The Song & Myth of Stagger Lee
1901 - 1920
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.
Democrat 1905–09
1909, Thanksgiving Lee Shelton released from prison, pardoned by governor Joseph Wingate Folk.
1910, February Miss Ella Fisher of Texas sends John Lomax, a pioneering musicologist and folklorist, 8 stanzas of The Ballad of Stagalee. She writes to him, “This song is sung by the Negroes on the levee while they are loading and unloading the river freighters.”
1910 - 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 Shelton pistol whips and kills William Atkins while robbing his house.
1911, May 7 Shelton enters prison once more.
1912, February 8 Governor Herbert Spencer Hadley (Republican 1909–13) pardons Sheton 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
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