GEM 55 03 Last Updated: 4/17/2012

Home , Archibald (musician), Lee Shelton, Stagger Lee

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GEM_55_03 Last updated: 4/17/2012

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FM_HT Stagolee Shot Billy

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GEM_55_03_020_Samp_TXT_APP • 11/10/17 10:23:33 AM • ii_005881 FM_TP_ Stagolee Shot Billy TITLE

Cecil Brown FM_TP_AU

Harvard University Press FM_TP_HUP s Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England FM_TP_ ADD1 r l

GEM_55_03_020_Samp_TXT_APP • 11/10/17 10:23:33 AM • iii_005881 FM_DED To Alan Dundes, with great admiration

Printed in the United States of America FM_CRITE1 Publication of this book has been supported through the generous provisions of the Maurice and Lula Bradley Smith Memorial Fund

First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2004

FM_CRITE3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brown, Cecil, 1943– FM_CRITE4 Stagolee shot Billy / Cecil Brown. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-01056-6 (cloth) ISBN 0-674-01626-2 (pbk.) 1. Stagolee (Legendary character) 2. African Americans—Songs and music—History and criticism. 3. Ballads, English—United States—History and criticism. 4. Literature and folklore—United States. 5. African American criminals—Folklore. 6. African American men in literature. 7. African American men—Folklore. 8. Saint Louis (Mo.)—Folklore. 9. African Americans—Folklore. I. Title. s PS478.B76 2003 813.54—dc21 2002192241 r l

GEM_55_03_020_Samp_TXT_APP • 11/10/17 10:23:33 AM • iv_005881 ET Acknowledgments

Many people helped in the making of this book. It was Alan Dundes who first urged me to write a complete history of Stagolee. Further encouragement came from Charles Henry, Jan Mohammed, Olly Wilson, and Amin Sweeney. Tom Luddy gave the manuscript to Greil Marcus, who in turn gave it to Lindsay Waters at Harvard University Press, and Lind say’s perseverance and patience brought the project to completion. Zachary Taylor helped me organize the chapters. My ideas about Stagolee were refined in the course of valuable discussions with Al Young, Ishmael Reed, Mel Watkins, Steve Jami son, David Henderson, Quincy Troupe, Billy Woodberry, Phil Kaufman, Paul Wilner, Leon Litwack, Sterling Stuckey, George La- kov, Quincy Troupe, Big John Henry, Jürgen Streeck, Dr. Ingrid Krutzner, Susan Golden, and David Peebles. A few individuals, though they departed this life some time ago and were not directly involved in the writing of the manuscript, Cecil Culphert Brown; my uncles Lindsey Waddell and Lofton Free- s man; and my brother Donald Ray Brown. r Essential help came from John Waide at the archives of Saint l v

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Louis University, Mildred Rigs of the Saint Louis Public Library, and Randy Bloomgant of the Missouri Historical Society. Ellen Thomasson of the Missouri Historical Society kindly provided the photographs of Judge David Murphy and Nathaniel Craig Dryden. I am indebted to Russell David, whose dissertation on Stagolee furnished important details; and to Judy David, his widow, who generously shared items from his archives. And I am deeply grateful to Randi Rucker for her patience, for- bearance, and encouragement.

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FM_CONT_ Introduction: The Tradition of Stagolee 1 CT FM_CONT_ i. stagolee and st. louis PT 1. Stagolee Shot Billy 21 2. Lee Shelton: The Man behind the Myth 37 3. That Bad Pimp of Old St. Louis: The Oral Poetry of the Late 1890s 48 4. “Poor Billy Lyons” 59 5. Narrative Events and Narrated Events 70 6. Stagolee and Politics 79 7. Under the Lid: The Underside of the Political Struggle 84 8. The Black Social Clubs 93 9. Hats and Nicknames: Symbolic Values 98 10. Ragtime and Stagolee 105 11. The Blues and Stagolee 110 FM_CONT_ ii. the thousand faces of stagolee PT

s 12. Jim Crow and Oral Narrative 119 r 13. Riverboat Rouster and Mean Mate 122 l vii

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14. Work Camps, Hoboes, and Shack Bully Hollers 127 15. William Marion Reedy’s White Outlaw 129 16. Cowboy Stagolee and Hillbilly Blues 134 17. Blueswomen: Stagolee Did Them Wrong 144 18. Bluesmen and Black Bad Man 148 FM_CONT_ 19. On the Trail of Sinful Stagolee 157 CT 20. Stagolee in a World Full of Trouble 163 21. From Rhythm and Blues to Rock and Roll: “I Heard My Bulldog Bark” 172 22. The Toast: Bad Black Hero of the Black Revolution 177 23. Folklore/Poplore: Bob Dylan’s Stagolee 184

FM_CONT_ iii. mammy-made: stagolee and american identity PT 24. The “Bad Nigger” Trope in American Literature 193 25. James Baldwin’s “Staggerlee Wonders” 206 26. Stagolee as Cultural and Political Hero 212 27. Stagolee and Modernism 217

Notes 231 FM_CONT_ Bibliography 261 CT Index 287

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GEM_55_03_020_Samp_TXT_APP • 11/10/17 10:23:33 AM • viii_005881 Introduction: The Tradition INTRO_ET of Stagolee

There is . . . a culture of the Negro which is his and has been ad- EP1 dressed to him; a culture which has, for good or ill, helped to clarify his consciousness and create emotional attitudes which are conducive to action. This culture has stemmed mainly from two sources: (1) the Negro church; and (2) the folklore of the Ne- gro people. —richard wright, 1957 EP1S

What does the [Stagolee] song say exactly? . . . It says no man gains EP1 immortality thru public acclaim. —bob dylan, 1993 EP1S

DI While I was growing up on a tobacco farm in North Carolina in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the most important legend to me was that of Stagolee. As chanted in the form of a “toast” by my Uncle Lindsey, young black field hands sitting in the shade of s a tree at the end of the tobacco road, Stagolee was as impulsive, as r vulgar, as daring, and as adventurous as they wanted him (and l 97

