Copyright © 2002-2009
by James P. Hauser except where otherwise noted. All rights reserved.
In Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest songs (records) of all time (issue 963, dated December 9, 2004), its entry for Lloyd Price's "Stagger Lee" (song # 456 out of 500) refers to the legendary black badman as the "original gangsta." The legend is based largely on an incident which took place in December of 1895 in the city of St. Louis when a pimp named Lee Shelton (also known as Stag Lee) shot a man named William Lyons in a bar. The two men had been arguing. Lyons had taken Shelton's hat from him and refused to give it back. So Shelton shot him. As reported in the St. Louis Globe Democrat newspaper, after Lyons fell to the floor, Shelton "took his hat from the hand of the wounded man and coolly walked away."
Many musicians have recorded the legend in song over the last 80 years, including blues, folk and jazz artists. Rock 'n' roll musicians have also recorded the song; the first rock version was Lloyd Price's classic "Stagger Lee." Price's record glamorized--or it might be more appropriate to describe it as seeming to glamorize--the tale's violence and murder. In this way, it was a forerunner of gangster rap. Recorded in 1958, 30 years before N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton album broke gangster rap to a mass audience, Price's voice is exuberant as he tells a story of murder on a recording which has such a celebratory tone that it sounds like a 1960s frat rock record such as "Louie Louie" or "Double Shot of My Baby's Love."
Price pared down the story, leaving out the part about how the police refused to pursue the badman out of fear for their own lives. This omission left no clues for the white part of the 1950s rock 'n' roll audience about the meaning of the legend to black America. The significance of the lawmen refusing to arrest Stagger Lee can be understood in light of the fact that the primary instrument for the enforcement of the Jim Crow system was the police force. The legend of Stagger Lee was fathered by slavery and Jim Crow, and it grew out of the African-American will to be free of white oppression and the racial boundaries established by the authorities in the white ruling class. Stagger Lee was the original anti-authority, anti-cop song. Gangster rap, with its anti-authority stance, and anti-cop records such as Ice-T's "Cop Killer" and N.W.A.'s "F*ck tha Police" follow in the footsteps of Price's record and the legend of the original gangster, Stagger Lee.