Stagger Lee

1865, March 16 Lee Shelton is born.

1865 With $100, John B. Stetson rents a small room, buys tools, and $10 worth of fur. The John B. Stetson Hat Company is born.

Late 1800s A popular song of the south is "Bully of the Town." Ragtime emerges as a new musical style. St. Louis is the Ragtime hothouse.

It is easy to forget now that the technology to record and preserve music is barely a century old. Before then popular music would spread by a player hearing another player do their version of a song, then playing it themselves as best as memory allowed. Sometimes the same music was used under new lyrics, often the music itself changed according to the player.

In the discussions of the origins of the Stagger Lee song there is much speculation that the events of Lee Shelton and Billy Lions were overlaid on to "Bully of the Town." Certainly many versions of Stagger Lee refer to him as a Bully, notably Long ‘Cleve’ Reed and Little Harvey Hull's 1927 version.

Early 1890s Madame Babe’s is a famous, classy St. Louis brothel. Madame Babe once refused to have Oscar Wilde in her house. Mama Lou, the house singer, is renowned for belting out her version of “Bully of the Town.”

1894 On a train from Chicago to San Francisco, white sports writer, horse judge, and amateur musician, Charles E. Trevathan, plays the song to amuse fellow passengers. Making no mention of St. Louis brothels, he claims to have learned the tune from Tennessee blacks. The passengers encourage him to put lyrics to it. He does.

1895, September 16 May Irwin, Trevathan’s girlfriend, sings his “The Bully Song” in the Broadway musical, "The Widow Jones." It becomes a huge success.

When I got through with bully, a doctor and a nurse
Weren't no good to dat feller, so they put him in a hearse,
A cyclone couldn't have tore him up much worse.