Prometheus 6   

Stagger Lee lives on
Author Cecil Brown probes the shooting behind the songs
Joel Selvin, Chronicle Senior Pop Music Critic
Sunday, July 13, 2003
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Stagger Lee shot Billy over a $5 Stetson hat, or so the song goes. Everybody knows the fate of Billy Lyons, but it was East Bay author Cecil Brown who tracked down the actual turn-of-the-century shooting that launched a thousand songs.

Lee Shelton, a pimp called Stack Lee, was convicted of the murder of William Lyons, whom Shelton shot with a .44 Smith & Wesson after Lyons took his Stetson hat in a downtown St. Louis saloon on Christmas night 1895.

In his new book, "Stagolee Shot Billy" (Harvard University Press), Brown uses the incident as a starting point for an absorbing, far-ranging exploration of its subsequent recounting in hundreds of versions, including a 1958 No. 1 hit by Lloyd Price.

The song has been recorded many times, many ways, by musicians from Ma Rainey to Mississippi John Hurt, from New Orleans pianist Archibald to Bob Dylan. In December, Brown watched Taj Mahal play the song in his honor with Hawaiian musicians at Yoshi's.

But to Brown, who first heard his uncles sing the song in a North Carolina tobacco patch as a boy, "Stag-O-Lee" is more than a song, it's an African American myth that speaks to the heart of the black male experience in America.