The legend of “Stagger Lee” is born

On Christmas night 1895, a barroom argument between two men—one named Billy and another named "Stag" Lee—takes place, leading to murder. The killing would inspire an iconic blues song.

Murder and mayhem inspired many popular songs over the years, though more often than not, the tales around which such songs revolve tend to be wholly fictional. Johnny Cash never shot a man in Reno, and the events related in such famous story songs as “El Paso” and “I Shot The Sheriff” never actually took place. The same cannot be said, however, about “Stagger Lee”—a song that, while it has drifted from the facts somewhat over the course of its many lives in the last 100-plus years, was indeed inspired by an actual murder that took place late in the evening of December 25, 1895, in a St. Louis, Missouri bar. Billy Lyons died early the next morning.

Under the headline “Shot in Curtis’s Place,” the story that ran in the next day’s edition of the St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat began, “William Lyons, 25, colored, a levee hand…was shot in the abdomen yesterday evening at 10 o’clock in the saloon of Bill Curtis…by Lee Sheldon, also colored.” According to the Globe-Democrat’s account, Billy Lyons and “Stag” Lee Sheldon “had been drinking and were in exuberant spirits” when an argument over “politics” boiled over, and Lyons “snatched Sheldon’s hat from his head.” While subsequent musical renditions of this story would depict the dispute as one over gambling, they would preserve the key detail of “Stag” Lee Sheldon’s headwear and of his matter-of-fact response to losing it: “Sheldon drew his revolver and shot Lyons in the abdomen… When his victim fell to the floor Sheldon took his hat from the hand of the wounded man and coolly walked away.”

In his 2003 book Stagolee Shot Billy, scholar Cecil Brown recounts the story of how the real “Stag” Lee became an iconic figure in African American folklore and how his story became the subject of various musical renderings “from the [age of the] steamboat to the electronic age in the American 21st century.” The most famous of those musical renditions were 1928’s “Stack O’ Lee Blues” by Mississippi John Hurt and 1959’s “Stagger Lee,” an unlikely #1 pop hit for Lloyd Price. Versions of the story have also appeared, however, in songs by artists as wide-ranging as Woody Guthrie, Duke Ellington, Bob Dylan, James Brown, The Clash, the Grateful Dead and Nick Cave.