, it has taken musical shape as ballad, as blues, as jazz,
as epic and as folk song. Its influence can be found in every
20th-century American cultural form, from rock'n'roll to literature to
politics to cinema to hip-hop. There are at least 20 jazz recordings,
by musicians ranging from Cab Calloway, Jimmy Dorsey and Peggy Lee to
Duke Ellington. More than 100 bluesmen, from Champion Jack Dupree and
Sonny Terry to Mississippi John Hurt, have recorded it.

During the 1930s and 1940s, the widely respected folklorist John Lomax
and his son collected it from prisoners across the south, in the form
of a strictly folk protest music; at least a dozen recordings survive
in the Library of Congress.

Stagolee - or Stack Lee, or Stagger Lee - has thrived as a soul tune
rendered by James Brown, Neil Diamond, Fats Domino and Wilson Pickett.
Performers of Stagolee have ranged from levee camp workers to white
female "coon-shouters" (white performers who sang as black-face
minstrels); from whorehouse pianists to black female blues shouters;
from black convicts to Huey Lewis and the News, Bob Dylan and the
Grateful Dead; and from 1920s Hawaiian guitarists to 1970s English
punks like the Clash, who recorded it in 1979. The earliest
recordings, in 1923, were made by two white dance bands, Fred Waring's
Pennsylvanians and Frank Westphal and His Orchestra. Australian rocker
Nick Cave recorded it in 1996, in Murder Ballads.

Then there are the songs in which Stagolee appears disguised. As Greil
Marcus observed, Stagolee was "Muddy Waters's cool and elemental
Rollin' Stone; Chuck Berry's Brown-Eyed Handsome Man; Bo Diddley with
a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind; Wilson Pickett's Midnight
Mover, Mick Jagger's Midnight Rambler... When the civil rights
movement got tough, [Staggerlee] took over. And Staggerlee would come
roaring back to the screen in the 1970s, as Slaughter, Sweet
Sweetback, Superfly."

Though my interest in the legend began in my childhood, it was many
decades later, researching a book on the phenomenon, that I discovered
the myth's origins, in a murder in 1895 in St Louis, then one of the
largest cities in the US. The killer was a man named Lee Shelton.

Shelton was born on March 16 1865, in Texas. Like New York, San
Francisco and New Orleans, during the 1890s St Louis had a large
red-light district. Most of the ballads say Stagolee was a gambler,
but as I dug deeper it appeared that he was also a "maquereau", a
French term for pimp often abbreviated to "mack". St Louis, which was
founded by the French, still used the term to describe men who were
kept by women.

In folk poetry, we find songs praising him:


Stackolee was a good man
Everybody he did love
The pimps and whores all swore by Stack -
By the everlasting stars above
They all loved Stackolee!
As a pimp and leader of a group called the Stags, Shelton was a slum
hero, reigning in an area called Deep Morgan, one of the few places in
the city where blacks and whites could commingle, and where blues,
ragtime and "coon songs" had their origins. It was in a bar in this
area that Shelton shot and killed Billy Lyons.

According to eyewitness George McFaro, on Christmas night, 1895,
around 10 o'clock, Shelton walked into the Curtis saloon, in the heart
of Deep Morgan, and asked the bartender: "Who's treating?" In reply,
someone pointed out William Lyons. Apparently, the two men drank and
laughed together for some time until the conversation turned to
politics.

Soon, they began to exchange blows by striking each other's hats.
Shelton grabbed Lyons's derby and knocked it out of shape. Lyons said
he wanted payment of "six bits" from Stagolee for damaging his derby.
Then Lyons grabbed Shelton's hat. At this point, everything changed.
The argument turned on Shelton's Stetson, and whether Billy would give
it back to him. In an attempt to make him give it back, Shelton pulled
his .44 Smith & Wesson revolver from his coat, and hit Lyons on the
head with it. Still Lyons would not relinquish the hat. Shelton
demanded it again, saying that if Lyons didn't give him his hat
immediately, he was going to kill him.

Then Lyons reached into his pocket for a knife and approached Shelton,
saying: "You cock-eyed son-of-a-bitch, I'm going to make you kill me."
Stagolee backed off and took aim. The 25 people in the saloon flew for
the door. Only bartenders and a few others drinking at the bar stayed.
Witnesses later testified to the coroner that they then saw Shelton
shoot Lyons.

Leslie Stevenson, one of the witnesses, claimed that after he was
shot, Billy "staggered against the side of the bar, leaned against the
railing, holding the hat in his fingers like that, and it seemed he
was getting weak, and he let the hat drop out of his hands. About that
time, Stagolee says, 'Give me my hat, ******' . . . and he picks it up
and walks out into the brisk air."

A newspaper account also described Stagolee as walking over to the
dying man still holding on to the bar and snatched his hat from
Lyons's hand, put it on his head, and walked out "coolly" into the
night air.

