Stagolee shot Billy / Cecil Brown.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 231-285) and index.

Stagolee shot Billy -- Lee Shelton : the man behind the myth -- That bad pimp of old St. Louis : the oral poetry of the late 1890s -- "Poor Billy Lyons" -- Narrative events and narrated events -- Stagolee and politics -- Under the lid : the underside of the political struggle -- The Black social clubs -- Hats and nicknames : symbolic values -- Ragtime and Stagolee -- The blues and Stagolee -- Jim Crow and oral narrative -- Riverboat rouster and mean mate -- Work camps, hoboes, and shack bully hollers -- William Marion Reedy's white outlaw -- Cowboy Stagolee and hillbilly blues -- Blueswomen : Stagolee did them wrong -- Bluesmen and Black bad man -- On the trail of sinful Stagolee -- Stagolee in a world full of trouble -- From rhythm and blues to rock and roll : "I heard my bulldog bark" -- The toast : bad Black hero of the Black revolution -- Folklore/poplore : Bob Dylan's Stagolee -- The "bad nigger" trope in American literature -- James Baldwin's "Staggerlee wonders" -- Stagolee as cultural and political hero -- Stagolee and modernism.

Print version record.

"This story was never meant to by sandwiched between the covers of a book, as neat lines of prose. In 1895 a man called "Stag" Lee Shelton shot a man called Billy Lyons in a St. Louis bar. A black-on-black crime that scarcely made headlines. But this story, turned into a song, is one that black Americans have never tired of repeating and reliving. This tale of dignity and death, violence and sex, has been given countless forms by artists ranging from Ma Rainey to the Clash." "Billy died because he touched another man's five-dollar Stetson. Or was it because he cheated at a card game? Or was it because the antagonists straddled the great American fault line of race at the time the earth was shifting - at the time a strange, almost conspiratorial war was raging in St. Louis between traditional black Republicans and a renegade faction aligned with the traditionally racist Democratic party? A small portion of this story has been told again and again, generation after generation, but few, till now have known what the whole story was." "Novelist and scholar Cecil Brown explores this legend from what was in those days the second city of America, gateway between East and West and North and South: St. Louis. Though bits of actual history have been associated with the song, the true story - told in its entirety for the first time in this book - is more complex, more deeply rooted, than anything anyone would ever dare to invent. It tells of the first generation of free black men, crushed by a Genteel America that was both black and white. It tells of the wild place this country was in the nineteenth century - so wild that the inhabitants of the twentieth century could take it only in small doses and needed to forget. Now it can be told in full."--Jacket.

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