Copyright © 2002-2005
by James P. Hauser
except where otherwise noted. All rights reserved.
Stagger Lee: From Mythic Blues Ballad to Ultimate Rock 'n' Roll Record
The AKA Blues Connection: Documenting the Blues Roots of Rock 'n' Roll
The Story of the Black Badman, the Stetson Hat, and the Ultimate Rock 'n' Roll record
Part 4: The Stetson Hat
Author's Note on the Stetson hat as a positive versus negative symbol:
When I wrote the essay below concerning the Stetson hat, I was convinced that the Stetson must have at one time been a symbol of white authority to African-Americans. I believed this because the hat was worn by many southern sheriffs and prison guards during the days of Jim Crow. Since the law was the primary instrument by which Jim Crow was kept in place, logic told me that the southern sheriff's trademark Stetson must have been a quite negative symbol to America's black population. One thing that kept bothering me though was the fact that the hats have actually been worn by some African-Americans. In particular, I was aware that blues and soul musicians such as Otis Rush, Solomon Burke, and Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown regularly wore Stetsons.
After finishing the essay, I continued to research the Stetson and soon it became quite clear to me that, although the hat certainly was a powerful symbol to blacks, it was actually a positive rather than a negative symbol. There were two sources which helped me to discover this: Louis Armstrong's book Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans and Cecil Brown's doctoral dissertation Stagolee: From Shack Bully to Culture Hero. Armstrong relates in his book that, during his early days in New Orleans, Stetsons were coveted by African-Americans and they often purchased them by making periodic payments. Brown points out the symbolic nature of the hat by stating that it represented the black man's manhood. As a symbol of African-American manhood, the Stetson was ultimately a symbol of freedom (as explained in my essay "Stagger Lee: From Blues Ballad to Ultimate Rock 'n' Roll Record" .
Taking into account the idea that the hat could actually be a positive symbol, I wonder whether perhaps it had a dual symbolic nature which represented both freedom (a positive) and white authority (a negative). In other words, it might be a case of two different sides of the same coin--on one side, the hat may have been a symbol of Jim Crow-era white authority, and on the other, a symbol of the freedom won by defeating Jim Crow. If this is the case, then it may be that African-Americans wore the hat as a proud reminder that they were able to survive and triumph over many years of racist oppression.
Although I may have been incorrect about the Stetson being a negative symbol of racist white authority, this does not invalidate the point I was trying to make in writing the essay. The essay argues that many African-Americans who listened to Lloyd Price's civil rights-era recording of "Stagger Lee" may have interpreted it as being about their ongoing struggle for freedom due to the fact that the fight between Billy and Stagger Lee centered on a symbol of racist white authority--the Stetson hat. This argument still holds together with the corrected understanding that the Stetson was actually a symbol of freedom itself.
I plan to revise the essay to reflect the findings discussed above. Until then, I will continue to investigate the significance of the hat and its meaning as it relates to the Stagger Lee legend. One area I plan on pursuing is whether the Stetson actually does have a dual positive/negative symbolic role. If so, this should not be a surprise because the transforming of a negative into a positive is not an uncommon thing for African-Americans. Wally Amos (also known as "Famous" Amos) is a good example of this. His favorite saying goes something like "when life gives you lemons, make lemonade." This philosophy is quite fitting in that it comes from a member of the African-American people, a people which has had to adapt to racist adversity and overcome great obstacles in order to survive. Consider this also--African-Americans may actually be in the process of removing the venom and the power from the word "nigger" by transforming it from the dirtiest, most objectionable word in the English language into a harmless, or even (in certain contexts) positive, word. The African-American author Randall Kennedy explores this transformation in his 2002 book Nigger: The Strange Case of a Troublesome Word.