The murder had serious political consequences. Lyons, it turned out,
was a staunch Republican, as were nearly all of St Louis's 25,000
black people. Lyons's stepmother, Marie Brown, owned the famous
Bridgewater saloon. Her son-in-law, Henry Bridgewater, was reputed to
be the richest black man in St Louis. Lyons belonged to this powerful
clan loyal to the Republican party, which had freed the slaves. A new
generation, represented by Stagolee, was anxious to vote for the
Democrats. Stagolee had gained the support of the Democrats and so was
hated by most of the black bourgeoisie, who were represented by Billy
Lyons.

In the 1890s in St Louis, black people sought political protection
with their right to vote. Both the Republican and the Democratic
parties thought they could win if they got the black vote. The
majority of black St Louisans voted Republican, but during the
Republican convention, in the summer of 1896, many - unhappy that the
national Republican party ignored their interest - broke with the
party.

This break owed much to the black pimps in St Louis. Under the guise
of "sporting" clubs, frequently called the 400 Clubs, pimps,
saloon-keepers, and gamblers exerted voting power for the Democratic
party. Some saloon-keepers represented the "unofficial" Democratic
party.


They took him to the courthouse
Judge Murphy sat on the bench
An' the first one to put her can in a chair
Was Stack-o-Lee's lovin' wench
Down at the trial, down at the trial of Stack-o-Lee.
Many of the figures in the ballad - Judge Murphy, Stagolee's defence
lawyer Nat Dryden, Stagolee's wife - were well known figures in the
area. Other versions of the ballad make references to historical
places and people, like St Louis Chestnut Valley, Lillie Shelton, and
bartenders Tom Scott and Frank Boyd. We can assume, therefore, that
the hero Stagolee who is the centre of the poem is a reference to the
real man Lee Shelton.

Shelton's white lawyer, Dryden, may have been brilliant, but he also
was a bohemian with an opium addiction. In the first trial, Dryden got
Stagolee off with a hung jury. After two years in the courts, at the
retrial in 1897, with a new judge and in the absence of Dryden,
Stagolee was sentenced to 25 years in the Jefferson penitentiary.
After being released by the Democratic powers that be, he was out for
a few years and then returned for pistol-whipping another man. He died
in the state prison in 1912, aged 46.

After the murder, the ballad telling of Stagolee's exploits began to
spread across the American south and west. A circus performer heard it
in the Indian territory in 1913. Early folklorists took an interest in
the ballad as early as 1911, when Guy B Johnson published the first
version in the prestigious Journal of American Folklore. John Lomax
went around the southern states collecting the songs for the Library
of Congress during the 1930s. During this time, most black men were
either in prison or exploited on farms as sharecroppers. They sang
about Stagolee and the Devil. The Devil was the white man.

In 1959, the song Stagger Lee became a number one for the
rock'n'roller Lloyd Price, selling a million copies and topping the
charts. In the 1960s, the civil rights movement took to Stagolee. At
the height of the Black is Beautiful era, James Brown and Wilson
Pickett recorded the Stagolee song. Bobby Seale, the leader of the
Black Panthers, used it to recruit young black men to the party. I
once got the opportunity to ask him why. He replied that Stagolee
represented a template for black resistance to whites that just needed
to be organised. "Stagolee was a bad ****** off the block and didn't
take **** from nobody," he said. "Malcolm X at one time was an
illegitimate hustler. Later in life Malcolm X grows to have the most
profound political counsciousness... So symbolically, at one time he
was Stagolee... To me, Stagolee was the true grassroots."

During this period, Stagolee also took the evolutionary leap that
would go on to produce rap music and hip-hop. The connection between
the bad man ballads and hip-hop was the form known as the "toast" - a
recited story in verse. In telling the Stagolee legend as a toast, the
speaker takes on the role of Stagolee. He begins to take on the
character of the hero he is singing about. Asserting themselves as
bullies and bad men, young black men "perform" Stagolee. The toast
became an instrument that allowed them to be powerful and charismatic.

Shedding itself of the musical accompaniment that came with the
ballad, Stagolee took his first step to being the basic form that the
oral poets, the first hip-hoppers, utilised. During the 1980s, the
first rhymers of rap took Stagolee to heightened levels. They used the
Stagolee narrative structure as their own personal narratives.

In the development of rap music and hip-hop culture, Stagolee's
influence is very clear. It persists in rap in the use of the
first-person narrator, the performers' adoption of nicknames, the
social drama, the humour, and participation in the commodity culture.
From the 1930s to the 1950s, most reciters of Stagolee told the story
in the third person. After the rise of the toast tradition in the
1960s, most reciters told the story in the first person. The audience
sees through the eyes of the character the rapper creates. The "I" is
the bridge between the "I" of the rapper and the "I" of the character.

A reciter of Stagolee associates himself with the hero, but he also
makes clear that he is not Stagolee. He can effectively change himself
in the eyes of his spectators and listeners. In gangsta rap, the
performers are acting out the lives of the criminals in an effort to
dispel the criminal from their midst, as a way to get rid of the
negative energy.