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themselves) to be. My uncles, who were my male role models, and their friends recited their rhymed, obscene praise of Stagolee’s bad- ness. At the end of the day the same men gathered in J. C. Himes’s jook joint to dance with the girls, drink whiskey, and fight. Their nocturnal activities, I thought, were an extension of Stagolee’s. As I grew up, I realized that many other young black men also knew Stagolee. In fact interest in Stagolee is widespread among black men throughout America, not just on southern farms and in industrialized northern ghettos but also in Oklahoma, Montana, and California. The origins of the Stagolee legend coincide with the origins of the blues in the 1890s. The legend had its first expression as a field 30 lines holler of former plantation slaves as they migrated to the levee camps along the Mississippi. From there the legend moved to south ern prisons, where it was honed and shaped into a work song. St- agolee also expressed the worldview and feelings of poor white hill- billies, who adopted the legend as one of their own. Carl Sandburg loved singing “Stagolee,”1 and writers such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Howard Odum, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin have used the song as a model for short stories, poems, and plays. Duke Ellington and Sidney Bechet arranged and per- formed versions of it, and more recently Stagolee has been the subject of a musical comedy. Stagolee is a metaphor that structures the life of black males from childhood through maturity. I have heard versions of it, spo- ken and sung, many times during and since childhood, and the core image continues to have meaning for me in middle age. Not long ago I recited a few stanzas of the ballad to my eight-year-old nephew Lionel, and soon afterward he asked me to tell him all s about Stagolee. The legend survives because black men pass it on. r l 98

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As culture critic Greil Marcus observes, Stagolee “is a story that black America has never tired of hearing and never stopped living out, like whites with their Westerns.”2 The earliest recordings, in 1923, were made by two white dance bands, Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians and Frank Westphal and His Orchestra. The next recording was made in 1926 by Ma Rainey, one of the first blacks to popularize vocal music. Australian rocker Nick Cave last recorded it in 1996. What accounts for the longevity of this tune? And how is it that the same song can mean so many different things in so many different forms of music? While I was learning the Stagolee toast from my Uncle Lindsey, Hogman Maxey, a black prisoner, was singing the following version to collector Harry Oster at the Angola State Penitentiary in Louisi- ana. By then the Stagolee tradition was already six decades old. Yet Maxey’s version remains close to the original in substance.

I was standin’ on the corner When I heard my bulldog bark; He was barkin’ at the two men Who gamblin’ in the dark. V It was Stagolee and Billy, Two men who gamble’ late, Stagolee throw seven, Billy swore that he throwed eight. Stagolee told Billy, “I can’t let you go with that; You have won my money And my brand new Stutson [Stetson] hat.” Stagolee went home, s And got his forty-four, r l 99

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Says, “I’m goin’ to the bar room, To pay the debt I owe.” Stagolee went to the bar room, Stood four feet from the door Didn’t nobody know when he Pulled his forty-four. Stagolee found Billy, “Oh please don’t take my life!” I got three little children, V And a very sick little wife.” Stagolee shot Billy, Oh he shot that boy so fas’ That the bullet came through him, And broke my window glass. Some folks don’t believe, Oh Lord that Billy dead You don’t believe he gone, Jus’ look what a hole in his head.5

In the version I heard forty years ago, Billy Lyons also asked for mercy. Invariably his plea is based on his wife’s sickly condition and his three children:

“Have mercy!” Billy groaned, “Oh please spare my life. V I’ve got two little babies and an innocent wife! Don’t! Don’t shoot me anymore!”6

How is it that I can still remember the image and the rhythms of this song so many years later? How is it that people from as far west as Oregon and as far south as Florida remember exactly the same s imagery? The image of Billy Lyons begging for his life, for example, r l 100

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made a deep impression on my young mind. I can still remember the emotions that it evoked. Billy Lyons has been begging for his life for many decades now. He has made his plea on the lips of thousands of tellers, singers, liars, actors, and ordinary folk. From David C. Rubin’s study Memory in Oral Traditions, we know that ballads can transmit imagery orally for hundreds of years. The ballad “Lord Thomas and Fair Annet,” for example, which dates to before 1690, is still sung in North Carolina.7 Some folk songs seem to have been helped to survive by the medium of print. But Stagolee survived primarily through oral traditions. It was so dirty that many would not print it. When it was printed, it was heavily censored for “obscene” words. The fact of censorship itself (chiefly through white Americans’ control of blacks’ access to the print media) has ensured Stagolee’s survival as an example of oral memory.12 The fact that Stagolee was a pimp ensured that white Americans would not see him as a subject of serious interest.

SPCBRK1

Was there a real model for the Stagolee myth? Did Stagolee exist at all? If he did, was he born in St. Louis, New Or- SPCBRK1_ TEXT leans, or Memphis? The first Stagolee ballad ever collected con- sisted of eight stanzas sent to John Lomax in February 1910 by Miss Ella Scott Fisher of San Angelo, Texas, with the following note: “This is all the verses I remember. The origin of this ballad, I the Memphis levee by Stack Lee. The song is sung by the Ne- groes on the levee while they are loading and unloading the river freighters, the words being composed by the singers. The characters s were prominently known in Memphis, I was told, the unfortunate r Stagalee belonging to the family of the owners of the Lee line of l 101

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steamers, which are known on the Mississippi River from Cairo to the Gulf. I give all this to you as

Messenger boy came to the winder, Then he knocked on the door, V An’ he said, “Yer old man’s lyin’ there Dead on the Barroom floor.” O Lord, po’ Stagalee!

Then Billy’s wife addresses Stagolee:

“Stagalee, O Stagalee, V What have you gone and done? You’ve gone and shot my husband With a forty-four gatlin’ gun.”