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In Mississippi John Hurt's "Stack O' Lee Blues", he laments that Billy was murdered over a $5 Stetson hat. Bob Dylan's extraordinary version of the song, based on an obscure 1927 recording by Frank Hutchison titled "Stackalee", echoes that sentiment as, in a wailing voice, he repeatedly lays the blame for all the trouble on "that John B. Stetson hat". But his recording specifically identifies the hatmaker's full name, as if to say that there is more to the story, that the cause was something more than just the hat itself. What Dylan might be saying is that the trouble was all about the same thing that the Stetson hat is all about. Let me explain what I mean by this. The Stetson is a powerful symbol which has strong elements of conflict and violence ingrained deeply in its history. For example, it was sometimes referred to as a "war bonnet". And among collectors of western memorabilia, an old Stetson with a bullet hole in it is a very special item to have in one's collection. According to Lewis Nordyke's article "Boss of the Plains: The Story Behind the Stetson" (collected in The Cowboy Reader, an anthology edited by Lon Tinkle and Allen Maxwell), the Stetson was known as a hat that could take a dozen bullet holes and still not unravel. The Stetson can represent good on the one hand and evil on the other. A classic example of this comes from the cowboy movie cliche of the "good guys" wearing the white hats and the "bad guys" wearing the black. As a symbol of the cowboy, it is also a symbol of the white man's violent struggle with the American Indian. It is a symbol of the lawman, but, as Stetson Kennedy has pointed out to me, it is also a symbol of the lawman against the badman. This translates, for African-Americans, into a symbol of the lawman against Stagger Lee, and of the lawman against the black man as will soon be discussed in detail below.
By recognizing the Stetson's great symbolic nature, we can see that the fight between Billy DeLyon and Stagger Lee was about much more than a $5 Stetson. It represented something of much greater significance than a simple hat--it signified the battle between good and evil, between lawman and badman, and between black and white. In the southern states, the Stetson was almost as much a symbol of the law as a police officer's badge. To African-Americans, this type of hat--when perched on top of a lawman's head--must have been a potent symbol of the injustices that they were forced to endure under a racist system of law. Southern sheriffs, prison guards, and other officers of law enforcement were the primary instrument by which the Jim Crow system was kept in place, and the Stetson hat was a typical part of the southern lawman's uniform. By killing the man in the fight over the Stetson, Stagger Lee symbolically defeated the people and the system that oppressed him and the African-American people for so many years.
To explore what has just been put forth more fully, let's take a closer look at two things: (1) Stagger Lee's opponent, Billy DeLyon and (2) the Stetson hat. Lloyd Price's and Archibald's recordings do not explicitly identify Billy as an officer of the law, but the song's storyline of a dispute over a Stetson certainly must have influenced African-Americans into seeing him as a white lawman. The law and the men who enforced it were a constant threat to blacks. Even the most docile harmless law-abiding black men had to constantly be on guard against acting in a way that the law saw as a provocation. Simply standing up for one's rights could mean having to deal with "the man" and doing time in jail. Since the law was such a threat to blacks, and the Stetson was a symbol of the law, many blacks must have seen the dispute over the hat as representing the black man's struggle with the white man's system of law. And since blacks identified with Stagger Lee, they would have cast Billy DeLyon with the role of a white policeman. In fact, in an essay titled "Got the Blues for Mean Old Stack O' Lee", Max Haymes points out that Billy is portrayed as a policeman in an early recording about Stagger Lee from 1927 by two men known as The Downhome Boys. (See www.earlyblues.com for Haymes's essay. Also see Note 1.) Therein, he also points out that the fifth stanza of the song seems to protest the common practice of arresting innocently idle blacks for vagrancy, a discriminatory practice which I discussed earlier in this essay.) It would be fair to say that the role of the police officer is so vital to the Stagger Lee legend that--in versions which make no specific mention of the lawman--he and Billy have become combined into a single person. (Note 2)
Now, let's move the focus away from Billy and take a closer look at the Stetson hat itself. When people write about the legend of Stagger Lee, they rarely fail to mention the Stetson--probably because they sense that it is very important, even crucial, to the story. But these writers also rarely offer any explanation as to the significance of the hat to the story. Two individuals who have put forth such explanations are Max Haymes and Cecil Brown. Haymes discusses the Stetson (in the essay referenced above) in terms of its magical or mojo-like qualities. And Brown wrote about the importance of the hat, mainly on a psychological (Freudian) basis, as part of his dissertation titled Stagolee: From Shack Bully to Culture Hero. I will go in a different direction in my essay, focusing on the Stetson in connection with the history of race relations between African-American and white people.
