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Whatever name you call Stagger Lee, we know one thing for sure: He shot Billy Lyons in plain sight, with a bar full of witnesses. If you’ve heard the song, you might think he did it because he lost a game of dice. But the real Stagger Lee wasn’t gambling at all. He got mad when Billy took his Stetson hat and wouldn’t give it back, so he fired the gun. What could lead to such a violent end? There’s a good chance it was politics — a life and death subject for these men.
• “The Mystery of Stack-O-Lee” on Mother Jones
• “The Legend of Stagger Lee is Born” on History.com
Deep Dive Reading
• Stagolee Shot Billy by Cecil Brown (Harvard University Press, 2004)
• “Staggerlee Wonders” by James Baldwin
• “A Christmas Killing: Stagger Lee” on Planet Slade
• Hear My Sad Story: The True Tales that Inspired Stagolee, John Henry, and Other Traditional Folk Songs by Richard Polenberg (Cornell University Press, 2015)
• “Stagger Lee: How Violent Nostalgia Created an American Folk Song Standard” in the Journal of Extreme Anthropology
• “The Number Ones: Lloyd Price’s Stagger Lee” on Stereogum
• Price’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame biography
• “Lloyd Price’s Personality: Long Live the Real King!” an interview with Jazz Weekly
• Price interviewed by Dick Clark about Stagger Lee
Deep Dive Reading
• Sumdumhonky by Lloyd Price (Cool Titles, 2015)
• “Rock and Roll Legend Lloyd Price Talks Sumdumhonky and Reflects on Race, Life, and Writing Hits” in Glide Magazine
• Timeline of Missouri’s African American History from the Missouri State Archives
• “Reconstruction Politics in Missouri” on PBS’s American Experience
• A Preservation Plan for St. Louis Part 1: Historical Contexts, The African American Experience in St. Louis from the Cultural Resources Office of St. Louis
Deep Dive Reading
• The Missouri Compromise research guide from the Library of Congress
• Cornell Law School analysis of the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court
• Supreme Court majority opinion on Dred Scott v. Sanford
• Justice Stephen Breyer Supreme Court Historical Society Annual Lecture, 2009: “Guardian of the Constitution: The Counter Example of Dred Scott”
Lloyd Price had one thing on ‘is mind when he started singing as a teenager — getting the hell outta Kenner, Louisiana. After he landed his first hit single, Price set his sights on becoming a star. Even though he faced a huge color barrier in the music industry, that wouldn’t stop him.
At only 19 years old, Price topped the charts with “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” a classic from 1952. It was the first song Price ever wrote, and he ad-libbed most of the lyrics in the studio. Plus, Fats Domino played piano on the track — he just showed up at the session because he knew the producer, Dave Bartholomew. That’s quite a flex for your debut record! The song went to No. 1 and was arguably the invention of rock and roll.
All that to say: Lloyd Price was a big fucking deal. He led the tide of Black artists shepherding the transition from blues and R&B into rock and roll. He was the first Black teen idol. He helped bring Black and white kids together to dance and listen to music in a way they hadn’t before. And the release of his first single helped start the youth-led movement to end segregation in America.
Price’s success was put on hold for a bit when he was drafted in 1953. He asked for a deferment of service due to hardship. Five of his brothers were already in the military, his father was in long-term recovery from a hip injury, and he — the eighth of 11 children — was the family’s breadwinner. The draft board told Price that the order to serve came directly from Washington. Specifically from Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, a segregationist who chaired the Armed Services Committee. He publicly said Price had to be drafted to stop the ruckus his music was causing. Russell didn’t like the kids mixing races and this abuse of power was his way of doing something about it.
While Price served in Korea, his label wanted him to record some new songs. Price said he couldn’t and suggested they ask Little Richard instead, opening the door for another Black godfather of rock.
When Price returned to Louisiana, he was ready to get busy recording again. In 1956, he started his own record label. He took control of his career in a way most artists only dream of — he bought out his recording and publishing contracts. Although he later learned that both contracts were already expired. That means Price got swindled out of the thousand dollars he paid to get out of them. He just didn’t know, because he didn’t know how to read contracts and didn’t have a lawyer he trusted to do it for him.