In the next stanza Stagolee’s friend asks him why he didn’t run. Then the policeman, “a little scared of Stagalee,” addresses him. In the next stanza Stagolee addresses his jailer. We must also consider why many scholars are ignorant of Stagol- ee’s true identity. One reason has to do with who the actual person was and what he did to earn his place in the folk culture. We Ameri- cans love our folk heroes and the ballads made about their lives. Yet we are reluctant to admit that many of those heroes come from the lowest levels of society. Like the “Frankie and Albert” ballad, “Stagolee” may have originated with a pianist in a bordello. The “hero” of the ballad was a pimp, and the “heroic deed” was the murder of a defenseless black man. How much of this can we really ap- plaud?

s EXT1_PARA Kevin Mumford’s book Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chi- cago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century casts some light on r l 102

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why Stagolee was associated with the subcultures of bordellos and prostitution. As Mumford suggests, these subcultures are closely EXT1_PARA linked with sex and class. They are also coded with criminality.20 After studying the counterculture in America for many years, jazz critic Albert Goldman came up with an intriguing insight:

One idea I summed up in the formula of the counterculture is the criminal culture. This meant two things, first, that the roots of the counterculture as a defiant revolutionary way of life lay not so much in the sources that the kids were proud to show—the political treatises of Marcuse, the racial theories of Fanon, the Eastern religious doctrines of Zen . . .—but rather in that culture that had always been the most antagonistic to conventional values and codes of behavior, the culture that had always acted out the most basic fantasies of the American psyche and created the whole underground world of drugs, violence, street argot and antisocial de fiance: the criminal culture.21 As one of the earliest examples of the antihero, Stagolee is a fig ure who embodies and perpetuates a counterculture. Many scholars do not want to know who the real Stagolee was, because he was not a hero. This is as much as admitting that although we enjoy the folk hero, we have no idea how he came to be. It is true that the American public has been interested in other black folk heroes such as John Henry and Joe Louis. But rarely does one hear their names associated with popular figures today. Stagolee’s name, however, is frequently linked to sports figures like O. J. Simpson and Jack Johnson and rap stars like Tupac Shakur.22 For example, after Tupac’s arrest, Randee Dawn reported in the s New Musical Express that the “fans of Tupac accuse the white com- r munity of missing the point . . . They say Shakur is a black hero in l 103

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the tradition of the blues archetype Stagger Lee [Stagolee], who created a system for himself based on his own perceptions.”23

John Henry: Are folk figures who worked within the white system of the counterculture is the criminal culture. Simpson: Perceived as working outside and against it of the coun- DLG1 terculture is the criminal culture. Christian: Who worked from nine to five on a railroad, John Henry sacrificed his life for that system.

In contrast, one cannot imagine Stagolee giving his life for a system that One idea I summed up in the formula of the counterculture is the criminal culture.

This meant two things, first, that the roots of the counterculture as a defiant revolutionary UL1 Way of life lay not so much in the sources that the kids were proud to show—the political treatises of Marcuse The racial theories of Fanon, the Eastern religious doctrines of Zen but rather in that culture that had always been the most antagonistic to conventional values and codes of behavior

The culture that had always acted out the most basic fantasies of the American psyche and created the whole underground world of black folk heroes such as John Henry and Joe Louis. But rarely does one hear their names associated with popular figures today. drugs, violence, street argot and antisocial defiance: the criminal culture oppresses the black man. One idea I summed up in the formula of the counterculture is the criminal culture. This meant two things, first, that the roots of the counterculture as a defiant revolu- s tionary way of life lay not so much in the sources that the kids. r l 104

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Stagolee and St. Louis PT

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Stagolee Shot Billy CT

“Stagolee” was one of the verses that went into numbers that was EP1_HANG wrote and rewrote in St. Louis. Stagolee and Billy Lyons about the milk white Stetson hat. —jelly roll morton, 1938 EP1S

It was in the year of eighteen hundred sixty-one, EP1_FL In St. Louis on Market Street where Stackalee was born Everybody’s talkin’ ’bout Stackalee. —“stackalee,” 1941 EP1S

A cold wind blew through the streets of downtown DI St. Louis that Christmas night in 1895. In the Third Ward, better known as “Chestnut Valley,” well-dressed Negroes strolled up and down Market Street, which was lined with high-class whorehouses. A large crowd had gathered in Tom Turpin’s Rose Bud Saloon, at 2222 Market, where Turpin sat beside a Christmas tree that was “beautifully illuminated by scores of electric lights in all colors.”1 s About ten blocks away, two men came out of the Bridgewater r Saloon at the corner of Eleventh Street and Lucas Avenue and l 107

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watched the crowd: women gaily dressed as though going to a men ended up a few blocks down the street at the Bridgewater’s rival es- tablishment, the Bill Curtis Saloon, at 1101 Morgan Street, at the corner of Thirteenth in the Bloody Third District. Between Morgan and Christy Streets, as one newspaper put it, the heart of black society “throbbed” with vaudeville theaters, bordellos, shoe-repair shops, and billiard parlors.2 In fact the Bill Curtis Saloon was the epicenter of the vice district.

1 The Extent of Bilingualism

When they arrived at the Bill Curtis Saloon, Lyons stopped at the door and asked Crump to lend him a weapon. Everybody knew the saloon’s reputation for crime. Murders had taken place in the rowdy atmosphere.