But before we get into specifics about the Stetson, let's look at the symbolic nature of hats in general. They often serve as symbols of authority as in a king's crown or in the special hats worn by military and police officers. Traditionally, in the presence of a king or another individual holding a post of authority, a man of lower station was expected to remove his hat. By baring his head, he in effect became shorter thereby showing subordination to his superior. In the past, hats were symbolic of social class, with members of different classes wearing different types of hats. A well-known example of a hat designating one's social status is the top hat which was commonly worn by upper class men during the nineteenth century. Hats also represent transformation, as in the crowning of a king. Anyone who has attended a high school or college graduation ceremony is familiar with the symbolic transformation made by moving the tassel from one side to the other on top of a graduate's mortarboard. (Note 3)
The Stetson is a large and impressive hat that could make a man appear much taller and give him a certain air of authority. It is a symbol of law and order to Americans because it is part of the uniform of many law enforcement agencies. But to certain groups, the Stetson can be a very negative symbol. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a book filled with symbolism, there is a key scene when a mean-spirited white character wears a Stetson. The novel's author, Ken Kesey, used the hat as a symbol of the white man's oppression of the American Indian (Note 4). In the world of African-Americans, the Stetson must have also been a symbol of white oppression because it was commonly worn by southern men of the law including sheriffs, prison guards, and judges. Not all southern lawmen were racists (some of them risked their own lives to save black men from lynch mobs), but many of the uniformed officers of the law in the south were enthusiastic enforcers of the Jim Crow system.
The folklorist Alan Lomax, near the beginning of his book The Land Where the Blues Began, tells of his encounters with two Mississippi sheriffs who displayed racist attitudes that surely were common among southern lawmen. One of the sheriffs, whom Lomax described as wearing his Stetson "like a crown", expressed shock over the idea that Lomax would shake hands with a black man or use the term "Mister" in addressing him. Possibly the most notorious and powerful of all the southern sheriffs was Willis McCall, the racist Lake County, Florida sheriff who shot the Groveland Four defendants. McCall, with his Stetson capping his hulking six foot one inch 240-pound frame, was a personification of the evils of the Jim Crow system.
A Stetson was the trademark of another well-known lawman, Bud Russell. Russell's name was legendary in the jails and prisons of the south. As the chief transfer agent for the Texas prison system, he is said to have traveled millions of miles, most of them spent transporting prisoners from local jails to Texas state prisons. His work had him traveling throughout the south and through many northern states also. It is estimated that he had 115,000 men in his custody during his forty year career and only one of them was ever able to escape. A large percentage of these prisoners were African-Americans. Russell treated these black men more humanely than the average officer of the law, but his exceptional efficiency at getting his job done make him a figure of dread among the black prison population. He transported groups of prisoners "long-chained" together by the neck in a specially built wagon known as Black Betty. When a man in a jail cell awaiting transfer to a Texas state prison heard the rattling of chains coming towards him from down the hall, he knew it was Bud Russell and that any chance at escape had been lost. But there were other ways of identifying Russell; in Alan Lomax's book The Land Where the Blues Began, he quotes from a song the prisoners sang about Russell (probably from a version of the classic song "The Midnight Special").
Yonder comes Bud
Russell
How do you know?
I know by his big hat
And his forty-four
The "big hat" was Russell's trademark grey Stetson (Note 5). This was not the only song about Russell. The great Texas bluesman Lightnin' Hopkins wrote and recorded a song called "Bud Russell Blues" and also mentions him in another recording titled "Penitentiary Blues". As you might suspect, Hopkins was from Texas and he served time in prison. Russell was such a legend that the term "Uncle Bud" became synonymous with prison transfer agents in general (Long-Chain Charlie was another slang term for these agents).
When Uncle Bud delivered a group of prisoners to the penitentiary, they were taken into the custody of guards who despised convicts, especially black convicts. In the 1967 Paul Newman movie titled Cool Hand Luke, Hollywood brought us the chilling image of the cold cruel prison guard (Note 6). The guard who stood out the most in the movie was known as "the walking boss" or "the man with no eyes". He had a particularly menacing appearance which was emphasized by his black Stetson hat and reflective shades (Note 7). Although the guards treated the convicts with brutality, this celluloid version of prison life fell far short of depicting the horrible conditions that many prisoners, and blacks in particular, endured in the south's prison system. A very graphic, factual account of a convict's experiences in a state penitentiary can be found in Albert Sample's book Racehoss: Big Emma's Boy (Note 8). In this book, Sample--a real-life inconceivably tough Stagger Lee figure himself--tells of his years in a Texas prison where guards constantly brutalized black prisoners and even killed them without any fear of being held accountable. One such guard was nicknamed Boss Killer Band because he allegedly murdered a whole band of black convicts--a total of 14 men--in a single day. In Lomax's The Land Where the Blues Began, he likens the southern prisons he visited to Nazi concentration camps. He describes the extreme racism of the guards in these prisons and in one particular description of them he points out their Stetson hats. For the many blacks who served time in prisons, the Stetson must have been associated with some of the most brutal aspects of white oppression.
