Following a barroom quarrel over a Stetson hat in 1895, Lee Sheldon fatally shot 25-year-old Billy Lyons in the abdomen with a revolver. Sheldon, a notorious St. Louis pimp nicknamed “Stag,” was arrested and convicted, and spent the rest of his life in prison. He died in the nineteen-teens, but the story of his lethal saloon spat with Billy Lyons has been told and retold by literally hundreds of blues, jazz, folk, soul, country and rock musicians.

In the songs, he is known as Stagger Lee, Stacker Lee, Stagolee, Stack O’Lee, etcetera. His story has been sung and crooned and strummed by blues legends like Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim and Muddy Waters; folk legends like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Dave Van Ronk; soul legends like James Brown, Ike and Tina Turner and the Righteous Brothers; jazz legends like Sidney Bechet and Duke Ellington; and popular singers like Tom Jones and Neil Diamond. And that’s barely scraping the surface. Even The Clash has taken a stab at Stagger Lee.

According to blues connoisseur Bruce Pingree, who operates the Press Room in Portsmouth and will be discussing the Stagger Lee legend on “Words and Music” with Sarah Boucher on Portsmouth Community Radio on Monday, Dec. 5, the song originated as a “toast,” which is an early form of a rap.

It would be impossible to determine who first set the fatal shooting to music, but the first written documentation of the Stagger Lee story came in 1910. That’s when a woman wrote to folklorist/historian John Lomax about a toast she heard recited by dock hands in Memphis.

“She thought it probably was about a member of the Lee family, which was a white family in Memphis that owned a lot of steamboats,” Pingree explained in a recent interview. “There actually was a riverboat at that time called Stacker Lee, so a lot of Memphis people thought that the rap was about somebody from Memphis.”

Others thought the story originated in New Orleans because certain versions made reference to Rampart Street, Pingree added.

The story itself varied as well. In most of the songs, Billy wins Stag’s cherished Stetson hat in a game of cards. In others, Stag and Billy’s girl have a fling. But according to St. Louis news clippings from 1895, the dispute started as a political discussion. With large quantities of booze fueling the debate and inflaming tempers, the conversation turned sour. Finally, Billy made the irrevocable error of ripping Stagger Lee’s hat from his head. Stag returned the favor by putting a bullet in young Billy’s gut. 
Regardless of how it actually happened, the Stagger Lee legend became woven into 20th century folklore, much like John Henry and John Hardy.

 “The whole story became a big folk legend in the African American community. That’s what kept it going and the reason that people have recorded versions of it,” Pingree said.

“It is still, I’m sure, being recited to young black males somewhere, right now as we’re speaking, by an older relative, so that the different versions of the story live on that way, in oral tradition.”

The first actual recording of the song “Stagger Lee” appeared in 1923, performed by a white jazz group called Frank Westphal and his Regal Novelty Orchestra. In 1927, two important versions emerged, one by blues matriarch Ma Rainey, the other by a white guitar and harmonica player named Frank Hutchison. (Hutchison’s version was redone by Bob Dylan in 1993.)

But the song did not conquer a mainstream audience until 1950, when it was recorded by New Orleans pianist Archibald. A couple years later, a successful R&B version was recorded by Lloyd Price. That version ended famously with the lines “Stagger Lee shot Billy, oh he shot that poor boy so bad, / Till the bullet came through Billy and it broke the bartender’s glass.”

Unfortunately, the violent lyrics did not sit well with Dick Clark, and Price was forced to record a new version so that it could be played on “American Bandstand.” The clean-cut version ended with Stag and Billy resolving their differences and becoming pals.

Hence began a wild array of “Stagger Lee” incarnations, totaling over 220 versions, according to Pingree. In a 1978 version by the Grateful Dead, Lee has already shot Billy by the second line. The bulk of the song, written by Robert Hunter, is about Billy’s girlfriend Delia hunting down the killer and ultimately shooting “him in the balls.”

Perhaps the most vulgar version came from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in 1996. In this lovely ballad, Lee kills a bartender before ever meeting Billy Lyons. “Well those were the last words that the barkeep said / ’Cause Stag put four holes in his motherfucking head.” The song ends with Lee forcing Lyons to perform sexual acts at gunpoint. Dick Clark, eat your heart out.

In some versions of the song Lee is presented as a rebellious, heroic figure who took the law into his own hands. In others he is demonized as a murderous villain who cruelly shot down the honest and noble Billy. In some versions the protagonist is defiant and courageous, and in others he is despicable and craven. The only thing everyone seems to agree on is that Stagger Lee was a bona fide badass. 

“To a lot of young males he could definitely be looked upon as a hero because he was just doing what he wanted to do; he could care less about the law or anybody else,” Pingree said. “It’d be like the way some people look at the drug dealers nowadays.”

America has always nurtured a morbid fascination with senseless feuds and idle gunplay. Look at Johnny Cash in the 1960s, singing about getting jacked up on coke and shooting his woman down, or shooting a man in Reno “just to watch him die.” More recently, consider the gansta rap invasion of the ’90s, when Snoop, Dre, Pac and Eazy boasted of rampantly machine gunning each other just for sport—and to tremendous consumer applause. Most Americans seem to connect on some level with the idea of rabidly spilling blood in the name of jealousy, pride or simple wrath. Hence the larger-than-life aura surrounding history’s all-time scum-bags, like cowboys, bikers and mobsters.

But there might be more to the Stagger Lee story than raw bloodlust. Pingree pointed out that Bobby Seale, cofounder of the Black Panther party in 1966, once brought up the legend in a prison interview.
“He goes, ‘When I was on the streets I had a bit of Stagger Lee. Lee was Malcolm X before he became political, when he was a bad brother on the streets,’” Pingree said. He added that Stag also was referenced by Eldridge Cleaver, the Panther who went to prison for raping a white woman and later wrote “Soul On Ice,” a collection of essays on racism that fueled the Black Power movement.

The history behind the Stagger Lee story has been studied in depth since the 1970s. A book called “Stagolee Shot Billy,” by Cecil Brown, was published in 2003. As the mythology continues to expand, Pingree strives to keep the true historical context in focus. He notes that the rhyming games associated with early versions of the song can be traced all the way back to Africa.

“There’s a lot of African American culture that’s kind of below the radar,” he said. “A lot of folks don’t realize that, like the song Stagger Lee, they’ll hear Pat Boone do it or something and have no idea where the song actually came from or that there’s this long history of the song.”

On WSCA’s “Words and Music” on Monday night, from 6 to 7 p.m. Pingree and Boucher will examine the history of the song and its connection to the written word. 

“I might recite some of the cleaner written versions,” he said with a laugh.