The Historical Timeline of Stagger Lee
1901 - 1910
Important Events in the Stagger Lee Story
1903 Earliest known transcription of lyrics from Memphis but reportedly first heard in Colorado in 1899 or 1900.
1903 Another transcription of lyrics to the Ballad of Stackerlee. Sung from the perspective of a St. Louis prostitute working for him as her pimp.
The song spreads like a game of Chinese Whispers across the South as musicians hear it and play it back from memory with their own embellishments. The Stag Lee of the song is hung for the murder, sent off with an elaborate funeral, kicks the Devil from his throne and takes over Hell. The real Lee Shelton is still in prison.
Democrat 1905–09
1909, Thanksgiving Lee Shelton is released from prison, pardoned by governor Joseph Wingate Folk.
You just have to wonder what he thought when he heard the songs.
1910, February Miss Ella Scott Fisher of San Angelo, Texas sends John Lomax, a pioneering musicologist and folklorist, eight stanzas of The Ballad of Stagalee. She writes to him:
This is all the verses I remember. The origin of this ballad, I have been told, was the shooting of Billy Lyons in a barroom on the Memphis levee by Stack Lee. The song is sung by the Negroes on the levee while they are loading and unloading the river freighters, the words being composed by the singers…
1911 - 1920
1911 Two variations appeared in the 1911 edition of The Journal of American-Folk Lore. The first is a variant found in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee; the second is found in Georgia.
1911 White American sociologist and author who researched African-American life and folklore, Howard Odum, describes the song as being widely sung in several southern states and also remarks that it is "sung by Negro vagrants all over the country."
1911, January 26 Lee Shelton pistol whips and kills William Atkins while robbing his house.
1911, May 7 After barely 16 months of freedom, Lee Shelton enters prison once more.
1912, February 8 Governor Herbert Spencer Hadley (Republican 1909–13) pardons Shelton under pressure from the Democrats.
1912, March 11 Lee Shelton dies of tuberculosis without having left the prison hospital. No notice of his death appears in St. Louis newspapers.
Visit the graves of Lee Shelton and Willie Lyons