Ryan Kirkby | Archives Associate
On a chilly Christmas night in 1895, local pimp Lee Shelton walked into a St. Louis saloon and shot Billy Lyons. His reason? Lyons touched his hat.
There is more to the story.
According to folklorist Cecil Brown in his book Stagolee Shot Billy (2003), eyewitness observers told police that Shelton and Lyons had been drinking and laughing amicably until a brawl broke out over politics. In the 1890s, St. Louis was one of the largest cities in the United States, with a thriving African-American population whose support was crucial for winning local elections. Lyons, like most Black Americans at the time, was loyal to the Republican Party for its help in emancipating enslaved Blacks during the Civil War.
Shelton, however, represented a small but growing cohort of African-Americans (several of them hustlers) whose allegiances had shifted toward the Democrats. But it was Lyons’s refusal to relinquish Shelton’s white Stetson hat that cost him his life. Lyons died in hospital of a gunshot wound to his abdomen early the next morning.
We don’t often think about Lee Shelton. But for the better part of a century his story and the myth it spawned had a substantial influence on North American culture.
Beginning around the turn of the 20th century, songs valorizing Shelton as the character Stagolee, or Stagger Lee, circulated the U.S. The origins of these names are not entirely clear.
Brown cites the convergence of Shelton’s nicknames, “Stag Lee” and “Stack Lee,” as a likely explanation: “Stag” signifying male virility, as well as the name of an African-American political group (the Stags) that Shelton perhaps belonged to, and “Stack Lee” referring to a riverboat of the same name on which prostitutes might have worked.
Regardless, the legend of Stagolee spread, finding expression among the varied musical genres of blues, jazz, folk, hillbilly country, rock ‘n’ roll, and soul. James Brown, Mississippi John Hurt, Ma Rainey, Bob Dylan, The Black Keys, and Amy Winehouse are just a few of the artists to have performed the ballad of Stagolee. It also laid the groundwork for modern-day rap, earning Stagolee the title of “Godfather of Gangsta” by Brown.
Operating under his own agency, according to his own rules, the character of Stagolee (violent as he is) stands as a symbol of resistance to authority and the reassertion of Black personhood.
The Black freedom struggle of the 1960s and 1970s also cultivated considerable interest in Stagolee. Black Power advocates and cultural nationalists in particular gravitated toward the ballad. In 1974, Toronto’s Black Theatre Canada (BTC) staged its own adaptation of the story, based on Julius Lester’s 1969 book, Black Folktales.
Founded in 1973 by Vera Cudjoe, BTC was distinctively community-oriented in focus, providing “a platform for the cultural expression of Black people in Canada,” according to one of the theatre’s press releases from 1983.
During its fifteen-year run (the company closed in 1988), BTC published newsletters announcing events, organized workshops and one-act play competitions to nurture new talent, prepared study guides and hosted conferences to foster intercultural dialogue, and produced theatrical stage plays showcasing the talents of African and African-Caribbean Canadians.
Stagolee, written and directed by Ed Smith, was the company’s second production. It premiered on Aug. 8, 1974, at the Toronto Workshop Productions Theatre to positive reviews.
Like all folktales, the story of Stagolee has many variants. Combining a mix of live and recorded music with dance and drama, BTC’s interpretation tells of the bar fight between Stagolee and Lyons, and follows its lead character into the afterlife, whereupon finding heaven too white he defects to hell and seizes control of the underworld from the Devil.
The enduring popularity of Stagolee as a folk hero owes much to his badness: Stagolee isn’t just bad, he’s baaad. So bad that not even the Devil can quell him. This defiance had heroic implications, especially in the Black community. In African-American retellings of the story, the pronunciation of “bad” was elongated as a way of signifying that Stagolee is good bad rather than bad bad. Operating under his own agency, according to his own rules, the character of Stagolee (violent as he is) stands as a symbol of resistance to authority and the reassertion of Black personhood.
BTC understood this and targeted its production to adults as well as children.
“Stagolee is of the Earth,” Smith explained in the production’s house program, “rooted from a people’s culture” – a culture Stagolee emboldened with his self-assurance.
Indeed, it’s not just Stagolee’s hat that is defaced; it’s his dignity, too. Something he doesn’t let anybody – not Lyons, not the Devil – take from him.
Interested in learning more about Black Theatre Canada or its production of Stagolee? Visit Archival & Special Collections at lib.uoguelph.ca.
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