Stagger Lee, frequently also known as
Stagolee,
Stackerlee,
Stack O'Lee,
Stack-a-Lee and by
several other variants, is a popular
blues folk song based
on the murder of William "Billy" Lyons by
Stagger Lee Shelton. The version
recorded by
Mississippi John
Hurt in
1928 is considered by some
commentators to be definitive, containing as it does all of the
elements that appear in other versions. A cover with different
lyrics was a chart hit for
Lloyd Price
in
1959;
Dick Clark felt that the original
tale of murder was too morbid for his
American Bandstand audience, and
insisted that they be changed to eliminate the murder. In Clark's
version, the subject was changed from gambling to fighting over a
woman, and instead of a murder, the two yelled at each other, and
made up the next day. Despite the changes, it was the original
version of the song that reached #1 on
Billboard's Hot 100 and was ranked #456 on
Rolling Stone's list of the
500 Greatest Songs of All
Time.
"Stag O Lee" songs may have predated even the 1895 incident , and
Lee Shelton may have gotten his nickname from earlier folk songs.
The first published version of the song was by folklorist
John Lomax in 1910. The song was well known in
African American communities along
the lower
Mississippi River by the
1910s .
Before
World War II, it was almost
always known as "Stack O'Lee" .
W.C.
Handy wrote that this probably was a
nickname for a tall person, comparing him to the tall
smokestack of the large
steamboat Robert E. Lee . By the
time W.C.
Handy wrote that explanation in the 1920s,
"Stack O' Lee" was already familiar in United States
popular culture, with recordings of the song made
by such pop singers of the day as Cliff
Edwards.
In Hurt's version, as in all such pieces, there are many (sometimes
anachronistic) variants on the lyrics. Several older versions give
Billy's last name as "De Lyons" or "Deslile".
A version by
The Fabulous
Thunderbirds can be found on the
Porky's Revenge soundtrack.
Johnny Otis's band
Snatch and the Poontangs perform a
version in which the violence is matched by the sex.
The
Grateful Dead recorded a version
of the tale which focuses on the fictionalized hours after the
death of "Billy DeLion", when Billy's wife Delia tracks down
Stagger Lee in a local saloon and "she shot him in the balls" in
revenge for Billy's death.
Elton John's 1976 "
Blue Moves" album
included the song "Shoulder Holster", about a vengeful woman out to
kill her cheating ex. The song begins with the lyrics "It was just
like Frankie and Johnny / And it was just like Stagger Lee".
The 1979 album
London
Calling by
The Clash includes a
ska version (a cover of a song by the Jamaican
rocksteady group
The Rulers) titled "Wrong 'Em Boyo", in which
Stagger Lee is explicitly the hero and Billy the villain. Another
variant by Austin blues artist Steve James retells the story from
Stagger Lee's perspective, as the underprivileged child of a
prostitute and a steamboat worker, and like the Clash's version,
Billy is not innocent.
Nick Cave and the Bad
Seeds, by contrast, present an even more violent and homoerotic
version of the song "Stagger Lee" on their 1996 album
Murder Ballads. This version retakes a
street
"toast poem" on Stagolee . Toasts
are 'pre-
rap' poems and stories especially
popular among those in "the life" and among prisoners. The song
contains much swearing and shows the story from a neutral
perspective; Stagger Lee refers to himself as "The Bad
Motherfucker." The song also appears to set the story in the 1930s.
This is evident in the opening line "It was back in '32 when times
were hard."
More recently,
the Black Keys
recorded a song entitled "Stack Shot Billy" on their 2004 album
Rubber Factory. In 2005,
Chris Whitley and
Jeff Lang recorded their own arrangement of the
song, called "Stagger Lee", ultimately released on their 2006 CD
Dislocation Blues.
A version of Staggolee performed by
Pacific Gas & Electric
was included on the soundtrack for
Quentin Tarantino's film
Death Proof, the second portion of the 2007
double-feature
Grindhouse. In the 2007 film
Black Snake Moan,
Samuel L. Jackson's character sings a boastful
version of the song from Stagger Lee's perspective, titled
"Stackolee". This version is based on
R. L. Burnside's rendition which can be heard on
the album
Well, Well, Well. Blues musician
Keb' Mo' performs his version of Stack O Lee in a
scene from the 2007 film Honeydripper.
List of artists to record song
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