Episode 76: “Stagger Lee” by Lloyd Price

A History of Folk Music and 500 Songs

by Andrew A.K.W.

Episode 76

Stagger Lee

by Lloyd Price

Before we start today's episode, a brief note.

Firstly, this episode contains a description of a murder, so if you're squeamish about that sort of thing, you may want to skip it.

Secondly, some of the material I'm dealing with in this episode is difficult for me to deal with in a podcast for a variety of reasons.

This episode will look at a song whose history is strongly entwined both with American racism and with black underworld culture.

The source material I've used for this therefore contains several things that for different reasons are difficult for me to say on here.

There is frequent use of a particular racial slur, which it is not okay under any circumstances for me as a white man to say.

There are transcripts of oral history, which are transcribed in rather patronising attempts at replicating African American vernacular English, which, even were those transcripts themselves acceptable, would sound mocking coming out of my English accented mouth.

And there is frequent use of sexual profanity, which I personally have no problem with at all, but would get this podcast an explicit rating on several of the big podcast platforms.

There is simply no way to tell this story while avoiding all of those things, so I've come up with the best compromise I can.

I will not use, even in quotes, that slur.

I will minimise the use of transcripts, but when I have to use them, I will change them from being phonetic transcripts of AAVE into being standard written English, and I will include the the swearing where it comes in the recordings I want to use, but will beep it out of the version that goes up on the main podcast feed.

I'll make an unexpagated version available for my Patreon backers, and I'll put the unbleeped recordings on Mixcloud.

The story we're going to tell goes back to Christmas Day 1895,

but we're going to start our story in the mid-1950s with Lloyd Price.

You may remember us looking at Lloyd Price way back in in episode 12 from Christmas 2018.

But if you don't, Price was a teenager in 1952 when he wandered into Cosimo Matasa's studio in New Orleans at the invitation of his acquaintance Dave Bartholomew, who had produced, co-written and arranged most of Fat's Domino's biggest hits.

Price had a song, Laudie Miss Claudie, which was loosely based around the same basic melody as Domino's earlier hit, The Fat Man, and they recorded it with Bartholomew producing Domino on piano and the great Earl Palmer on drums.

Please don't excite me,

That was one of the first RB records put out on specialty records, the label that would later bring Little Richard, Larry Williams, Sam Cook and others to prominence.

And it went to number one on the RB charts.

Price had a couple more big RB hits, but then he got drafted.

And when when he got back, the musical landscape had changed enough that he had no hits for several years.

But then both Elvis Presley and Little Richard cut cover versions of Lordie Miss Claudie, and that seemed to bring Price enough extra attention that in 1957 he got a couple of songs into the lower reaches of the Hot 100.

And one song, Just Because,

went to number three on the RB charts.

you left and said goodbye,

do you think that I will sit and cry,

even if my heart should tell me so?

Darling, I would rather let you go

just because you think that you're so small.

But it wasn't until 1958 that Price had what would become his biggest hit,

a song that would kickstart his career and which had its roots in a barroom brawl in St.

Louis on Christmas Day, 1895.

The Lee line was a line of steamboats that went up and down the Mississippi, run by the Lee family.

Their line was notorious, even by Mississippi Riverboat standards, for paying its staff badly, but also for being friendly to prostitution and gambling.

This meant that some people, at least, enjoyed working on the ships despite the low pay.

There is a song, whose lyrics were quoted in an article from 1939,

but which seems to have been much older, whose lyrics went, I've changed these into standard English, as I explained at the start.

Reason I like the Lee Line trade, sleep all night with the chambermaid.

She gives me some pie, and she gives me some cake, and I give her all the money that I ever make.

The Lee Line was one of the two preferred steamboat lines to work on, for that reason, and it ended up being mentioned in quite a few songs, like this early version of the song that's better known as Alabami Bound, but was here called Don't You Leave Me Here.

Running side by side,

well, you got my loving kind feet, babe, get it there just right.

Don't you leave me, yeah,

don't you leave me here?

Well, I don't mind you going through loving baby, but don't you?