2 Bilingualism is a rare phenomenon

Billy Lyons didn’t have to read the newspapers to know that the saloon was the “envy of all of its competitors and the terror of the like; one night he had had to pull his knife on a fellow.4 Every time he went into the saloon, Billy told Crump, he got into trouble with “those bad niggers.”5 Crump had a knife and agreed to lend it to Billy. After Crump handed him the knife, the two men entered the saloon. They walked deep into the bar, near the stove. A ragtime band was playing happy, delightful music. There were good-looking belles sitting at the tables. In the back, on a platform, a craps game was in session. s After ordering beer, Billy Lyons noticed that people were looking r l 108

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[1.] Billy Lyons’ death certificate. Courtesy of Judith Ann David. CAP1

toward the door. Turning to see what they were looking at, he saw that Lee Shelton, known as “Stack Lee,” had entered. Shelton was dressed in a pair of tailored shoes known as “St. Louis flats,” with almost no heels and long toes pointing upward. On the top of the toes were tiny mirrors that caught the electric light hanging overhead and sent sparkles upward. A pair of dove- colored spats covered Shelton’s shoe tops. Gray-striped pants hung over his spats. The flaps of his black box-back coat fell open to reveal an elaborately patterned red velvet vest and a yellow embroidered shirt with a celluloid standing collar that kept his chin high in the air. Knuckle-length sleeves almost covered the gold rings on s his manicured fingers; his left hand clutched the gold head of an r ebony walking cane. The other hand took a long cigar out of his l 109

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mouth. On his head was a high-roller, milk-white Stetson. Along the hatband was an embroidered picture of his favorite girl, Lillie Shelton.6

CN 2

CT Lee Shelton: The Man behind the Myth

According to his prison records, Lee Shelton was DI born on March 16, 1865, in Texas, the son of a Negro named Nat Shelton. He was thirty at the time of the killing and the trial. When he entered the Jefferson City penitentiary on October 17, 1897, he was thirty-two. When Uncle Lindsey told me about Stagolee, he was always big, black, and bad. But although Shelton had big feet—his shoe size was eleven—he was only five feet seven and a half inches tall. The prison records describe his hair and eyes as black, his “com- plexion” as “mulatto.” Under the column “marks and scars,” the au- thorities noted: “L[eft] eye crossed. 2 scars [on] R[ight] cheek. 2 scars [on] back head. 1 scar on L[eft] shoulder blade.”1 As we have seen, one witness said that just before Lee Shelton shot him, Lyons taunted Shelton: “I’m going to make you kill me, you cockeyed son of a bitch.” This may have been a reference to Lee Shel- ton’s crossed left eye. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch (March 17, 1911) described Lee Shelton as “formerly a Negro politician” and the “proprietor of a lid club for his race.” What was a lid club? One suggestion is that “lid” re- s ferred to a guidebook on prostitution. A “lid book” existed in New r l 110

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Orleans as a “supplement to the Blue Book,” the famous whore- house guidebook. Because it was smaller than the Blue Book, “it could readily be given away free without serious loss to the distribu- tor, and issues were usually handed out in the railway station to single men.”2 But in fact a lid club was an underground establish- ment that kept a “lid” on such criminal activities as gambling while serving as a front for other activities. According to Gould’s St. Louis Directory for 1894, “Stack L. Shel ton” was a waiter living at 1314 Morgan Street. Three years later he was listed as “a driver” living on North Twelfth Street.3 The newspaper reporting the murder of Billy Lyons said that Shelton was a “car riage driver.”4 As the driver of a hackney cab, Shelton would have been in a position to direct white male visitors to St. Louis bordellos. As one writer describes the situation in Storyville, New Orleans, “the visitor came out of the Southern Railroad Station on Canal Street, looking for a hack . . . a hotel room and then for a night on the town. White or black poontang. And many tried the colored joints first.”5 Henry Townsend, a St. Louis musician whom would thus have put him in the role of a “go-between” for pro stitutes and their customers. Kevin J. Mumford has identified “the go-between[s] of vice” as “taxi drivers, doormen, and porters who earned money on the side for connecting prospective customers with prostitutes.”6 At the time of the murder Lee Shelton owned a lid club called the Modern Horseshoe Club, a name that related nicely to his profes- sion as a carriage driver. According to blues scholar William Barlow, the Modern Horseshoe Club was in the “center of the tenderloin’s night life” on Morgan Street, ranking among the most prestigious s underworld nightclubs along with the Chauffeurs Club, the Deluxe r Club, the Jazzland Club, and the Cardinal’s Nest in the 1920s.7 l 111

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1 The Extent of Bilingualism

“During the 1940s and 1950s, as in other decades, DI_ Stagolee existed in multiple forms. Sidney Bechet’s 1950 jazz render- wQUOTES ing of “Old Stack O’ Lee Blues” is the most beautiful instrumental version ever recorded. Bechet’s clarinet is like the lead singer on the work gang, wordlessly calling all the bluesy chorus into action. But the melody and the phrasing and tempo evoke the bordello, not the work gang. Bechet’s version harkens back to the early jazz of New Orleans, of which he was a founding father.1

CN+1LiSpc 2

CT Lee Shelton: The Man behind the Myth

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Bilingualism is a rare phenomenon 2

shoe size was eleven—he was only five feet seven and a half inches tall. The prison records describe his hair and eyes as black, his “com- plexion” as “mulatto.” Under the column “marks and scars,” the au- thorities noted: “L[eft] eye crossed. 2 scars [on] R[ight] cheek. 2 scars [on] back head. 1 scar on L[eft] shoulder blade.”1 As we have seen, one witness said that just before Lee Shelton shot him, Lyons taunted Shelton: “I’m going to make you kill me, you cockeyed son of a bitch.” This may have been a reference to Lee Shel- ton’s crossed left eye. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch (March 17, 1911) described Lee Shelton as “formerly a Negro politician” and the “proprietor of a lid club for his race.” What was a lid club? One suggestion is that “lid” re- ferred to a guidebook on prostitution. A “lid book” existed in New Orleans as a “supplement to the Blue Book,” the famous whore- house guidebook. Because it was smaller than the Blue Book, “it could readily be given away free without serious loss to the distribu- tor, and issues were usually handed out in the railway station to single men.”2 But in fact a lid club was an underground establish- ment that kept a “lid” on such criminal activities as gambling while serving as a front for other activities. According to Gould’s St. Louis Directory for 1894, “Stack L. Shelton” was a waiter living at 1314 Morgan Street. Three years later he was listed as “a driver” living on North Twelfth Street.3 The newspaper reporting the murder of Billy Lyons said that Shelton was a “carriage driver.”4 As the driver of a hackney cab, Shelton would have been in a position to direct white male visitors to St. Louis bordel- s los. As one writer describes the situation in Storyville, New Orleans, r “the visitor came out of the Southern Railroad Station on Canal l 113