Despite that dickery, Price landed himself in the No. 1 slot again in 1959. This time, it was with a song you’re about to get very familiar with, if you aren’t already: “Stagger Lee.”
Price told Jazz Weekly that he discovered “Stagger Lee” while serving in the Army, when he played it with some fellow soldiers. It sounds like Price took a cue from a 1950 arrangement of the song recorded by a New Orleans pianist named Archibald. It was already a hit, but Price supercharged it with an engine of rock and roll. At the time, he didn’t realize he just created something amazing.
“Stagger Lee” was shipped out as a b-side, to fill up the flip side of a single everyone expected to be much bigger. But for the radio DJs who got the record, “Stagger Lee” was the hit. It became Price’s second No. 1. For a time, this song was selling 200,000 copies a day. A DAY. But even as he sat atop the charts, Price couldn’t get a seat at a lunch counter when he toured in the segregated South.
I’m Courtney E. Smith and you’re listening to SONGS IN THE KEY OF DEATH. This is the story of Stagger Lee, the bad man who became a Black folk hero.
On Christmas night in 1895, several murders happened in St. Louis’s “Bloody Third” District, but only one remains in our memory. Only one became a murder ballad.
The version of “Stagger Lee” that Price recorded tells the story of Stagger Lee and Billy, two Black men throwing dice one night. Billy says Stag threw an eight when it was a seven, winning all Stag’s money and taking his Stetson hat. So Stag gets his gun to kill Billy. Aaand Stag has the balls to do it in a barroom full of witnesses while Billy begs for his life, saying he’s got a sick wife and kids to go home to. Some of that was accurate. But most of it wasn’t.
Lee Shelton, better known around town as Stack Lee, was a carriage driver, a pimp, a Black political activist, owner of the Modern Horseshoe Club, and an influential man in the St. Louis underworld. He also headed up the 400 Club, a sporting circle whose members were gamblers and other macks, which is French slang for pimps. Missouri Life magazine described Stack as “unpossessing” physically. “At five-foot-seven, he was a relatively small man with a crossed left eye. According to the prison record, he had a face and torso that boasted several scars.” They suggest his carriage driving job was a means to an end, to take white visitors who wanted to get a taste of the culture in Black neighborhoods to his nightclub or to visit the girls under his purview.
So when William “Billy” Lyons, a dock worker, walked into the Bill Curtis Saloon with a friend that Christmas night, Billy asked his buddy to borrow a weapon. The guy handed Billy a knife. Later, Stack came in wearing a very nice Stetson hat with an image of his girl, Lillie, embroidered on it. Then Stack asked the room, “Who’s treating?” And Billy bought the man a drink. The two knew each other from running in the same social circles, and they sat, chatting and drinking for several hours. But things went south when talk turned to politics. The men came to blows and before you know it, Billy snatched that fine Stetson hat right off of Stack’s head. That’s when Stack pulled out his .44, pistol-whipped Billy, and demanded his hat back. When that didn’t work, Stack threatened to kill him. And then — Billy drew the knife. We probably shouldn’t make a joke about bringing a knife to a gun fight right? Too on the nose?
And Stack shot Billy, grabbed his Stetson, and walked out. Guess that’s what drinking heavily and talking politics gets ya — even in the 1800s! Stack went back to his house, leaving the gun with his landlady. At 3 a.m., the police came to arrest Stack. He wasn’t home, but they found the landlady carrying a note to his girl, Lillie. The cops went to Lillie’s house and found Stack in her bed. When they returned to Stack’s house to search it, his landlady handed over the gun.
Billy died in a hospital around 4 a.m. By then, Stack was already in jail.
What you don’t hear in this version of the story — the real version of the story — are some trappings that became famous thanks to songs that claimed to document the crime. And there were a lot of versions of “Stagger Lee;” songwriters took a few liberties. Of course.
The song tells us about a gambler and degenerate who killed a man over a matter of pride. This Stagger Lee is running around using his smokin’ .41 — that’s the wrong gun — with very little cause. In the older versions, he’s called “that bad man, Stagger Lee.” He’s a drinker, and in every iteration, he kills Billy. Sometimes he does it while Billy begs for his life.