The line, if the boat don't sink and the stack don't drown, refers to one of the boats on the Lee line, the Stack Lee,

a boat that started service in 1902.

But the boat was named, as many of the Lee Line ships were, after a member of the Lee family, in this case one Stack Lee, who was the captain in the 1880s and early 90s of a ship named after his father, James Lee, the founder of the company.

In 1948, the scholar Shields McIlwain claimed that the captain and later the boat were popular enough among parts of the black community that there were, quote, more coloured kids named Stack Lee than there were sinners in hell.

But it was probably the boat's reputation for prostitution that led to a thirty-year-old pimp in St.

Louis named Lee Shelton taking on the name Stack Lee at some time before Christmas Day, 1895.

On that Christmas day, a man named Bill Lyons entered the Bill Curtis saloon.

Before he entered the saloon, he stopped to ask his friend to give him a knife, because the saloon was the roughest in the whole city, and he didn't want any trouble.

Bill Lyons was known as Billy the Bully, but Bully didn't quite, or didn't only,

mean what it means to day.

A bully, in that time and place, was a term that encompassed both being a pimp and being a bagman for a political party.

There was far more overlap in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries between politics and organised crime than many now realise.

And the way things normally operated in many areas was that there would be a big man in organized crime whose job it would be to raise money for the party, get people out to vote, and tell them which way to vote.

Lyons was not a popular man, but he was an influential man, and he was part of a rich family, one of the richest black families in St.

Louis.

He was, like his family, very involved with the Republican Party.

Almost all black people in the US were Republicans at that time, as it was only 30 years since the end of the Civil War, when the Republican President Lincoln had been credited with freeing black people from slavery, and the Bridgewater saloon, owned by Lyons' rich brother-in-law, Henry Bridgewater, was often used as a meeting place for local Republicans.

Lyons had just ordered a drink when Lee Shelton walked into the bar.

Shelton was a pimp and seems to have made a lot of money from it.

Shelton was also a Democrat, which in this time and place meant that he was essentially a member of a rival gang.

Shelton was very big in the local Democratic Party, and from what we can tell, was far more popular among the black community than Lyons was.

While the Democrats were still the less popular of the two major parties among black people in the area, some were starting to feel like the Republicans talked a good game, but were doing very little to actually help black people, and were considering taking their votes elsewhere.

He was also a pimp, who seems to have had a better reputation than most among the sex workers who worked for him, though, like almost everything in this story, it's difficult to know for certain more than 120 years later.

When he walked into the bar, he was wearing mirror-toed shoes, a velvet waistcoat, an embroidered shirt, and gold rings, and carrying an ebony cane with a gold top.

He had a slightly crossed left eye and scars on his face, and he was wearing a white Stetson.

Lee asked the crowd who's treating, and they pointed to Lyons.

There was allegedly some bad blood between Lyons and Shelton, as Lyons' stepbrother had murdered Shelton's friend a couple of years earlier, in the Bridgewater saloon.

But none the less the two men were, according to the bartenders working there, who had known both men for decades, good friends, and they were apparently drinking and laughing together for a while until they started talking about politics.

They started slapping at each other's hats, apparently playfully.

Then Shelton grabbed Lyons' hat and broke the rim, so Lyons then snatched Shelton's hat off his head.

Shelton asked for his hat back, and Lyons said he wanted six bits, seventy five cents, for a new hat.

Shelton replied that you could buy a box of those hats for six bits, and he wasn't going to give Lyons any money.

Lions refused to hand the hat back until Shelton gave him the money, and Shelton pulled out his gun, and told Lyons to give him the hat.

Lions refused, and Shelton hit him on the head with the gun.

He then threatened to kill Lions if Lions didn't hand the hat over.

Lyons pulled out the knife his friend had given him, him and said, You cockeyed son of a bitch, I'm going to make you kill me, and came at Shelton, who shot Lions.

Lions staggered and clutched onto the bar and dropped the hat.

Shelton addressed Lyons using a word I am not going to say, and said, I told you to give me my hat, picked it up and walked out.

Lions died of his wounds a few hours later.

