A childhood song, a Christmas Eve shooting, and a Stetson hat that started it all
I must have been seven or eight the first time I heard it. Maybe younger. My mother had the radio going… she usually did. And this thing came on with a groove that just grabbed you. Something about a clear night, a yellow moon, leaves tumbling down. And then two men gambling in the dark. A Stetson hat. A .44.
I didn’t know what any of it meant. Didn’t matter. I sang along anyway.
That song was “Stagger Lee.” And I have been blissfully, cheerfully ignorant about it for roughly sixty years.
Until last week, when I made the mistake of looking it up.
Friends, I need you to sit down.
The story, the actual story, goes like this: Christmas Eve, 1895, a saloon in St. Louis. A man named “Stag” Lee Shelton got into it with a man named Billy Lyons. The historical record tells us Stag was a pimp, though no one mentioned that on the radio in 1971. Billy made the catastrophic decision to snatch Stag’s Stetson hat. Stag went home, got his forty-four, came back, and that was that for Billy.
Over a hat.
I have read some explanations of folk song origins in my time, but I was not prepared for that one. I grew up thinking this was just a colorful story about two hotheaded gambling men. Turns out I was singing the sanitized version of a song about a pimp who shot a man over a hat on Christmas Eve.
I grew up singing ‘Stagger Lee’ on the radio with my mother. Turns out neither of us had any idea what we were singing about. Sixty-odd years later, one internet search fixed that — and another chunk of childhood naiveté vanished with the click of a mouse.
Lloyd Price recorded his version in 1957. That’s the one I knew, the one my mother and I would have heard on the radio. He turned it into a lively, big-beat R&B number that shot to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1959. It sold something close to 200,000 copies a day at its peak. Dick Clark thought it was too violent for American Bandstand and made Price do a clean version with a happy ending. First number one hit to be censored. I did not know that either.
All I knew was that “go Stagger Lee, go” part, which I’m pretty sure I sang in the yard.
What I also didn’t know… and this is where the rabbit hole gets genuinely dizzying… is just how many people have covered this song.
Staggerlee.com (an entire website devoted to this one song, which tells you something) estimates that over 500 artists have recorded it since the first commercial release in 1923. I started scrolling through the list and couldn’t stop. Woody Guthrie. The Ventures. Ike and Tina Turner. James Brown. Wilson Pickett. Fats Domino. The Righteous Brothers. Neil Diamond did a disco version, which I did not need to know but now cannot un-know.
Pat Boone covered Lloyd Price’s version and changed the “Go, Stagger Lee!” chorus to “Oh, Stagger Lee!” That tells you everything you need to know about Pat Boone.
Elvis sang it during rehearsal, caught on the That’s The Way It Is documentary, never officially released. Apparently he revised Billy’s “three little children and a very sickly wife” to something considerably less family-friendly. That sounds about right for 1970 Elvis.
Bob Dylan recorded it in 1993 and explained that “a man’s hat is his crown.” You could spend an afternoon with that sentence alone.
Nick Cave did it on Murder Ballads after finding the lyrics in a collection of folk poetry gathered from New York prisons in the fifties and sixties. Nick Cave was always going to find it that way.
The Black Keys did a version called “Stack Shot Billy.” John Fogerty performed it with Lloyd Price at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. Beck said his 1996 hit “Devil’s Haircut” was basically a Stagger Lee rewrite, imagining what the man would look like if he showed up in 1996.
What gets me, sitting here thinking about it, is how far this thing traveled. Like a rumor passed along a river. Staggerlee.com says it spread through the South along railway lines and paddle steamers on the Mississippi, told and retold, sung and resung, changing a little each time until reality slipped away and the myth took over. At some point it went from a news item about a shooting to a folktale to a blues ballad to a number one pop hit that a kid in Louisiana was singing in the yard without the faintest idea what it was about.
In 1969, folk historian Julius Lester introduces Stagolee in language so exaggerated it almost sounds like somebody leaning across a card table trying to top the last story. Stagolee was supposed to be so mean the flies would not circle his head in summertime, and snow would not fall on his house in winter. Every line keeps reaching farther than the one before it. Not history anymore exactly. Something larger and rougher than that.
That is not what Lloyd Price sang on the radio.
I’ve had songs fool me before. “Amos Moses.” “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.” “Don’t Mess Around with Jim.” Songs that sound like good-time radio fare and turn out to be about something considerably rougher underneath. But those I at least vaguely understood going in.
Stagger Lee took sixty years to reveal himself to me.
I feel like I owe Billy Lyons an apology. I was rooting for the wrong man.
Special thanks to staggerlee.com — an extraordinary archive on one extraordinary song.