Daily Archives: Monday, July 3, 2017

  • Three Views of Stagger Lee

    Popular culture comes in a variety of forms.  There may be a traditional version (or versions) that is handed down from generation to generation.  There may be underground variations that until recent years were not discussed in polite society.  And there may be a “prime time”  offering designed so as not to offend a broad general audience.  As a case in point, I offer “Stagger Lee” — one of the most durable American crime ballads and a celebration of badass criminal violence that predates gangsta rap by about ninety years.

    “Stagger Lee,” also known as “Stackolee” and “Stagolee,” has been recorded over four hundred times by artists from Mississippi John Hurt to Wilson Picket to, in more recent years, Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse.  It tells the story of a fight between a man named Billy Lyons and the title character — a tough-as-nails anti-hero who mercilessly shoots Billy down.  Here is a recording with a traditional feel released in 1969 by Taj Mahal.

     

    Much research has gone into tracing in the origins of the song.  In The Folk Songs of North America in the English Language, Alan Lomax referred to tales identifying Stagger Lee with the mulatto son of a Confederate cavalryman and with a “tough Memphis sport” who “sold his soul to the Devil in return for a magic Stetson hat.”  But more recent scholarship has identified the protagonist as

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