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In Interzones Mumford describes the vice districts of New York and Chicago in the early 1910s. Here gambling, prostitution, and interracial mixing, which had been pushed out of the white ar- eas, took hold the African-American neighborhoods. “The internal migration of vice into growing black neighborhoods was covert, by the modern city dweller and must be carefully preserved. We are looking for “traces” of a life that has been been hidden or destroyed quiet—its purpose to elude police. The changing sexual terrain . . . was not obvious but was hardly invisible.” In St. Louis this migration of nightlife into the “interzones” seems to have occurred as early as 1895. There is no reason to doubt that Shelton’s club catered to gambling and prostitution. Given that ragtime and blues music would have flourished in such a place, it is not surprising that Stagolee first emerged as a blues song.

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That Bad Pimp of Old St. Louis: CT The Oral Poetry of the Late 1890s

We have learned what we can about Lee Shelton DI from public documents such as prison records and trial transcripts and from newspaper articles. Although these sources provide no de finitive proof that the Stagolee of the oral literature is the same as the Stack Lee of the St. Louis newspapers and other documents, neither do they disprove it. We may learn something more by casting backward from the oral literature, the ballads and the blues. “Living means leaving traces,” Walter Benjamin wrote.1 These traces of the living are left behind looking for “traces” of a life that has been been hidden or destroyed by the city. Although the ballads are not themselves historical documents, they are based on historical incidents and on real names. There are two variants of the basic type of Stagolee ballad. One of them is called the 1903 variant because it was collected then.2 The other one, called 1927, was privately printed in that year.3 Its first lines run:

s Stack-o-lee was a good man V r Everybody did love l 115

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Everybody swore by Stack V Just like the lovin’ stars above. 0, Stack, O, Stack-o-lee Stack-o-lee was a good man.

Here Stack-o- lee is “a good man” who loves and is loved by ev erybody. How could a pimp, or mack, be a good man, except per- haps from the point of view of those whom he helped? The next lines reveal that Stack-o-lee is the local hero of a specific group of people—other pimps and whores:4

The pimps and whores all swore by Stack— V By the everlasting stars above

V_STANZA_ They all loved Stack-o-lee! BREAK Now what you know ’bout this! An’ what you all know ’bout that? “They say he killed old Billy Lyons V ’Bout a damned old Stetson hat Oh! poor, poor, Stack-o-lee.

The Folklore Archives at the University of Oregon yield a single handwritten couplet transcribed either from an oral performance or from a memory of such a performance:

Go tell little Lilly Sheldon to get out on these icy blocks V And rustle for to get her Stackerlee some rocks.

Lilly Sheldon appears not only in the ballads but also in Stago lee’s prison records and in newspaper articles. The references to a Lilly or Nellie Sheldon as Stackerlee’s “girlfriend,” “wife,” or “old lady” indicate the presence of a hidden history.5 s The name Sheldon provides an essential link with the identity of r l 116

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Stagolee. It seems plausible that through frequent retellings and re- hearings the letter t in “Shelton” was changed to d, producing “Shel- don,” which was easier to pronounce (or to hear). If this is correct, then this name connects the ballad to the historical person Lee Shelton, a pimp who became a legend. Why didn’t Liz Bridgewater, their aunt, or Marie, their grand- mother, adopt them? Poverty was one of the reasons most black families gave children up for adoption—but this family was not poor. We do not know the answers to this question, but we do know that the Bridgewater family exerted a great deal of effort to ensure that Shelton was convicted and that he stayed behind bars. When Shelton’s parole came up in 1909, Lyons’ sister and stepmother wrote the parole board:

And in conjunction with my mother I hope and pray that you will never agree to let a man who never worked a day or earned an hon- EXT1 est dollar be turned out to meet us face to face. As far as his character is concerned ask any officer on the police force from Captain down to patrolman. Again as a sister I beg you not to turn a man like him on the community at large. If justice had been done he would have hung. Just think he has not served half his term. Yours respectfully, Mrs. Henry Bridgewater, sister Marie Brown, mother9

John David discovered a letter from a sheriff to Judge James With- row stating that Bridgewater was active “in the prosecution of Lee for the crime.” Billy’s sister Eliza, his stepmother Marie, and his s brother-in-law Henry Bridgewater hired C. Orrick Bishop—one of r the best lawyers in St. Louis—to convict Lee Shelton of the murder. l 117

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Henry Bridgewater may also have hired or influenced the appoint- ment of Marshall F. MacDonald as a and Chicago in the early 1910s. Here gambling, prostitution, and interracial mixing, which had neighborhoods.

1. Only human capabilities count as ends in themselves, although other capabilities may turn out to be instrumentally valuable in the promotion of human capabilities. 2. Human capabilities are the primary focus, but since human beings form relationships with non-human creatures, those creatures may enter into the description of the goal to be promoted not simply as NL1 means, but as members of intrinsically valuable relationships. 3. The capabilities of all sentient creatures count as ends in themselves, and all should attain capabilities above some specified threshold. 4. The capabilities of all living organisms, including plants, should count, but as individual entities, not as parts of ecosystems. 5. The individualism of 1–4 is dropped: the capabilities of systems (ecosystems in particular, but also species) count as ends in themselves.

