Stagger Lee

Also Known As: also Stagolee, Stack O’Lee, Stack-a-Lee, Stackalee; the folk figure built on Lee “Stag Lee” Shelton, a real St. Louis man, 1865-1912
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: African American Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: In song he is the bad man no law can hold, and in the richest written telling his power lives in a magic Stetson he bought with his soul.
Role in Mythos: He is the archetypal “bad man” of African American song and toast, the killer of Billy Lyons, whose story has been sung, recited and rewritten since 1895.
Relation to Humans: He began as a human being, a St. Louis carriage driver named Lee Shelton who shot William Lyons in a saloon on Christmas night 1895. The songs about him have been sung both to condemn him and to admire him, and the word “bad” in his refrain has carried both meanings.

Christmas night, 1895, and the saloon of Bill Curtis at Eleventh and Morgan Streets in St. Louis smells of beer and coal smoke. Two men who have been drinking together are arguing about politics. One of them reaches over and lifts the other’s hat off his head. The owner of the hat asks for it back. He does not ask twice.

That much is not legend. It is the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, reporting the next day that William Lyons, 25, a levee hand, had been shot in the abdomen by a carriage driver named Lee Sheldon, and that when Lyons fell to the floor the shooter took his hat from the wounded man’s hand and coolly walked away. The paper closed with a line that would outlive everything else in the column: Sheldon was also known as “Stag” Lee. Lyons died of the wound. Lee Shelton, born in Texas in 1865, went to trial, saw his first jury hang, and was then convicted of second-degree murder and given twenty-five years. Stagger Lee is what the song made of him.

The song moved faster than the courts. Early in 1897, a Kansas City Star reporter writing down the songs sung by Black prisoners in the city jail found one called “Stacka Lee”, described as an importation from St. Louis, which wondered what would happen when Stacka Lee had his trial through. By 1911 the sociologist Howard W. Odum could print two versions in the Journal of American Folklore, gathered across the South. In the first, Stagolee kills a man with “dat same ole fohty-fo'” and, one verse later, with the same old forty-five, and every stanza lands on the refrain “dat man, bad man, Stagolee done come.” Odum wrote about his singers from the lofty distance of a white academic of his day, as specimens of a type, but he got the words down, and his Georgia version already names the cause of the quarrel: a raw-hide Stetson hat. Mississippi John Hurt’s 1928 recording, with its “cruel Stack O’Lee”, is the one many listeners still call definitive. Lloyd Price took “Stagger Lee” to number one in 1959.

Nobody agrees where the nickname came from. One story says Shelton went “stag”, unaccompanied, to social events; another that he borrowed the name of a riverboat captain; John and Alan Lomax traced it to a Lee family steamboat called the Stack Lee. W. C. Handy guessed in 1926 that it was a name for a tall man, tall as a smokestack. In the mouths of singers it slid through Stack-a-Lee, Stackalee and Stagolee to Stagger Lee, and the man who had worn it faded behind the song. When the graduate student John Russell David went looking for its roots in St. Louis in the early 1970s, a local folk historian assured him that Stackalee had been a folklore character and nothing more. Then an 88-year-old musician named Ed McKinney, taped on a reel-to-reel, set him straight in one sentence: Stackalee’s name was Lee Shelton.

The supernatural Stack reached print in the summer of 1941, when Onah L. Spencer published “Stackalee” in the magazine Direction; the folklorist B. A. Botkin reprinted it in A Treasury of American Folklore in 1944. Spencer’s Stack comes kicking into the world double-jointed, with a full set of teeth and a veil over his face, and everybody knows a baby born with a veil can see ghosts. Grown into a drunk and a rounder, he meets the Devil one dark night on the road, is led into a graveyard and sells his soul. In return he gets an oxblood Stetson, said to be made from the raw hide of a man-eating panther that the Devil skinned alive, and as long as he keeps it he can do what no living man can. He shrinks small enough to sit inside a bottle on a shelf. He walks barefoot across hot slag from a pig-iron furnace and eats fire without burning his stomach. He turns himself into a mountain or a varmint, and old-timers swore his favourite night shape was a prowling wolf, which is why they sang that Stackalee didn’t wear no shoe and nobody could tell his track from a horse’s or a mule’s.

He spends the power the way a man spends a winning streak. Cornered between two mountains by a pair of deputies after the $5,000 on his head, he chats with them pleasantly, asks their names, shoots their initials through their hats, turns into a horse and gallops off with a crowd of little red devils riding on his back. In San Francisco one April morning in 1906, hungover and broke, he is refused a glass of gin and hauls on the bar with both hands, sweat rolling down his face in drops as big as marbles, until the ceiling comes down, and the building, and the city. Told in the street that it was an earthquake, he will not hear of it. It was the water pipes, he explains: they were all fastened together, and he must have pulled the whole town down by a faucet.

