William Lyons, 25, a levee hand, was shot in the abdomen yesterday evening at 10 o’clock in the saloon of Bill Curtis, at Eleventh and Morgan Streets, by Lee Sheldon, a carriage driver. Lyons and Sheldon were friends and were talking together. Both parties, it seems, had been drinking and were feeling in exuberant spirits. The discussion drifted to politics, and an argument was started, the conclusion of which was that Lyons snatched Sheldon’s hat from his head. The latter indignantly demanded its return. Lyons refused, and Sheldon withdrew his revolver and shot Lyons in the abdomen. When his victim fell to the floor Sheldon took his hat from the hand of the wounded man and coolly walked away. He was subsequently arrested and locked up at the Chestnut Street Station. Lyons was taken to the Dispensary, where his wounds were pronounced serious. Lee Sheldon is also known as ‘Stag’ Lee.

This 1895 account from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat gives the background for the blues standard known variously as “Stagger Lee,” “Stagolee,” “Stackerlee,” “Stack O’Lee,” and “Stack-a-Lee.” It was recorded definitively by Mississippi John Hurt in 1928, and adapted by Lloyd Price in the late-1950s into this parcel of straight R&B. By regularizing the extant folk lyrics, which revolved with many variations around the Lee Sheldon story, he constructed a narrative clear enough that it could be performed for the military in the Korean War: “There were hundreds of lyrics for the old song, but no story. While entertaining the troops, I had put together a little play based on it. I’d have soldiers acting out the story while I sang it.”

The result is the unusual marriage of a high-form Tin Pan Alley lyric (complete with scene-setting intro) and a loose R&B recording. Unexpectedly, it went to #1 in 1959, probably near the end of the era that a recording with a band this wobbly could achieve that. Though Price didn’t put together the framework of the song or invent the story, his contribution is extraordinary in its own merits: the meter of the verse and its consistent tenor wear their craft subtly, through the pitch-perfect significant details: the moon and leaves in the intro (an established metaphor for fallen soldiers), the narrator’s bulldog, the “swore” in the couplet “Stagger Lee threw seven / Billy swore that he threw eight,” Lee’s euphemistic apostrophe about “paying that debt I owe.” It’s classicism, and the structure of the chorus reflects that: its straining repetition, rather than emphasizing a recurring verbal theme and setting verses off from each other, is merely interpolated into the drama (it’s a chorus in the oldest sense), which adds textural emphasis while allowing Price’s plot to advance at a set pace. The relative reserve of all this development sets up the last — hyper-cinematic — line to stand out more plangently: “Stagger Lee shot Billy / Oh he shot that poor boy so bad / ‘Til the bullet came through Billy / And broke the bartender’s glass.”

Comments

1. ↩ Zach / 22 March 2011

   The original 45 of this is substantially different, and makes much of the above not really to the point.