Shelton was arrested and let go on $4,000 bail.

That's something like $120,000 in today's money, to give you some idea.

Though by the time we go that far back, comparisons of the value of money become fairly meaningless.

Shelton hired himself the best possible lawyer, a man named Nat Dryden, who was an alcoholic and opium addict, but was also considered a brilliant trial lawyer.

Dryden had been the first lawyer in the whole of Missouri to be able to get a conviction for a white man murdering a black man.

Shelton was still at risk, though, simply because of the power of Henry Bridgewater in local politics.

A mob of hundreds of people swamped the inquest trying to get to Shelton, and the police had to draw their weapons before they would disperse.

But something happened between Shelton's arrest and the trial that meant that Bridgewater's political power waned somewhat.

Shelton was arraigned by Judge David Murphy, who was regarded by most black people in the city as on their side, primarily because he was so against police brutality that when a black man shot a policeman, claiming self-defence because the policeman was beating him up at the time, Murphy let the man off.

Not only that, when a mob of policemen attacked the defendant outside the court in retribution, Murphy had them jailed.

This made him popular among black people, but less so among whites.

The 1896 Republican National Convention was held in St.

Louis, and one of the reasons it was chosen was that the white restaurants had promised the party that if they held the convention there, they would allow black people into the restaurants.

So the black caucus within the party approved of the idea.

But when the convention actually happened, the restaurants changed their minds and the party did nothing.

This infuriated many black delegates to the convention, who had seen for years how the systems of backhanders and patronage on which American politics ran never got so far as to give anything to black people who were expected just to vote for the Republicans.

James Milton Turner, one of the leaders of the radical faction of the Republicans, and the first ever black U.S.

ambassador, who was a Missouri local and one of the most influential black politicians in the state, loudly denounced the Republican Party for the way it was treating black voters.

Shortly afterwards, the party had its local convention.

Judge Murphy was coming up for re-election, and the black delegates voted for him to be the Republican nominee again.

The white delegates, on the other hand, voted against him.

This was the last straw.

In 1896, 90% of black voters in Missouri voted Democrat for the first time.

Shelton's faction was now in the ascendant.

Because Murphy wasn't reselected, Shelton's trial wasn't held by him, but Nat Dryden did an excellent job in front of the new judge, arguing that Shelton had been acting in self-defense, because Lyons had pulled out a knife.

There was a hung jury and it went to a retrial.

Sadly for Shelton though, Dryden wasn't going to be representing him in the second trial.

Dryden had hidden his alcoholism from his wife, and she had offered him a glass of sherry.

That had triggered a relapse.

He'd gone on a binge and died.

At his next trial, in late 1897, Shelton was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Presumably, the influence of his political friends stopped him from getting the death penalty, just as it got him paroled twelve years later.

Two years after that, though, Shelton was arrested again for assault and robbery, and this time he died in prison.

But even before his trial, just before Dryden's death, in fact, a song called Stacker Lee was mentioned in the papers as being played by a ragtime pianist in Kansas City.

The story gets a bit hazy here, but we know that Shelton was friends with the ragtime pianist Tom Turpin.

Ragtime had become popular in the US as a result result of Scott Joplin's performance at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, the same fair, incidentally, that introduced the belly dancers known as Little Egypt, who we talked about in the episode on the Coasters a few weeks back.

But a year before that, Turpin, who was a friend of Joplin's, had written Harlem Rag, which was published in 1897 and became the first ragtime tune written by a black man to be published.

Turpin was another big man in St.

Louis politics, and he was one of those who signed petitions for Shelton's release.

While we can't know for sure, it seems likely that the earliest ragtime versions of the Stagger Lee song were written by Turpin.

It's been suggested that he based the song on Bully of the Town, a popular song written two years earlier, and itself very loosely based on a real murder case from New Orleans.

That song was popularized by Maya Irwin, in a play which is also notable for having a love scene filmed by Edison in 1897, making it possibly the first ever love scene to be filmed.

Irwin recorded her version in 1909, but she uses a racial slur, over and over again, which I am not going to allow on this podcast.

