Stagolee Shot Billy

In""Stagolee,"" one of history's best-known blues songs, a dispute between Billy Lyons and a""bad man"" called Stagolee ends in a shooting; variations of the ballad have been recorded by hundreds of musicians, from Mississippi John Hurt and Champion Jack Dupree to Peggy Lee, Ike and Tina Turner, Bob Dylan and Nick Cave. But for all the song's incarnations, little is known definitively about its origins: Who was Stagolee--or Stacker Lee, or Stack-o-lee? Scholar and author Brown (The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger) sets out to answer that question by presenting Lee Shelton, a.k.a.""Stack Lee,"" a pimp who shot Billy Lyons in a barroom in 1895; probing the seamy St. Louis milieu that served as the murder's backdrop; and tracing the song's history through the decades--from the eight stanzas sent to music archivist John Lomax in 1910, through 1920s white""hillbilly"" versions and 1940s prison renditions and up to its influence on present-day rap music. Yet the book is more than a musical history; it considers""Stagolee as a black oral narrative and the rich relationship it reveals between oral literature and social life."" Brown addresses the legend's place in an evolving African-American consciousness and draws upon the works of luminaries like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison (he skillfully employs Freud, Levi-Strauss and Walter Benjamin as well). Brown's tone at times becomes dry and academic, and his occasional generalizations are jarring in such an otherwise thoughtful work. The book is intelligent and illuminating--and a smattering of illustrations livens it up--but it will likely be of more interest to serious musicologists and historians than casual blues fans.