By the 1920s, white orchestras a-plenty were playing and recording versions of the song — that bad man was a prohibition-era favorite. The first Black artist to record it was Ma Rainey, who mixed up the words in the studio and ended up mostly singing “Frankie and Johnny” with some “Stagger Lee” elements mixed in. That’s understandable since the crimes happened just four years apart in the same city. The story of who wrote the song is lost, but we know there were several balladeers working in St. Louis at the time. After all, it was a major hot bed of ragtime and blues music. We also know that white songwriters would go to the Black clubs to steal songs. So that’s one way it got around, traveling from Black to white circles.
Song collectors have theorized that “Stackolee,” another name the song went by, also traveled as a favorite of dock and ship workers. Stack-o-Lee wasn’t just close to Stack’s nickname. It was also a Mississippi River line steamboat. They sang it to keep time on the line while they unloaded cargo from ships. It was also popular as a chain gang work song, for the same time keeping reasons. And because those were guys admired a bad man, and even saw themselves in Stack.
As for the real Stack, after he was charged with the murder, he hired Nat Dryden, one of the best lawyers in town. Dryden was the first lawyer in Missouri to get a white man convicted for killing a Black man. Stack was facing first-degree murder charges after the coroner’s inquest, thanks to a lot of damning testimony from eyewitnesses to the crime. He was held in jail while a grand jury debated his fate. In January 1896, he was given the chance to post his bond and quickly paid the four thousand dollar fee. So between owning a brick house in a nice part of town, hiring a hotshot white lawyer, and paying a bail bond that would be around a hundred thousand dollars today, it’s clear Stack had some money.
Stack was tried for Billy’s murder that July. His lawyer argued self-defense. The jury was hung and the judge declared a mistrial. As Stack braced himself for a retrial in August 1897, tragedy struck. Stack’s brilliant defense attorney died. Dryden was a great lawyer but also a drunk. He fell off the wagon and went on a drinking binge that turned out to be his last.
The records of what happened at Stack’s second trial are lost. What we do know is that, without Dryden, he was found guilty. Stack was sent to the Missouri State Penitentiary that October to serve a 25-year sentence. He didn’t serve his full time, though. After helping with some kind of operation to find a thief — sorry, we don’t know the details — Stack was paroled on Thanksgiving 1909, after 12 years in prison.
But Stack Lee was not one to stay out of trouble. Two years later, Stack was arrested again. This time for assault and robbery of another Black man. Stack beat the man with a revolver and broke his skull. He was sent back to prison in 1911, but by then he was ill with tuberculosis. The governor of Missouri granted him parole the next year, due to the health issues — and some political pressure that we’re about to get into. Unfortunately for Stack, the state attorney general objected. He died in jail in March 1912.
Those are the bare-bones facts of Stack Lee Shelton killing Billy Lyons. But pull up a seat and get comfortable, because we’re about to talk about why politics are the key to understanding this story.
First, let’s have a little history recap to get a sense of how unique Missouri was in this era. Slavery was important to its existence as a state well before the Civil War. It was only admitted to the Union thanks to the Missouri Compromise in 1820, which officially drew lines between the slave and free territories.
It was also at the center of the Dred Scott decision in 1857, when the Supreme Court ruled that living in a free state didn’t guarantee a slave’s freedom and that because African Americans were slaves they couldn’t be US citizens. By the way, that invalidated the Missouri Compromise.
During that time, most white Missourians didn’t support abolition, and St. Louis was a major slave market. Race relations were even more complex in cities where (relatively) freemen mingled with skilled enslaved people. Then you had white people who moved to the state where industry was growing, bringing wildly different opinions on slavery. Slave traders rubbed elbows with abolitionists who worked on the Underground Railroad.
Once the Civil War came, Missouri still practiced slavery, even though it technically remained in the Union. But men in the state fought for both sides, mostly along party lines. Radical Republicans chose the North, and Conservative Democrats fought for the Confederacy.