So here's a nineteen twenties version by Gid Tanner and his skillet liquors.

I'm looking for that bully all the time.

Wheel, I walked it, let me round and round.

Every day I may be found.

Wheel, I walked it, let me

That song, in its original versions, is about someone who goes out and kills a bully, in the same sense that Billy Lyons was a bully, and so becomes the biggest bully himself.

It's easy to see how Turpin could take that basic framework and add in some details about how his friend had done the same thing, and turn it into a new song.

By 1910, the song about Stack Stacklee had spread all across the country.

The folklorist and song collector John Lomax collected a version that year that went'Twas a Christmas morning, the hour was about ten, When Stagger Lee shot Billy Lions and landed in the Jefferson Pen.

Oh Lordy, poor Stagger Lee In nineteen twenty four, two white songwriters copyrighted a version of it, called Stacker Lee Blues, and we've heard instrumental versions of that from nineteen twenty three and 24 earlier in this episode.

That's what those instrumental breaks were.

Lovie Austin recorded a song called Skeggerly Blues in 1924, but that bears little lyrical resemblance to the Stagger Lee we know about.

I won't come in morning.

I've won running home.

It won't matter.

I don't have a

road.

The first vocal recording of the song that we would now recognise as being Stagger Lee was by Ma Rainey in 1925.

In her version, the melody and some of the words come from Frankie and Johnny, another popular song about a real-life murder in St.

Louis in the 1890s.

And when they see cycling coming,

they give him the wrong he was married.

According to Wikipedia, Louis Armstrong is playing cornet on that song.

It doesn't sound like him to me, and I can't find any other evidence for that, except other sites which get their information from Wikipedia.

Sites I Trust More say it was Joe Smith, and they also say that Coleman Hawkins and Fletcher Henderson are on the track.

By 1927, the song was being recorded in many different variants.

Long Cleave Reed and Little Harvey Hull recorded a version that clearly owes something to The Bully of the Town.

Philly,

how can it be?

You arrest a man just to faded me, but you wore it, Stagger Lee.

It is all

Tiger Lee.

And in possibly the most famous early version, Mississippi John Hurt asks why the police can't arrest that bad man Stagger Lee.

Police officer, how can it be?

You can arrest everybody with cruel stagger-lee.

That bad man,

oh cruel stagger-leave.

By this point, all connection with the real Lee Shelton had been lost, and it wouldn't be until the early 90s that the writer Cecil Brown would finally identify Shelton as the subject of the song.

During the 30s and 40s, the song came to be recorded by all sorts of musicians.

Almost all of them, either folk musicians like Woody Guthrie, blues musicians like Ivory Joe Hunter, or field recordings, like the singer known as Bama, who recorded this for the Lomaxes.

Billy, I'm sure gonna

take your life.

You have win my money's dad,

and I found a foul die.

None of these recorded versions was a major hit, but the song became hugely well known, particularly among black musicians around Louisiana.

It was a song in everyone's repertoire, and every version of the song followed the same basic structure to start with.

Stagger Lee told Billy Lyons he was going to kill him over a hat that had been lost in a game of craps.

Billy begged for his life, saying he had a wife and children, and Stagger Lee killed him anyway.

Often the bullet would pass right through Billy and break the bartender's glass.

From there the story might change.

In some versions Lee would go free, sometimes because they couldn't catch him, and sometimes because crowds of women implored the judge to let him off.

In other versions he would be locked up in jail, and in yet other versions he would be sentenced to death.

Sometimes he would survive execution through magical powers, sometimes he would be killed, and crowds of women would mourn him all dressed in red.

In the versions where he was killed, he would often descend to hell, where he would usurp the devil, because the devil wasn't as bad as Stagger Lee.

There were so many versions of this song that the New Orleans pianist Dr.

John was, according to some things I've read, able to play Stagger Lee for three hours straight without repeating a verse.

Very few of these recordings had any commercial success, but one that did was a 1950 New Orleans version of the song, performed by Archibald and his orchestra.

I was standing on the corner when I heard my bulldog bow.

They were balking at the two men who were gambling

in the dog.

