Annotation:Stagolee
X:0 T: No Score C: The Traditional Tune Archive M: K: x
STAGOLEE. AKA - "Stack O Lee," "Stagger Lee," "Stagolee was a Bully." American, Blues Tune. The blues ballad about Stagolee (or Stackerlee) and his fight with Billy Lyons has been a blues classic for generations and can be found in most volumes of American folksongs. There are many versions of the tune and song in tradition, and it has been rendered in a number of genres. There was a real 'Stackolee', finds George M. Eberhart (in an article entitled "Stack Lee: The Man, the Music, and the Myth, in the journal Popular Music and Society, Spring, 1997), who was one Stack Lee Shelton. He murdered William “Willie” Lyons on Christmas Day, 1895, in a saloon on 11th & Morgan (now Delmar) in (east) St. Louis. Lyons and Shelton were friends but an argument arose between them, some say over a dispute about hats. The result was that Shelton shot and killed Lyons, who now rests in an unmarked grave in Saint Peter’s Cemetery, St. Louis.
The title appears in a list of traditional Ozarks Mountains fiddle tunes compiled by musicologist/folklorist Vance Randolph, published in 1954.