Stagolee is also present in rap music in the use of cliche: Stagolee
is composed of cliche lines that are easy to remember. In rap music,
performers found it necessary to use such cliches to keep the rap
going.

The final influence that Stagolee has on rap was participation in
commodity culture. In the 1890s, the Stetson became a symbol of black
male status; in the late 1990s, baggy pants became a signifier of
status. As in ear lier generations, ghetto blacks fight against a
white appropriation through weird dress. To be able to purchase these
commodities, young people in the ghettos resort to hustling, as their
parents and grandparents did. They can't afford to believe that a
nine-to-five job would solve their problems, because they could never
get those jobs.

So gangsta rappers use the lifestyle commodities - cars, clothes,
girls - as signifiers of success and wealth. They scrap the old cliche
of the ghetto hustler with a slick suit and a truckload of hot goods
for the new archetype of the rapper. The term and the concept of the
modern-day "mack" are a retrieval of the old cliche of the St Louis
mack that Lee Shelton once embodied. And it is not just the mack who
is revived, but the women who will do anything for him, including sell
their bodies. The girls rappers talk about are whores, or "ho's", just
as they were back in the pre-industrial ballads of Stagolee.

Except as appearing in nearly every gangster rap, how does the ballad
survive today? What made Stagolee survive for over 100 years? One of
the reasons is that performers keep reinventing the song in their own
image. Apart from such interpretation from black singers, like
Mississippi John Hurt, whites keep reinventing it too.

While he was waiting to record an album, Nick Cave was reading a book
on urban black folklore and came across a version of the Stagolee
toast. Cave decided to record it for two reasons. He was fascinated,
in the first place, by the homosexuality of this particular version.
In the toast, Stagolee makes Billy "drop down and slobber on his
head". "The final act of brutality, where the great Stagger Lee blows
the head off Billy . . . while he is committing fellatio [was]
especially attractive," said Cave.

Cave went further, adding lines from another blues ballad. "There's a
verse to our version that goes, 'I'm the kind of cocksucker that would
crawl over 50 good pussies to get to one fat boy's asshole,' which I
heard on an amazing talking blues song by a guy who, in the song,
introduces himself as Two-time Slim. I've always thought that was a
groovy line so I just threw it in for good measure."

William L Benzon wrote that European-American racism has used
African-Americans as a screen on which to project repressed emotions,
particularly sex and aggression. We can see this when we look at how
white people have used Stagolee. The key to this insight is the
concept of projection. "One aspect of this projection," Benzon says,
"is that whites are attracted to black music as a means of expressing
aspects of themselves they cannot adequately express though music from
European roots."

The screen Cave adds to Stagolee tradition tells us more about the
culture of the singer than it does of the culture of the song.
Stagolee as African-American tradition is the screen that allows the
projection to take place. "The reason why we [recorded it] was that
there is already a tradition," said Cave. "I like the way the simple,
almost naive traditional murder ballad has gradually become a vehicle
that can happily accommodate the most twisted acts of deranged
machismo. Just like Stag Lee himself, there seems to be no limits to
how evil this song can become."

How long will Stagolee get passed on? On a Sunday afternoon late last
year, Taj Mahal appeared on stage at Yoshi's, a nightclub in Oakland,
California. At 60, he is as energetic and solid as he was when I last
saw him perform, 20 or so years ago. That afternoon, he had asked that
parents come and bring their children. As Taj sang and strummed his
big guitar, kids as young as five and as old as 17 were bobbing their
heads to the rhythms of the blues.

"Now how many of you kids have heard of bandits," he asked as he stood
on the edge of the stage, staring out at the young, white faces.
Bandits? Sure. They had heard of bandits. "Okay," Taj said. "And
you've heard about gambling? Well, this ballad is about a bandit who
gambles! This song is about Stagolee!"

Backstage, sitting in a folding chair, Taj told me how he came across
the legend. "The first I heard of Stagolee was from Lloyd Price," he
said. "I was a Lloyd Price fan. I was always dancing to him. Then by
the 1960s, I kept hearing it on blues anthologies - Mississippi John
Hurt, and Furry Lewis's versions. As a child, I'd heard these stories
about the bad man - bad man Stagolee - from my mother, who was from
the low country in South Carolina. Then there was the other side of my
family, my father is from the Caribbean, and from him I heard about
'bad John'. They would say, 'Bad John, stay out he way, man!' "

Taj laughed. This was great fun for him. He was Stagolee. As long as
there are living historians like him, Stagolee will never die.

Cecil Brown's book Stagolee Shot Billy is published on May 29 by
Harvard University Press.

****

Mike M


Subject: Which version of Stagger Lee?
From: "Mike Mooney"
Newsgroups: rec.music.rock-pop-r+b.1960s
Date: Tue, 1 Jun 2004 09:30:29 +0100