That was Stacker Lee

and Billy.

Two men to

gambled late.

Stack a lead throwed seven, Billy sold that.

He told eight.

That version of the song was the longest ever recorded up to that point and took up both sides of a 78 record.

It was released on Imperial Records, the same label that Fat's Domino was on, in 1950, and was recorded at Cosimo Matas's studio.

It went top 10 on the Billboard RB charts and was Archibald's only hit.

That's the version that eight years later inspired Lloyd Price to record this.

at the two men who were gambling in the dark.

It was Slaggley

and Billy,

two men who gambled.

Slaggle Lee threw seven minutes more than

he threw eight.

That became a massive, massive hit.

It went to number one on both the Hot 100 and the RB charts, which incidentally makes Lloyd Price the earliest solo artist to have a number one hit on the Hot One Hundred and still be alive today.

Price's career was revitalized, and Stagger Lee was brought properly into the mainstream of American culture.

Over the next few decades, the song, inversions usually based on Price's, became a standard among white rock musicians.

Indeed, it seems to have been recorded by some of the whitest people in music history, like Huey Lewis in the News.

He was barking in the tomb and again

in the dawn

in the sky

Mike Love of the Beach Boys

Two men who gamble late

Stagger Lee threw a seven and it's more than

he threw eight

Stagger Lee

told Billy

I can't let you go without

You have won all my money and my brother new staggery Stetson hat staggering And Neil Diamond.

Stagger Lee,

he ran home,

went and got him his 44.

Said, I'm going to the ballroom just to pay that damn that I owe.

Go stagger me,

But while the song had hit the white mainstream, the myth of Stagger Lee had an altogether different power among the black community.

You see, up to this point, all we've been able to look at are versions of the song that have seen commercial release, and they all represent what was acceptable to be sold in shops at the time.

But as you may have guessed from the stuff about the devil I mentioned earlier, Stagger-Lee had become a folkloric figure of tremendous importance among many black Americans.

He represented the bad man who would never respect any authority, a trickster figure, but one who was violent as well.

He represented the angry black man, but a sort of righteous anger, even if that anger was chaotic.

Any black man who was not respected by white society would be thought of as a Stagger Lee figure, at least by some.

I've seen the label applied to everyone from O.J.

Simpson to Malcolm X.

Bobby Seal, the leader of the Black Panther Party, named his son Malik and Kroomer Stagger Lee Seale, and was often known to recite a version of Stagger Lee at parties.

In an interview later, Seale said, Now I transform Staggerly, more or less in my own mind, into brothers standing on the block and all of the illegitimate activity.

In effect, they were the lumpen proletariat in a high-tech social order, different from how lumpen had been described historically.

My point is this, that Malcolm X at one time was an illegitimate hustler.

Later in life, Malcolm X grows to have the most profound political consciousness, as far as I'm concerned.

To me, this brother was really getting ready to move.

So symbolically, at one time, he was Staggerly.

Lee.

The version of Stagger Lee that Seal knew is the one that came from something called toasts.

Toasting is a form of informal storytelling in black American culture, usually rhyming and usually using language and talking about subjects that would often be considered obscene.

Toasting is now generally considered one of the precursors of rapping, and the style and subject matter are often very similar.

Many of the stories told told in Toasts are very well known, including the story of the signifying monkey, which has been told in bowdlarised forms in many blues songs, including Chuck Berry's Jojo Gun, and the story of Shine, the black cook on the Titanic who swims for safety and refuses to help the captain's daughter even after she offers sex in return for his help.

Shine outswims the sharks who tried to eat him, and arrives back on land before anyone there even knew the ship was sinking.

Shine is, of course, another Stagger Lee style figure.

These toasts remained largely unknown outside of the less respectable parts of the black community, until the scholar Bruce Jackson published his seminal book, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me, African American Poetry from Oval Tradition, whose title is taken from a version of the story of Shine and the Titanic.

Jackson's field recordings, mostly recorded in prisons, have more recently been released on CD, though without the names of the performers attached.

Here's the version of Stagger Lee he collected.