When the war ended, the Republicans gave Black men their freedom, the right to vote, and, on paper, civil rights. But there wasn’t a sudden investment in schools to provide Blacks education — in fact, quite the opposite, even though support for Black schools was mandated in the state constitution. Neighborhoods stayed segregated. There was also no shift in public perception to offer free Blacks higher social status. They certainly weren’t able to find new career opportunities either. And there was no upward mobility without those things.
After the war, Republicans stripped Democrats of all political power in Missouri, including the ability to hold office, vote, or even speak from the pulpit. With all the power in the state and the Black vote in their pocket, Republicans ran things. For about 15 years, anyway. That pissed off a bunch of white men and encouraged the KKK to start terrorizing the population. Plus it left the Democratic party in the hands of Union supporters who didn’t like slavery but also didn't like Black and white people mixing. So, those Dems pushed to keep segregation. In the 1870s, a new state constitution outlawed interracial marriage, kept schools segregated, and gave Confederate supporters amnesty.
Meanwhile, advances in the cotton industry drove huge growth in St. Louis. During this time, the Black population in Missouri was increasing, as freed slaves moved away from the South, hoping for new opportunities. The influx of freed Black people was seen as a problem by the existing Black community, especially in St. Louis. Some were afraid the larger Black population would drain what little public money actually went to Black people. And some were concerned that unskilled and uneducated workers fresh off plantations would play up white ideas about racial inferiority.
By the 1890s, St. Louis was the fourth largest city in the U.S. And in 1896, one year after Stack Lee killed Billy, the Supreme Court passed the “separate but equal” doctrine, which allowed for segregation in public places. In his early 30s, when the events of “Stagger Lee” happened, Stack Lee was gaining influence in the first generation of post-slavery Black freemen. But the abolition of slavery didn’t mean the abolition of racism.
Black support for Republicans in Missouri was waning because those politicians weren’t following through on promises to improve the lives of Black people after the war.
In his book, Stagolee Shot Billy, Cecil Brown breaks down the political entanglements of Stack Lee and Billy Lyons. Based on his research, Brown shows that Stack was a Democrat. His affiliation could date back to the mid-1880s since there's a chance his nickname had something to do with a political party called the Stags, made up largely of pimps.
On the other hand, Billy was a Republican. For Black men at the time, politics was less about voting, in part because voting wasn’t a right Black people were uniformly able to access, and more about being a boss who makes and enforces rules, sometimes violently and with guns. The stakes were life and death.
Stack Lee was an important guy. We established that he had money. In addition to being a pimp who controlled white men’s access to prostitutes, he owned a saloon and ran a social club that met above that saloon, where Black men heard speeches from white political bosses. It’s possible Stack Lee collected money from the Democratic party for rounding up votes in the part of town he ran. That was pretty common at the time, as was manipulating elections by keeping opposing voters from getting to the polls by whatever means necessary. Yeah, you heard the subtext correctly.
Black nightclubs were one of the few places where it was socially acceptable for whites and Blacks to mix — where white people went to hear ragtime music and see dancing. There might also be gambling, and it’s where you could find a mack to get a prostitute. There was an underworld in St. Louis that drove the nightlife and the political climate. Stack Lee was a serious player in both. A “bad man,” as the song goes.
To underscore his importance to the Democrats, check this out: while Stack was in jail for shooting Billy, two petitions were submitted for his release. One was signed by a former Missouri Lt. Governor as well as a member of the legislature and a prominent lawyer — white men. And another was signed by a group of middle-class Blacks that included influential Democrats. That’s remarkable!
Now Billy Lyons’ brother-in-law was Henry Bridgewater, who Brown identifies as one of the richest Black men in St. Louis. And he was a Republican. Henry ran multiple saloons in St. Louis and was a member of the Colored Silk Stalkings, an elite group of Black Republicans. One informant told the police that Stack Lee killed Billy as part of a vendetta against Bridgewater. It was a convoluted story about Stack avenging a friend’s murder. Sure...that was a part of their history, but it’s just as likely the two men were drunk and then started talking politics, on which they strongly disagreed.
But talking politics wasn’t just some theoretical conversation for Stack and Billy. It would’ve felt like a matter of life and death, because it was. Lynching was very real and on the rise. So were the white men who raided Black saloons, beating and misusing the women. So was their desire to be treated as free and equal men in society. It would have been a discussion of their livelihoods, which were tied up in their political associations. It would have been extremely personal.
