African American badman folk hero, also known as Stackerlee, Stackalee, Stacker Lee,
or Stagalee, whose outrageous behavior, specifically the murder of Billy (or Bully) Lyon
(also Lyons, Lion, Lions, O’Lyons, or Galion) over a magical Stetson hat, has been the
subject of folksongs, legends, and toasts since the 1890s. According to oral tradition,
Stagolee was supposedly born in Missouri with a veil over his face and consequently had
supernatural powers, which he sought to increase by selling his soul to the devil. In some
versions, Stagolee was intoxicated as the devil lured him into the pact. For payment, the
devil gave him the hat, which enabled the protagonist to accomplish even more
extraordinary feats, such as eating fire and changing his size and shape. Some say he
went west, and in April 1906 he blew San Francisco down in response to a bartender who
was too slow in serving him; others say that Stagolee jerked out the bar and pulled out its
pipes—along with the rest of the town’s water pipes connected to it—causing the San
Francisco earthquake. The song’s beginning introduces some of the more typical
characteristics of the badman. The following lines come from Southern Black prisoners
and appear as examples in Roger Abrahams, Deep Dotun in thejungle: Negro Narrative
Folklorefrom the Streets of Philadelphia::
Stagolee, he was a bad man, an’ ev’body know,
He toted a stack-barreled blow gun an a blue steel forty-four.
Stackerlee, he was a bad man,
He wanted the whole world to know
He toted a thirty-two twenty
And a smokeless forty-four (quoted in Abrahams
1970a:131)
Finally growing intolerant of Stagolee’s obnoxious behavior, the devil removed the hat
and its magical powers by using a professional gambler, Billy Lyon. The events leading
to Lyon’s death include a barroom brawl, which ensued in Memphis, St. Louis, or elsewhere (depending on the version) following Billy Lyon’s theft of Stagolee’s hat;
consequently, Stagolee shot and killed him. Most versions of the ballad include Lyon
begging for his life, crying that he has two or three children and an innocent wife,
whereupon Stagolee typically responds:
Damn your children,
And damn your lovin’ wife.
You stole my good old Stetson hat,
And now I’m goin’ to have your life (quoted in Courlander
1963:178)
Other versions focus on Stagolee’s capture, his remorse, and his sentencing, or perhaps
even have the devil climbing out of hell and shouting, “Come and get this bad Stagolee
before he kills us all” (Courlander 1963:179). The following are the last nine of
seventeen stanzas of a chain-gang worksong text that comes from Black prisoners in the
Mississippi Penitentiary. This text includes the arrest, conviction, and sentencing of
Stagolee and a final encounter with the devil:
The high sheriff told the deputies,
“Get your pistols and come with me.
We got to go ‘rest that
Bad man Stagolee.”
The deputies took their pistols
And they laid them on the shelf—
“If you want that bad man Stagolee,
Go ‘rest him by yourself.”
High sheriff ask the bartender,
“Who can that bad man be?”
“Speak softly,” said the bartender,
“Its that bad man Stagolee.”
He touch Stack on the shoulder,
Say, “Stack, why don’t you run?”
“I don’t run, white folks,
When I got my forty-one.”
The hangman put the mask on,
Tied his hands behind his back,
Sprung the trap on Stagolee
But his neck refuse to crack.
Hangman, he got frightened,
Said, “Chief, you see how it be—
I can’t hang this man,
Better set him free.”
Three hundred dollar funeral,
Thousand dollar hearse,
Satisfaction undertaker
Put Stack six feet in the earth.
Stagolee, he told the devil,
Says, “Come on and have some fun—
You stick me with your pitchfork,
I’ll shoot you with my forty-one.”
Stagolee took the pitchfork,
And he laid it on the shelf.
Says, “Stand back, Tom Devil,
I’m gonna rule Hell by myself” (quoted in Lomax
1960:571–572)
Some scholars place the character, either real or imaginary, as a roustabout who gained
his notoriety during the late 19th century’s steamboating days along the Ohio River, until
a murder conviction ended his career. Many claim the ballad “Stacker Lee” was
composed on the levees, where it was most popular. Versions of the story on which the
ballad in Black oral tradition is based include one that claims Stagolee actually existed
and that his mother was a chambermaid on one of the many steamboats that carried the
name of Lee and that plied the river between Memphis and Cincinnati, St. Louis and
Vicksburg. Another story suggests he was born while his mother was a cook on board the
Stacker Lee, on which he became a roustabout or a stoker; however, Stagolee allegedly
murdered his arch-enemy, Billy Lyon, before the Stacker Lee was built, so the first
account seems more compelling. One of the most convincing arguments diat identifies
the 1890s in St. Louis as the time and place for events informing the ballad of
“Stackerlee,” comes from John David’s doctoral dissertation, Tragedy in Ragtime: Black
Folktales from St. Louis (David 1976).
