The Story of Stagger Lee

Stagger Lee Portrait

It all went down on December 25th, 1895.  Stagger lee Shelton was an African American cab driver and pimp convicted of murdering William “Billy” Lyons on Christmas Eve, 1895 in St. Louis,Missouri. The crime was immortalized in a popular song that has been recorded by numerous artists.Lee Shelton was not a common pimp, but as described by Cecil Brown, “Lee Shelton belonged to a group of pimps known in St. Louis as the ‘Macks’. The macks were not just ‘urban strollers’; they presented themselves as objects to be observed.”

Though there were 5 other murders that night, this would be the one remembered, as folk songs about the murder began to arise almost immediately.  Why is this story so important to the Delta Blues?  Because Good old Stagger Lee had many a song written about the incident…

A story appearing in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in 1895 read:

“William Lyons, 25, coloured, a levee hand, living at 1410 Morgan Street, 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, also coloured.
“Both parties, it seems, had been drinking, and were feeling in exuberant spirits. Lyons and Sheldon were friends and were talking together. 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 drew 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.”

The earliest written lyrics we have date back to 1903, and the first discs to 1923. There have been well over 200 versions of Stack’s story released on record since then, giving him a list of biographers which includes some of the biggest names in popular music. Duke Ellington, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis and James Brown have all recorded the song at one time or another, as have Wilson Pickett, The Clash, Bob Dylan, Dr John and Nick Cave. Even Elvis Presley had a stab at it in a 1970 rehearsal session which later surfaced as a bootleg CD.
The new century’s seen other media join in too. In 2006, Derek McCulloch and Shepherd Hendrix published a fat graphic novel telling Stagger Lee’s story in careful detail. Movie versions have come from Samuel L Jackson, who gives a storming live rendition of the song in 2007′s Black Snake Moan, and Eric Bibb, who uses it to comment on the action unfolding around his character in the following year’s Honeydripper.

All these versions tell the same core story, but no two of them seem able to agree on the details. A man named Stack Lee – or Stagger Lee, or Stack O’Lee – goes to a bar called The Bucket Of Blood – or sometimes The White Elephant – where he kills a man called Billy Lyons – or Billy Lion, or Billy DeLyon – for stealing – or winning – his Stetson hat. The story takes place in St Louis – or Memphis or New Orleans – in 1932, 1940 or 1952. Sometimes Stack kills the bartender first for disrespecting him and then moves on to Billy, who’s done nothing to offend him at all. He’s a sadistic killer in one version and a wronged innocent in the next. All these songs are about Lee Shelton – or “Sheldon” as the Globe-Democrat initially had it – but who was he?  What Really Happened?

Just south of Chestnut Valley, St Louis had a red light district called Deep Morgan. The two main bars in this part of town were the Bridgewater Saloon on the corner of Eleventh Street and Lucas Avenue, and Curtis’ Saloon on Thirteenth and Morgan. The two saloons were bitter rivals, and not only because they vied for the same business. Henry Bridgewater was a prominent black Republican, while Bill Curtis’ saloon seems to have served as a meeting place for Democrat activists.

Curtis’ joint had a particularly bad reputation. The St Louis Post-Dispatchcounted it among the “worst dens in the city”, calling its clientele “the lower class of river men and other darkies of the same social status”. Lyons had good reason to think of this place as enemy territory. He was Bridgewater’s brother-in-law, and had been attacked at Curtis’ before.

Cecil Brown, author of 2003′s Stagolee Shot Billy, has used the witness statements from Lyons’ inquest to compile an account of the night’s events. We know from these statements that Lyons left Bridgewater’s Saloon with his friend Henry Crump, and that the two men walked the few blocks to Curtis’ together. Lyons paused at the entrance to borrow a knife from Crump, and then they went in. He bought himself a drink at the bar, turned round, and saw Shelton walking in.

Shelton was a local carriage driver who sometimes moonlighted as a waiter at Curtis’. He was also one of the flamboyant St Louis pimps known as the “Macks” or “Macquerels”, using his two legitimate jobs to find potential clients for his stable of girls. He also ran his own Deep Morgan “lid club” called The Modern Horseshoe, which used an apparently legitimate bar out front to conceal illegal gambling and prostitution in its back rooms.

Shelton’s prison records show he was 5′ 7” tall with a crossed left eye and a light enough skin to suggest mixed parentage. He seems to have been dressed in full pimp regalia that night including – perhaps – the fashionable John B. Stetson hat which all the black dandies of Chestnut Valley considered essential wear.

Shelton joined Lyons at the bar and the two began drinking together in what onlookers thought was a friendly way. Everything was fine until, as the Globe-Democrat put it, “the discussion drifted to politics”. Here’s how Brown reconstructs what happened next:

“Soon they began to exchange blows by striking each other’s hats. Shelton grabbed Lyons’ derby and broke the form. Lyons said he wanted ‘six bits’ from Shelton for damaging his derby.
“Then Lyons grabbed Shelton’s Stetson. When Shelton demanded it back, Lyons said no. Shelton said he would blow Lyons’ brains out if he didn’t return it. Next, Shelton pulled his .44 Smith & Wesson revolver and hit Lyons in the head with it. Still Lyons would not relinquish the hat. Shelton demanded the Stetson again, saying that if Lyons didn’t give him his hat immediately, he was going to kill him.
“Then Lyons reached into his pocket for the knife his friend Crump had given him and approached Shelton saying ‘You cock-eyed son of a bitch, I’m going to make you kill me’. Shelton backed off and took aim. The twenty-five people in the saloon flew for the door. [...] Both bartenders later testified to the coroner that they saw Lee Shelton shoot Billy Lyons” .

Shelton calmly left the saloon, walked to a house he used on Sixth Street, left the gun with a woman there, and went to sleep upstairs. The police tracked him there and arrested him at about 3:00am on Boxing Day. Lyons was taken to the City Hospital where, after an operation to remove his lacerated left kidney, he died at about 4:00 o’clock the same morning. His death certificate shows he was 31 years old and unmarried.

Shelton may have taken his ‘Stack Lee’ nickname from a white man called Stacker Lee, whose father owned the famous Lee Steam Line of riverboats. Stacker Lee joined the Confederate army at the age of 16, became a cavalryman, and fought Yankees for the next two years. He was still only 18 when the war ended in 1865, and returned to civilian life determined to have some fun. When his father, James Lee, started the Lee Line a year later, he gave his son one of the boats to captain and Stacker set about making up for lost time. Travelling up and down the Mississippi between St Louis and New Orleans, he became well-known as a gambler, a hell-raiser and a ladies’ man. He made a habit of fathering illegitimate children wherever his boat put in, often by black or mixed-race women. In his 1948 book Memphis Down in Dixie, Shields McIlwayne reports that Stacker’s popularity meant there were “more coloured kids named Stack Lee than there were sinners in hell”.

It’s very unlikely that Shelton was really Stacker Lee’s son – the dates and locations are all wrong for that – but he may well have adopted his nickname to hint at that possibility. Shelton’s light skin, described by Jefferson Penitentiary as a “mulatto complexion”, would have made it easy for people to believe he had a white father. Who could blame him for hinting that father was the glamorous son of a powerful, rich family?

Shelton died in prison in 1912, of tuberculosis.

In the end, he was just a common murderer.  To read more, simply click here to visit Planet Slade for more.