Guest post by Nathan Arizona
His name was Stagolee or Stack Lee. Could have been Stag-A-Lee, Stackolee or Stag Lee. Maybe it was Stackerlee or Stack-O-Lee. But since Lloyd Price’s huge hit song in1958 about the famous bar-room killer, he’s generally been known as “Stagger Lee,” the name Price gave him in his version of the story.
Stagger Lee was a real-life pimp named Lee Shelton who shot and killed a man in a St. Lous saloon in 1895 after the guy knocked his hat off — his “brand new Stetson hat,” as Price sings it. He might have gotten his name from a riverboat named Stack Lee used as a floating bordello. He was flashy dude admired in his black community for his assertiveness. It didn’t seem to matter that the fellow he shot “had three little children and a very sickly wife.” Price’s background singers cheer him on. “Go Stagger Lee! Go Stagger Lee!”
They were writing songs about him by the time he was sent to prison in 1897. One Prof. Charlie Lee had a ragtime version out that year. A website devoted to Stagger Lee has counted 538 versions of the song, recorded and unrecorded.
Ma Rainey recorded “Stag O’ Lee Blues” in 1926, conflating Stagger Lee’s story with the tale of “Frankie and Johnny,” another murder song from around the same time and place. Louis Armstrong played cornet on her record. The many others who have taken a crack at it include Woody Guthrie, Cab Calloway, Tina Turner, Bob Dylan, Tennessee Ernie Ford, the Grateful Dead, Wilson Pickett, Sidney Bechet, Pat Boone (!) and “Negro Woman Prisoner.”
W.H. Auden and James Baldwin wrote poems about him. Black Panther activist Bobby Seale gave his son the middle name Stagolee to symbolize resistance to oppression. Rock critic Greil Marcus saw Stagger Lee as ”Muddy Waters’ cool and elemental Rollin’ Stone; Chuck Berry’s Brown-Eyed Handsome Man.”
Price had achieved some success in New Orleans r&b with “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” and other songs, but he gave “Stagger Lee” a slightly more pop spin. He also gave it a new melody. Price had several more hits, including”Personality,” a Billboard No. 2 in 1959. He entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998.
Here’s Lloyd Price with the song once described “a spirited New Orleans rumble.” When Price sang it on the teen dance show “Bandstand” Dick Clark made him change the lyrics so that Stagger Lee doesn’t shoot anybody.
Amy Winehouse gave a powerful but somewhat shambolic performance of the song in Brazil at one of her final concerts. You can see she might be on the edge of something dark.
Nick Cave changed the words to accentuate the darkness and all but abandoned melody. It first appeared on Cave’s 1996 album “Murder Ballads.”
Mississippi John Hurt made it a blues song in 1928 and was still singing it at folk festivals in the ‘60s.