In writing this paper, I gathered information from the writings of Stetson Kennedy and corresponded with him regarding the Stetson hat. As Mr. Kennedy has been a dedicated worker for civil rights for many years, and he is also a relative of the man who created the Stetson, he certainly has a sensitivity to the meaning of this hat to African-Americans. He told me the following story which is an excellent illustration of how this simple hat could be a powerful symbol to blacks living in the Jim Crow south.
In the 1940s, many African-Americans worked in the migrant camps of south Florida in the fertile fields just south of Lake Okeechobee. On Saturday nights, the local sheriff would make his rounds by visiting the many juke joints frequented by these migrants. These jukes were rough places where knife fights were common, but the sheriff came up with a unique way of reducing the number of cutting scrapes He would go to the establishment with the worst reputation and throw his Stetson out on the dance floor. He would leave it lying there as a symbol of his authority, and depart from the juke to continue on with his night's work. The hat was such a powerful symbol that the couples would be extremely careful to not disturb it as they moved around the dance floor. After making all the other stops on his rounds, the sheriff would drive back to the juke where he had left his hat. Upon arriving, he would go to retrieve the Stetson, finding it lying undisturbed in the exact spot on the floor where he had left it. (Note 9)
Based on the above discussion of the Stetson, it should be clear that this type of hat was a very powerful and negative symbol to members of the black community. It was a symbol of the law, and the law was no friend to African-Americans. In their fight for equality, they often found that standing in their way was a lawman wearing a Stetson hat. And since the fight between Stagger Lee and Billy DeLyon centered on a Stetson, many African-Americans who listened to Lloyd Price's civil rights era recording of "Stagger Lee" may have interpreted it as being about their ongoing struggle for freedom. With Stagger Lee's triumph over Billy, the recording served as a vision of victory in the civil rights struggle, a victory which--after many, many years of slavery and oppression--could finally be imagined as within reach. From this perspective, the jubilant tone of Price's recording makes perfect sense--it was a victory celebration.
My discussion of the Stetson would not be complete without pointing out that this hat could also be a positive symbol to African-Americans. In Stagolee: From Shack Bully to Culture Hero, Cecil Brown explained that, during the late nineteenth century, black men--including Lee Shelton, the man upon which the Stagger Lee legend is at least partially based--wore Stetsons as symbols of their manhood or "newly won masculinity". In effect, wearing a Stetson was a way of showing that you were no longer a slave, but a free man. Looking at the Stetson from this perspective, the fight between Stagger Lee and Billy could be interpreted as the black race's battle for freedom, with the hat serving as a prize symbolic of that freedom.
Other examples of black men wearing Stetson hats can be found in the world of the blues. Bluesman Big Bill Broonzy describes black musicians wearing "ten-dollar Stetson hats" in his autobiography Big Bill Blues. A number of famous bluesmen have worn a Stetson as a trademark including Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown and Otis Rush. And the great rock and roll songwriter Otis Blackwell, a black man who grew up in New York with a love for cowboy movies and Tex Ritter cowboy songs, regularly wore a Stetson. So the Stetson could be a positive or negative symbol with the determining factor being whose head the hat was perched upon.
Note 1:
"Duncan and Brady" is an old song which is specifically about a black man going up against a white policeman. It was in Leadbelly's repertoire and it tells the story of a black bartender named Duncan who kills a white policeman named Brady in retaliation for harassment of the bar's customers.
Note 2:
John W. Roberts, in chapter 5 of his book From Trickster to Badman, presents an excellent discussion of the black badman versus the white law officer. See especially pages 196 and 197.
Note 3:
There once was a time in America (not more than 50 years ago) when a man who left his home without a hat on his head was considered to be improperly dressed. Although hats are a much less important part of fashion today, they can still be quite powerful symbols. For example, when Hollywood's George Lucas originally explained his idea for the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark to Steven Spielberg, the hat that the character Indiana Jones would wear was one of the major factors which captured Spielberg's imagination. Here is how Spielberg explained it: "When he [Lucas] mentioned that it would be like the old serials and that the guy would wear a soft fedora and carry a bullwhip, I was completely hooked". (Quoted from George Lucas: The Creative Impulse by Charles Champlin.) (end of Note 3)
Note 4:
The scene occurs in chapter 24 when Chief Bromden tells a story to McMurphy about a time when he was a boy and several white men visited the reservation.
Note 5:
You can find several pictures of Bud Russell wearing his Stetson by clicking here
Note 6:
The location of the prison is not identified in the movie, but the novel upon which it is based sets the story in the state of Florida. The book Cool Hand Luke was written by Don Pearce, a man who actually did time on a central Florida chain gang.