That doesn’t mean it was a good enough reason for Stack to kill Billy. But it feels a lot more compelling than saying he “shot the man for messing with his hat" — which is a deep offense on its own, frankly. It feels way more serious than losing your mind over a game of dice. That story, by the way, originated with a false report in a local paper during Stack’s trial.
It helps us understand WHY Stack Lee is a folk hero to Black people. He controlled the white man’s access to political offices with his access to Black voters. And with Democrats trying to regain control of Missouri, the Black vote meant a lot. Stack had power. He had money. And he had a political machine trying to get him off the hook for murder.
When the bluesmen who started singing about Stack Lee called him a “bad man,” they didn’t mean bad bad. They meant Badass bad. He was above the place given to Black men in society by whites. And in some ways, he was above the law.
So back to “Stagger Lee,” the song. You need to know that every version you’ve heard by a white performer is derivative of something a Black performer did first.
Mississippi John Hurt sings what many consider the definitive blues version of “Stackolee.” His take on the song isn’t sad, which probably had a lot of influence on how the song was handed down. In it, Stack Lee is a hell-raising scoundrel which...is not far from the truth.
The book Stack Shot Billy also points out that hobo musicians like Hurt, who were Black men earning a living without taking a job given to them by white men were “considered to have beaten the white man at his own game; they became a symbol of freedom and enjoyed a high status among Blacks.”
So you know that Nick Cave version of “Stagger Lee” that’s the dirtiest version of the song ever recorded? Yeah, it came from a book of toasts that Black civil rights activists passed around to each other in the 1960s. “Stagger Lee” was a favorite in a game where the objective was to make a toast as profane as possible, lionizing a Black hero in an exclusively Black space.
Now back to Lloyd Price, who kind of did the opposite. While his original “Stagger Lee” is legendary, he created a second version of the song that takes the teeth out of the story. Price changed the ending, and cut out the gambling, the fighting, and the killing.
The censored version was created at the behest of Dick Clark, when he invited Price to appear on American Bandstand, which was recently promoted from a regional Philly broadcast to airing nationally on ABC. Getting that kind of audience — millions of eyes and ears — guaranteed a huge spike in popularity for Price, and for “Stagger Lee.” He had to do it.
If you’ve watched the movie Hairspray, which was based on the story of American Bandstand, you know the show notoriously kept dancers segregated, and minimized airtime for Black dancers. At the same time, they featured appearances by Black performers including Chuck Berry, Sam Cooke, and, of course, Lloyd Price — all of whom helped integrate music.
There’s a clip of Clark interviewing Price in the ‘70s where he asks about changing the lyrics. “There’s a very good reason,” Clark says. “Do you want to tell that story?” Price does, saying Clark called him up and said “you can’t use that lyric because there’s shootin’ and cuttin’ and crap games.” They both laugh loudly and Clark says, “We didn’t do things like that in the ‘50s!”
But that’s bullshit. In the ‘50s, the most popular type of TV shows were westerns. There were hundreds on the air throughout the decade. Do you know what people did in westerns? Shot each other. Gambled. Kidnapped. Raped. Every terrible thing you could think of. They could do it because there was nothing in the FCC obscenity regulations that prohibited it.
But really, they could do it because the cowboys were white. What Clark meant was: we didn’t let Black people talk about that stuff in the ‘50s. Asking Price to change the song lyrics was an act of self-censorship to keep advertisers happy.
You know though, some lame lyrics weren’t going to stop Price with his big New Orleans sound and his even bigger personality. He still got back to the No. 1 slot, just like he wanted to — just like a bad man would.
Thanks for listening to Songs in the Key of Death. This episode owes a great debt to Stagolee Shot Billy by Cecil Brown, the book which provided much of the framework and research for understanding the context of the song. It also references details from the life of Lloyd Price which you can read in his book, Sumdumhonkey. You can read more about Stagger Lee and his life in our show notes.
So here we have Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Nathan Salsburg with their version of “Stagger Lee,” about a man who never learned to lose.