“The internal migration of vice into growing black neighborhoods was covert, by the modern city dweller and must be carefully hidden or destroyed quiet—its purpose to elude police. The changing sexual terrain . . . was not obvious but was hardly invisible.” In St. Louis this migration of nightlife into the “interzones” seems to have occurred as special counsel for the state to assist Bishop.10

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PT The Thousand Faces of Stagolee

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From Rhythm and Blues to Rock and CT Roll: “I Heard My Bulldog Bark”

During the 1940s and 1950s, as in other decades, DI Stagolee existed in multiple forms. Sidney Bechet’s 1950 jazz render- ing of “Old Stack O’ Lee Blues” is the most beautiful instrumental version ever recorded. Bechet’s clarinet is like the lead singer on the work gang, wordlessly calling all the bluesy chorus into action. But the melody and the phrasing and tempo evoke the bordello, not the work gang. Bechet’s version harkens back to the early jazz of New Orleans, of which he was a founding father.1 As the blues evolved into rhythm and blues from the 1930s through the early 1950s, and then crossed over into the white culture as rock and roll, Stagolee kept pace with the trends. There were three signifi cant recordings of Stagolee during this period: a “good- feeling” version by Lucious Curtis and Willie Ford in 1940, a bril- liant piano rhythm-and- blues version by Archibald Cox in 1950, and a 1959 version by Lloyd Price that became a rock-and-roll hit.2 Lucious Curtis was working in a Natchez, Mississippi, sawmill s when John Lomax encountered him on October 19, 1940. With his r partner Willie Ford, Curtis gave Lomax a happy, irresistibly dance l 121

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able Stagolee.3 According to Alan Lomax, both the melody and the traditional folk two-line stanzas “link his version to several others later recorded by New Orleans pianists.”4 The first stanza has an eyewitness immediacy:

It was late last night, I heard my bulldog bark. V Stagolee and Billy Lyons, they was arguing in the dark.

Curtis then presents the devil theme:

Stagolee, he told the devil, “Come on, let’s have some fun. You get your pitchfork, I’m gonna get my forty-one.”

He then returns to the “bad man” theme:

Stagolee, he was a bad man; now boys, you don’t know. Stagolee, he will get you, wherever you may go.

Next comes an eyewitness stanza about Stagolee and his “girls”— “girls” who may have been prostitutes:

Now look, last night I was standing here when he come. He told his girls, “Come on, let’s have some fun.”

But Stagolee at once leaves his girls and runs to his mother with an odd “bad man” announcement:

Stagolee went running to his mother, holding up his right hand. Said, “Looky here, mother, I got to kill me another man.”

The scene shifts again, like a cut in a movie:

Stagolee, he was a bad man, and he didn’t live in town. Stagolee had a good woman, didn’t ’low nobody ’round. s The final stanza celebrates Stagolee with a rhythm-and-blues beat r l 122

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SPCBRK1_ top Street, looking for a hack . . . a hotel room and then SPCBRK1_ for a night on the town. White or black poontang. And many tried TEXT the colored joints first.”5 Henry Townsend, a St. Louis musician whom I interviewed in 1998, and who arrived in St. Louis as a boy in the early 1920s, had also heard that Lee Shelton was a carriage driver who made connections with well-heeled men looking for prostitutes. “He was instrumental in delivering them to, or getting in touch with the ladies or whatever,” Townsend said. Shelton’s job would thus have put him in the role of a “go-between” for pro stitutes and their customers. Kevin J. Mumford has identified “the go-between[s] of vice” as “taxi drivers, doormen, and porters who earned money on the side for connecting prospective customers with prostitutes.”6 Trixie Text Trixie Plain trixie extra

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GEM_55_03_020_Samp_TXT_APP • 11/10/17 10:23:33 AM • 124_005881 appendix

notes EMHT

bibliography

index

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Throughout his distinguished career, economics James J. Heckman of the University of Chicago, winner of the Nobel Prize in Econom- ics in 2000, has focused on an idea of human capability in connec- tion with his interest in early childhood. Heckman’s important em- pirical and formal work has until now been insuf ficiently cited in work on the Human Development Approach, and the ideas embod- ied in his parallel research project should become central to this work in the future, since they provide clear directions for public.

* Just to give you an idea: Sen is a Bengali Indian; though he has acquired British citizenship and currently resides in the U. S., he retains his Indian FNOT citizenship and a profound engagement with Indian politics and culture. I am a U. S. citizen, but my work has led me to India for much of my research, as well as to a variety of other nations. The leading founders of the Human Development and Capability Association include researchers with the following nationalities: Pakistani, Japanese, Brazilian, Dutch, Italian, Bangladeshi, British, American; members are drawn from 70 s countries. The Presidents of the Association have included two Indians, r one British citizen, and one U. S. citizen. l 127

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GEM_55_03_020_Samp_TXT_APP • 11/10/17 10:23:33 AM • 128_005881 ET Notes

A introduction Epigraphs: Richard Wright Reader, ed. Ellen Wright and Michael Fabre (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 39; Bob Dylan, “Stack A Lee,” World Gone Wrong, Columbia Records, New York, 1993. ENOT 1. Archie Green, Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal-mining Songs (Ur- bana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 32. 2. Greil Marcus, “Sly Stone: The Myth of Staggerlee,” in Mystery Train, 3d ed. (New York: Dutton, 1990), 65. 3. William Barlow, Looking Up at Down: The Emergence of Blues Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 19. 4. Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (London: Ox- ford University Press, 1977), p. 413. 5. Hogman Maxey, “Stagolee,” Angola Prisoner’s Blues, Arhoolie Rec ords, El Cerrito, Calif., 1959. 6. Harry Osler, liner notes, Angola Prisoners’ Blues. 7. David C. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 258. 8. Quoted in ibid., 17. 9. I am greatly indebted to Richard Bauman, Story, Event, and Perfor- s mance: Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), for the terms narrative event, narrated event, r l 129