Note 7:
In Pearce's book, all the guards wore "cowboy hats", but, in the movie, the "Walking Boss" was the only guard to wear a Stetson.
Note 8:
The story of Albert "Racehoss" Sample's life is truly amazing. He spent 17 years incarcerated in the Texas prison system, doing most of his time in a unit called Retrieve, a place that was known as "the burnin' hell". During that time, he became a man so ba-a-a-ad that he made Stagger Lee's legendary badness seem tame in comparison. He was a man of mixed race, both black and white. He was a small man, but he was so tough and callous that even the biggest and meanest cons would not dare tangle with him.
Sample was punished on a regular basis for his rebellion against authority and his refusal to accept the dehumanizing treatment to which prisoners were subjected. But the punishment had no effect on him because he was so hardened by his life's experiences that he could endure incredible amounts of pain and torture.
The guards would punish him by hanging him up off the ground with handcuffs, suspending him until his feet were just barely off the ground. This torture was so painful that it was referred to as being effective at making the deaf hear and the blind see. The warden tried to break Sample's spirit by leaving him hanging like this for hours. Then, he would approach Sample and ask him how he was doing. Sample's response was that he was "doin' just fine Cap'n". Then the warden would ask him "when you want me to let you down from there?". Sample would respond by saying "whenever you get ready, Cap'n".
This was the pattern for what was repeated over and over again, with the warden hoping to catch Sample in a moment of weakness in which he would cry out for mercy. But Sample refused to give in. It was his way of striking back and protesting against the way he was treated.
They probably would have killed him if it wasn't for the fact that he was such a valuable laborer on the prison farm. In his capacity for work, he was a true superhuman--a real life equal to the legendary John Henry. The guards certainly must have also feared what would have happened if they had tried to kill him and failed. Even the notorious murderer Boss Killer Band was apparently too frightened of Sample to try to kill him, as evidenced by an incident in which he explained to the prisoner why he hadn't yet killed his "yellow ass".
After he was released from prison, Sample earned a college degree and became a prison reformer, earning many prestigious awards for his work. He wrote his life story in Racehoss: Big Emma's Boy. A powerful movie documentary about him titled Racehoss was released in 2001. (end of Note 8)
Note 9:
In relating this story to me, Stetson Kennedy explained that he was not sure of where he had come across it, but he believed that its source was his friend, the Florida writer Theodore Pratt. (Pratt, who wrote extensively about Florida in books and articles of fiction and non-fiction, died in 1969.) The way Mr. Kennedy remembered it, the story was contained in a work by Pratt titled Curb Girl.
I can find no evidence of anything written by Pratt with that title, but I did learn that there is a Ronald Reagan movie titled Juke Girl which was based upon a story that Pratt provided to NAME of movie studio (This is documented in letters that Pratt wrote to Kennedy . The letters are part of a collection of Pratt's personal papers which are archived in Florida Atlantic University's library.)
Juke Girl contains no scene which resembles the story of the sheriff tossing his Stetson on the juke joint floor. A screenplay for the movie which was included in Pratt's papers did not contain the scene either. Still, it is possible that the story was included in the material Pratt provided to the studio and was simply never incorporated into the screenplay.
Despite my failure to find the story among Pratt's writings, I believe that he actually was Kennedy's source, mainly because Pratt wrote an article for the Saturday Evening Post titled "Land of the Jook" (published in the April 26, 1941 issue). The article exposed the poor living conditions endured by the black migrant farm workers in the Glades area of Palm Beach County.
In this article, Pratt also wrote about his visits to the local juke joints frequented by the migrants. It is my guess that during one of these visits he must have encountered or learned about the Stetson-throwing sheriff. Possibly Pratt did not write about the sheriff in his Post article because he wanted to include it in the story that he eventually submitted to Warner Brothers. (I found a letter from Pratt to Kennedy dated September 24, 1941 in which he writes that
Assuming that Pratt was the source for the Stetson-throwing sheriff story, it probably would have been based on fact because Pratt was a real stickler for authenticity in his novels and other fictional work. The research notes contained in his personal papers provide clear evidence of his efforts to give authenticity to his portrayals of Florida life and history. And in regards to his research for Jook Girl, I found a letter from Pratt to Kennedy (dated September 24, 1941) in which he states that Warner Brothers "have a bellyful of Glades jook stuff in my story which I gathered in the 'Glades". (end of Note 9)