I like to play music to stay focused while working and one of the genres I've been listening to lately is New Orleans R&B, with one of my favorite songs being the Lloyd Price's version of "Stagger Lee". This is one of two general-standard takes on the ballad, the other being the original blues/folk version often titled "Stackolee," originally popularized by Mississippi John Hurt in 1928. The story in the song is self-explanatory: two guys play dice, one wins the other's hat or car, there's a dispute, and the pissed-off loser of the game goes off to get revenge.
It's a simple plot for a folk song but when I looked up the origins, there's an actual true story behind it (summed up nicely by Mike Hobart for the Financial Times in 2018):
An account of what was to be the genesis of a ballooning oeuvre was published in the St Louis Globe-Democrat in December 1895, when it reported the murder. William Lyons, “a levee hand”, and Lee Shelton, a pimp who was also known as “Stag” Lee, had been drinking together happily enough on Christmas Day in a bar until a row broke out about politics, the paper said. “Lyons snatched Shelton’s hat from his head”, and when he refused to return it, Shelton shot Lyons, “took his hat from the hand of the wounded man and coolly walked away”. More than a century later, the New York Daily News examined the killing’s musical afterlife, adding the detail that Shelton had exclaimed: “I told you to give me my hat!”
Lyons died in hospital; Shelton was paroled in 1909. The song that emerged from the killing, “The Ballad of Stagalee”, came to the attention of the musicologist John Lomax in 1910, by which time there were already several folk versions travelling up and around the Mississippi.
Aside from the fact that the story and the song don't exactly match up - like it was written through a game of Telephone - there's also the issue of 400 different covers/versions of "Stagger Lee" that are often wildly different from each other out there, as well as a whole bunch of in-depth write-ups available on just the internet alone. I honestly don't know if there's anything else to add from my end but if you want to jump down this particular and specific rabbit hole, you have plenty to work with based on both the below playlist (containing about 7 hours of these numerous versions) and a rough reading list I've put together for further exploration.
Playlist - "Stagger Lee Songs" from Ken Oatman (Spotify)
A Reading List
"Stagger Lee — from bar-room brawl to black resistance" by Mike Hobart (Financial Times)
The Stagger Lee Files, compiled by James P. Hauser
"A Christmas Killing: Stagger Lee" by Paul Slade (PlanetSlade)
"The story of Stagger Lee" by Stuart Buchanan
"The Story of Stagger Lee – As told by song (a LOT of song)" by Garrett Sherwood (The Salty Beatnik)
"The murder ballad of “Stagger Lee” created a gruesome legend" by Jeff Terich (Treble)
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