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and narrative text. Roman Jakobson’s “Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb,” in Selected Writings (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 2: 130–147, has also been helpful. 10. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ, 1992). 11. Turner summarizes Van Gennep’s schema in ibid., 24. 12. John W. Roberts, “Stackolee and the Development of a Black He- roic Idea,” Western Folklore 13 (July 1983): 179. 13. John Lomax and Alan Lomax, American Ballads and Folk Songs (New York: Macmillan, 1934), 93–95. 15. Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints: Vocal Tradition on Race Records (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 241. 16. Cited in John R. David, “Tragedy in Ragtime: Black Folktales from ENOT St. Louis” (Ph.D. diss., St. Louis University, 1976), 167. 17. Frederick William Turner III, “Badmen, and Black and White: The Continuity of American Folk Traditions” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1965), 305. 18. John W. Roberts, From Trickster to Badman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 1, n. 1. 19. John David’s dissertation has been a font of ideas and suggestions. I am grateful to his widow, Judith Ann David, who allowed me to look at some of her late husband’s research sources. 20. Kevin J. Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia Uni versity Press, 1997). 21. Albert Harry Goldman, Grassroots: Marijuana in America Today (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 7. 22. Jack Johnson is a “bad nigger,” according to folk tradition and scholarship. See William H. Wiggins Jr., “Jack Johnson as Bad Nigger: The Folklore of His Life,” Black Scholar 5 (January 1971): 35– 46. 23. Randee Dawn, “Sex and Thugs and Bulletholes,” New Musical Ex- s press, December 1994. r l 130

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24. Greil Marcus, “Stagger Lee,” Mojo 25 (January 1996): 7. 25. Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), 66. ENOT 26. Arnold Rampersad, Jackie Robinson: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1997), 21. 27. Barlow, Looking Up at Down, 250. 28. Mumford, Interzones, 20. 29. Barlow, Looking Up at Down, 251. 30. Mumford, Interzones, xii. 31. Ibid., xviii.

A 1. stagolee shot billy Epigraphs: Jelly Roll Morton, “Levee Man Blues,” Library of Congress Recordings, Vol. 1, reissued by Rounder Records, Cambridge, Mass., 1991; Onah L. Spencer, “Stackalee,” Directions 4 (Summer 1941): 17, quoted in John R. David, “Tragedy in Ragtime: Black Folktales from St. Louis” (Ph.D. diss., St. Louis University, 1976), 200. 1. David A. Jasen and Trebor Jay Tichenor, Rags and Ragtime: A Musical History (New York: Dover, 1978), 79. 2. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 21, 1891. 3. Ibid. 4. David, “Tragedy in Ragtime,” 74. 5. Account by Henry Crump, transcript 576, Lyons inquest, copy given ENOT to me by John David’s widow, Judith Ann David. Unless otherwise noted, all eyewitness accounts quoted in this chapter are from this transcript. 6. This fictional description is based on a composite of factual sources given in Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, Anywhere but Here (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966). Another source is Nathan B. Young’s “Transgressions: Death, Legends, and Music of Bad Man Stackolee,” Manuscript M2, St. Louis University Archives, 1983. s 7. Theodore Dreiser, A Book about Myself (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922). r l 131

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A 1. stagolee shot billy 8. Dundes and Lévi-Strauss agree on the general principle but differ in their application of this principle. See Alan Dundes, “Typogra Dundes (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 206–215; Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” in Structural Anthropology (New York: Doubleday, 1986). 9. Alex Olrik, “Epic Laws of Folk Narrative,” in Dundes, The Study of Folklore, 129–141. 12. “Stackerlee,” The Mirror, January 3, 1919, 11. 13. Quoted in ibid., 282. 15. St. Louis Star, April 1916, 84A. 16. Ibid. 17. Gary R. Kremer, James Milton Turner and the Promise of America: The ENOT Public Life of a Post–Civil War Black Leader (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 177; Christensen, “Black St. Louis,” 213. 18. 1903 version, W. K. Wilgus Collection, Folklore Archives, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 19. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, May 5, 1931; also Necrology Scrapbook, 130, Missouri State Historical Society, St. Louis. 20. Ben Scott appears in several variants, such as the one printed in Sigmund Spaeth’s Weep Some More My Lady (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1927), p. 131:

Ben Scott sent for the police And they came on the run; ENOT_V The bar boy up and told them What Stackalee dun done, That bad, that bad man Stackalee.

The version quoted in the text is in ibid., 131–133. 21. Langston Hughes and Arna W. Bontemps, eds., The Book of Negro Folklore (New York: Dodd, 1983), p. 361. s 22. Interview with Dorothy Todd, St. Louis, summer 1992. r l 132

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published sources A

Aarne, Antti, and Sith Thompson. The Types of the Folktale. 2d rev. ed. Hel- sinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1961. BIB Abrahams, Roger D. “Black Talk in the Street.” In Explorations in the Eth- nography of Speaking. Edited by Dell Hymes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

——— Deep Down in the Jungle. 1964; reprint, Chicago: Aldine, 1970.

——— “The Enactment-Centered Theory.” In Frontiers of Folklore. Edited by William Bascom. Boulder: Westview, 1977, pp. 79–120.

——— “The Negro Stereotype, Negro Folklore and the Riots.” Journal of American Folklore 83 (1970): 228–249.

——— Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South. New York: Pantheon, 1991.

Abrahams, Roger D., and John F. Szwed, eds. After Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.

s Adams, Edward C. L. Tales of the Congaree. 1928; reprint, Chapel Hill: Uni- r versity of North Carolina Press, 1987. l 133

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Armstrong, Louis. Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans. New York: Da Capo, 1986.

Baer, Florence. Sources and Analogues of the Uncle Remus Tale. Helsinki: Aca- demia Scientiarum Fennica, 1980.

Baker, Houston A. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacu- lar Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

——— Long Black Song. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “The Hero, and the Position of the Author. Edited by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp. 47–77. BIB ——— Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Blooming- ton: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Bal, Mieke. Narratology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988.

Baldwin, James. Jimmy’s Blues. New York: St. Martin’s, 1985.

——— Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon, 1984.

——— “Stagolee.” Foreword to Bobby Seale, A Lonely Rage. New York: Times Books, 1978.

Baraka, Imamu Amiri (LeRoi Jones). Blues People. New York: Morrow, 1963.

———, ed. Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. New York: Morrow, 1968.