It is the Devil who tires of the bargain. He wants the soul, and he reasons that if Stack dies fighting another bad man God might not let it go to Hell, so he arranges for Stack to kill an innocent family man instead. At a card game on a cold, frosty Friday night, Stack is so busy raking in his winnings that he hangs the oxblood hat on the back of his chair. The Devil, wearing Billy Lyons’s face, snatches it and runs to the barrelhouse where the real Billy stands by the door, smoking and watching the dancers. Stack arrives hatless and furious, and Billy begs for his life for the sake of his wife and babies. Stack shoots him anyway. Outside the jailhouse window afterwards, a black cat sits waiting, and it is not a cat.

The ballad Spencer printed alongside the tale keeps the fight going. Asleep in his cell, Stack dreams that the Devil has come up from Hell for him, and the struggle goes so badly for the Devil that he ends scrambling up the wall, yelling for someone to come and get this bad man before he puts the fire out. Later versions, as Cecil Brown’s history of the legend records, carry Stagolee down to Hell itself and let him take it over. Spencer added that policy players prized luck charms bearing Stackalee’s name, and that such mojoes sold from a dollar up. How much of his marvellous Stack he collected and how much he improved is not on record, and no independent telling of the panther-skin hat has surfaced.

The songs keep some facts and bend others. Billy nearly always pleads for two little babies and a loving wife, yet Lyons’s death certificate called him single; the poet Eric McHenry, working through John Russell David’s papers, has turned up two possible families for him and cannot settle between them. The songs march Stagolee proudly to the gallows. The real Shelton was paroled around 1909, went back to prison in 1911 after a robbery in which he fractured his victim’s skull with a pistol, and died of tuberculosis in the penitentiary hospital at Jefferson City on 11 March 1912, weighing less than a hundred pounds. George M. Eberhart argued in 1996 that Shelton was no murderer at all and probably fired in self-defence. McHenry’s search of the St. Louis papers found him arrested three times in 1889 and 1890 for assault with intent to kill. The legend may have slandered Lee Shelton less than it seems.

A man died over a hat. The story survived because of what the hat stood for. The scholar John W. Roberts described bad men like Stagolee as more a projection than a role model, a release for people living under the limits imposed on Black Americans after emancipation, and Brown wrote that every performance of the story grants singer and audience “time out” from life in a racist society. So Stagger Lee’s real power is refusal. He takes no insult, gives back nothing that is his, and cannot be frightened by deputies, juries or the Devil himself. His weakness is the same thing turned over. Take his hat and he loses his head, and in Spencer’s telling his magic with it; he can pull down a city but cannot master his own temper, and the law, slowly, gets him in the end. From the 1960s some singers swapped the Stetson for a Cadillac. The weakness moved with it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Was Stagger Lee a real person?

Yes. Stagger Lee is based on Lee Shelton, a St. Louis carriage driver nicknamed “Stag” Lee, who shot William “Billy” Lyons in Bill Curtis’s saloon on Christmas night 1895. Shelton was convicted of second-degree murder and died of tuberculosis in the Missouri State Penitentiary hospital in 1912.

Why did Stagger Lee shoot Billy Lyons?

According to the 1895 newspaper report, Stagger Lee shot Billy Lyons after an argument that ended with Lyons snatching Shelton’s hat and refusing to return it. In the songs the hat becomes a Stetson, and in Onah L. Spencer’s 1941 telling it is a magic hat the Devil gave Stagger Lee in exchange for his soul.

What is the Stagger Lee song about?

The Stagger Lee song tells how the “bad man” Stagolee kills Billy Lyons over a hat, usually ignoring Billy’s plea for his wife and children, and then faces the law. It was sung by prisoners in Kansas City by 1897, printed by Howard W. Odum in 1911, recorded by Mississippi John Hurt in 1928, and taken to number one by Lloyd Price in 1959.

Did Stagger Lee sell his soul to the Devil?

In the legend printed by Onah L. Spencer in 1941 and reprinted by B. A. Botkin in 1944, Stagger Lee sells his soul to the Devil in a graveyard in exchange for an oxblood Stetson that gives him magical powers. In that telling the Devil later disguises himself as Billy Lyons and steals the hat, tricking Stagger Lee into killing an innocent man.

Why is Stagger Lee called a bad man?

Stagger Lee is the model of the “bad man” in African American folklore, a figure who answers every insult with violence and fears no authority. The songs use “bad” both as condemnation and as admiration, and scholars such as John W. Roberts and Cecil Brown read the figure as a release from the pressures of life in a racist society.