Besides appearing as the subject of the ballad and prose narrative tradition, Stagolee
has also emerged as a main character in toasts. “Stackolee,” wrote Bruce Jackson in his
book on Black prison toasts, “Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me”: Narrative
Poetry from Black Oral Tradition, “Is about an irrational badman who engages in
gratuitous violence and joyless sexuality, a man who fires his gun a lot but is almost
totally nonverbal. He is the archetypal bully blindly striking out [at] any passing object or
person. His sheer strength and big pistol bring him fame, but there are for him no
solutions….” (Jackson 1974:13). Versions of the Stagolee toast emerge among males in
military and other settings such as prisons, street corners, parties, and bars. While the
bully ballad focuses primarily on Stagolee’s motives for killing Billy Lyons, the toast
concerns itself more with which of the two badmen is the meaner, and it usually has
Stagolee sexually violating Billy’s woman. In toasts Stagolee exercises his virility in
direct rejection of women and femininity, such as in a confrontation with a woman who
approaches the hero after he has murdered Billy’s brother, the bartender. The woman
attempts to keep him there until Billy arrives:
“Hi there, baby, where’s the bartender, if you please?”
I said, “Look behind the bar, he’s with his mind at ease.”
So she peeped at her watch, it was seven of eight.
She said, “Come upstairs, baby, let me set you
straight.”
Now, we went upstairs, the springs gave a twistle,
I throwed nine inches of dick into that bitch before
she could move her gristle.
Now we come downstairs big and bold.
They was fucking on the bar, sucking on the floor.
Then you could hear a pin drop. Benny Long [Billy
Lyon] come in (quoted in Abrahams 1970a:76)
And of course, Stagolee also demonstrates his powers in battle:
And out went the lights.
And Benny Long was in both of my thirty-eight
sights.
Now the lights came on and all the best.
I sent that sucker to eternal rest,
Widi thirteen thirty-eight-bullet holes ‘cross his motherfucking chest (quoted in Abrahams 1970&77)
Abrahams has offered an interesting interpretation of the badman in Black oral traditions:
“Where the trickster is a perpetual child, the badman is a perpetual adolescent. His is a
world of overt rebellion. He commits acts against taboos and mores in full knowledge of
what he is doing. In fact he glories in this knowledge of revolt” (Abrahams 1970a:65). In
his subsequent work, Positively Black, Abrahams examines more closely the use of such
stock characters in folklore, demonstrating that “a stereotype will always exhibit the bias
of the group that fashions it” (Abrahams 1970b:11). Stagolees actions in the toast form
exhibit the importance of bravery as well as words, as the above story’s ending attests:
I was raised in the backwoods, where my pa raised a
bear,
And I got three sets of jawbone teeth and an extra layer
of hair.
When I was three I sat in a barrel of knives.
Then a ratdesnake bit me, crawled ofFand died.
So when I come in here, I’m no stranger.
‘Cause when I leave, my asshole print leaves “danger”
(quoted in Abrahams 1970a:77)
As Abrahams observes, “the endings of many texts [of toasts] are conventional boasts
which may have traveled from the river with the stories of Stack.” The Black heroic
conceptions of Stagolee, as the genres in which the figure appears demonstrate, have also
remained intact, although some versions of the earliest ballads describe Stagolee’s killing
of Billy Lyon as simply a “good man’s” response to a bully:
Stack-O-Lee was a good man
One everybody did love.
Everybody swore by Stack,
Just like the lovin’ stars above.
Oh, that Stack—that Stack-O-Lee (quoted in Roberts 1989:208)
In short, Stagolee epitomizes the Black badman folk hero, whose interpretation demands
a genre- and culture-specific approach. He may exist as the dramatis persona in song,
such as those ballads Howard Odum collected in the early 1900s; he may exist in both
song and tale, such as diose diat Mississippi John Hurt told and sung in which the
badman was White (Jackson 1974:4); and he may exist in both Black and White toasts
(Evans 1977; Jackson 1974:44–54; Wepman, Newman, and Binderman 1976).
Richard Allen Burns
References
Abrahams, Roger. [1963] 1970a. Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the
Streets of Philadelphia. Chicago: Aldine.
——. 1970b. Positively Black. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Botkin, B.A. 1946. The American People: In Their Stories, Legends, Tall Tales, Traditions,
Ballads, and Songs. London: Pilot.
Courlander, Harold. 1963. Negro Folk Music U.S.A. New York: Columbia University Press.
David, John. 1976. Tragedy in Ragtime: Black Folktales from St. Louis. Ph.D. diss., St. Louis
University.
Evans, David. 1977. TheToast in Context. Journal of American Folklore 90:129–148.
Jackson, Bruce. 1965. Stagolee Stories: A Badman Goes Gende. Southern Folklore Quarterly 29
(3):188–194.
——. 1974. “Get YourAss in the Water and Swim Like Me”: Narrative Poetryfrom Black Oral
Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Labov, William, Paul Cohen, Clarence Robbins, and John Lewis. [1968] 1990. Toasts. In Mother
Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore, ed.
Alan Dundes. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, pp. 329–347.
Levine, Lawrence. [1977] 1980. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk
Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lomax, Alan. 1960. The Folk Songs of North America. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Roberts, John W. 1989. From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Wepman, Dennis, Ronald B.Newman, and Murray B. Binderman. 1976. The Life: The Lore and
Folk Poetry of the Black Hustler. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Wheeler, Mary. [1944] 1969. Steamboatin Days: Folk Songs of the River Packet Era. Freeport,
NY: Books for Libraries.