There will be several beeps in this, and the next few recordings, if you're listening to the regular version of this podcast.

It was back in the time of 1902.

I had a f ⁇ ed up deck of card and I didn't know what to do.

My woman was leaving, she's putting me out in the cold.

I said, why are you leaving, baby?

She said, I love this grown-off.

So she kept packing the bags, so I said, f ⁇ it, you know.

So I waded through water and I waded through mud, and I came to this town called the Bucket of Blood.

And I asked the bartender for something to eat.

He gave me a dirty glass of water and a tough-ass piece of meat.

I said, Bartender, bartender, don't you know who I am?

He said, Frankly, my man, I don't give a goddamn.

I said, well, my name is Stack Alee.

So, oh, yes, I heard about you up this way, but I feed you home the mother f ⁇ ers each and every day.

After Jackson's book, but well before the recordings came out, Johnny Otis preserved many of these toasts in musical form on his Snatch and the Poontangs album, including The Great Stacker Lee, which clearly has the same sources as the version Jackson recorded.

A fed up coat and a fopped down hat, a T-model boat, and I didn't own that.

And if I didn't live four months ago, my wife kicked me out, I'm going to hold a hole.

I heard of a place called a Rampart Street.

I heard that the place where all the people meet.

I waited through all and I waited through more.

I waited to a place called a mother.

But I fell in love.

Oh, yes, I did, y'all.

That version was used as the basis for the most well-known recent-ish version of the song, the 1995 version by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

It was back in 30 days when times were hard.

He had a quote 45 and a deck of cards.

Staggerly

He wore rat drone shoes and an old Stetson hat.

Had a 2840 had payments on that.

Staggerly

I was woman threw him out on the ice and the snow and she told him never ever come back no more.

Staggery

Cave has later said in interviews that they improvised the music and used the lyrics from Jackson's book.

But the melody is very, very close to the Johnny Otis version.

And there's more evidence of Cave basing his version on the Johnny Otis track.

There's this line.

That's not in the versions of of the toast in Jackson's book, but it is in a different song on the Snatch and the Poontangs album, Two Time Slim.

But I want you to excuse me for being so bold.

But I'm the type of son of a bitch to crawl over over 50 goods to get to one fat boy's

this is the staggerly of legend the staggerly who is the narrator of James Baldwin's great poem Staggerly Wonders

a damning indictment of racist society kinsman

I have seen you betray your saviour.

It is you call him saviour

so many times.

And I have spoken to him about you behind your back.

Quite a lot has been going on behind your back.

And if your phone has not yet been disconnected, it will soon begin to ring.

Informing you, for example, that a whole generation in Africa is about to die.

And a new generation is about to rise.

And will not need your bribes or your persuasions any more.

Baldwin's view of Stagger Lee was, to quote from the interview from which that reading is also excerpted, a black folk hero, a singer essentially, who actually truly comes out of the auction block, by way of the cotton field, into the beginning of the black church.

And Stagger Lee's roots are there, and Stagger Lee's often been a preacher.

He's one who conveys the real history.

It's a far cry from one pimp murdering another on Christmas Day 1895,

and it's a mythos that almost everyone listening to Lloyd Price's hit version will have known nothing of.

As a result of Stagger Lee, Lloyd Price went on to have a successful career, scoring several more hits in 1959 and 1960, including the song for which he's now best known, Personality.

talk with personality, smile with personality, charm with personality, love personality, and blush you got a path,

and over,

whoa, I'll be a fool for you.

Rubbing over now over, rub it over and over.

What more can I do?

Cause you've got

personality.

Price also moved into other areas, including boxing promotion.

He was the person who got Don King, another figure who has often been compared to Stagger Lee, the chance to work with Muhammad Ali, and he later helped King promote the famous Rumble in the Jungle fight.

Lloyd Price is 87 years old now, and released his most recent album in 2016.

He still tours.

Indeed, his most recent live show was earlier this month, just before the current coronavirus outbreak meant live shows had to stop.

He opened his show, as he always does, with Stagger Lee.

And I hope that when we start having live shows again, he will continue to do so for a long, long time.

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