Barlow, William. Looking Up at Down: The Emergence of Blues Culture. Phila- delphia: Temple University Press, 1989.

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Abrahams, Roger D., 222, 254n1 Bishop, Orrick C., 32, 33, 63 Akins, William, 35 Black-and-tan clubs, 7, 43, 94, 144 IND_MAIN Ali, Muhammad, 14 Black churches, 1, 94–95 Allomotifs. See Oral narrative Black ethos, 214–216 Armstrong, Louis, 101 Black males: significance of Stagolee for, 1–3, 4, 7–8, 10–11, 14, 92, 178, 220, 227, 228; as “bad niggers,” 14–15, 17, 114, 126, IND_ALPHA “Bad niggers,” 114, 149–151, 170, 222; 180, 149–151, 170, 180, 193–206, 202, 207–211, 196–198, 202, 207–211, 214, 215–216, 228; 214–216, 222, 228 in American literature, 193–206 Black Panther party, 14, 92, 207, 214 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 169–170 Black social clubs, 70–71, 93–98; four Baldwin, James, 2, 196, 205, 220; “Stagger- hundred clubs, 7, 11, 16, 42–44, 93, 98, lee Wonders,” 206–207, 208–211; 116; black-and-tan clubs, 7, 43, 94, 144; “Stranger in the Village,” 212 as lid clubs, 38, 39, 82 Bama (prisoner at Parchman Farm), 167– Blues, 37, 110–116, 142, 188; versions of 169, 171 “Stagolee,” 2, 3, 4, 7, 13, 14, 40, 69, 115, Barlow, William, 16, 39, 81, 107, 112–113, 226 121, 144–147, 151–157, 167–169, 172, 189; Bauman, Richard, 71–72, 187, 256n9 “St. Louis Blues,” 86; “Deep Morgan Bechet, Sidney, 2, 121; “Old Stack O’Lee Blues,” 87; and Mama Lou, 107; origin Blues,” 172 of, 110–111; “Crazy Blues,” 144; “Stack- Benjamin, Walter, 16–17, 48, 71, 91, 99, o-Lee Blues,” 145–146, 147; “Original 188–189, 219, 224, 226 Stack O’Lee Blues,” 151–152; “Stack Berlin, Edward A., 94 O’Lee Blues,” 153–157; “Me and the Berry, Chuck, 14 Devil Blues,” 163; “Old Stack O’Lee “Big Black: A Mississippi Idyll” (story by Blues,” 172. See also Rhythm and blues Tennessee Williams), 193–195, 196 versions of “Stagolee” “Big Boy Leaves Home” (story by Richard Bluestein, Eugene, 186, 187, 188, 256n9 s Wright), 195–196 Bontemps, Arna: God Sends Sunday, 84– r Bill Curtis Saloon, 22–25, 28–31, 64, 65 85, 86, 7, 12, 55, 103, 106–107, 172, 244n11, l 135

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Bontemps, Arna (continued) Claiborne, Bob, 83 245n6; brothel bullies, 89–90. See also Clash (musical group), 4 Prostitution Class, 16–17, 91–92, 213 Bowden, Betsy, 188 Cleaver, Eldridge, 88, 212 Boyd, Frank, 24, 28–29, 74 Cohen, Norm, 145 “Brady and Duncan” (ballad), 110 Cole, Bob, 107 Brearley, H. C., 149 Colwell, Lew, 135 Bridgewater, Eliza, 60, 62–63 Connors, Madam “Babe,” 106–107, Bridgewater, Henry, 63, 65–66, 81; and 245n6 Bridgewater Saloon, 21–22, 31, 42, 60, Conroy, Jack, 131 65, 93, 133; as Republican, 28, 65, 79; re- Cook, Emmett, 96 lationship with Lyons, 42 Cook, Will Marion, 107 IND_MAIN Brooks, Gwendolyn, 2, 199 Coonjinings, 45, 123–126, 151 Broven, John, 174–175, 176 Courlander, Harold, 60 Brown, Charles, 31, 42–43, 60, 63, 64 Covington, J. C., 42–43 Brown, “Hi” Henry, 87 Cox, Archibald, 172, 174–176, 177 Brown, H. “Rap,” 14, 88 Crane, Stephen, 134 Brown, James, 4, 178 “Crawling Kingsnake” (epithet for Brown, Marie, 62–64, 182 Stagolee), 14 Brown, Sterling, 197, 199–201 Criminal culture, 12–13, 111–112, 120, 224– Bucket of Blood (bordello), 41 225 Buehler, Richard E., 44, 59, 66 Crump, Henry, 22, 24 “Bully of the Town, The” (ballad), 131 Curtis, Bill, 81 “Bully Song, The,” 106, 107–109, 111, 128– Curtis, Lucious, 172–173 129 Bunch, William, 114–115 Burgess, Albert, 79 Dance, Daryl, 201 Burkert, Walter, 71, 72 David, John, 60, 62, 63, 73, 82, 106, 110 Burleigh, Harry T., 107 Davis, Charles B., 35 Burnett, Addison “Booker T. Washing- Davis, Gussie, 111 ton,” 83 Dawn, Randee, 13 Dawson, James L., 67 IND_ALPHA Deep Morgan (red-light district). See St. Calloway, Cab, 4 Louis Campbell, James, 132 Democratic party, 16, 34, 35–36, 41, 77, 81, Capel, Maurice, 188 82–83, 84, 93, 94 Carby, Hazel V., 145 Devil, the, 199–201; and Stagolee, 36, 104– Carol, Ada, 96 105, 162–163, 168, 169–170, 171, 173, 182– Cave, Nick, 4 183 Champly, Henry, 90 Diamond, Neil, 4 Charles, Robert, 154 Dickens, Charles, 102 Christensen, Lawrence Oland, 74–75 Diddley, Bo, 14 s Civil rights movement, 14, 119, 177, 208 Dinosaurs (musical group), 68 r l 136

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