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 5: Black Power and the Romanticized Stagger Lee
Earlier in this essay, I showed that by looking at recordings which were made between the 1920s and 1950s, you can observe a major change in the myth of Stagger Lee. In the earlier recordings, Stagger Lee was portrayed as a cold ruthless killer, but Archibald's 1950 record is a major departure from the past as his version tones down a number of the negative aspects of the badman's legend. Finally, we saw that Lloyd Price's celebratory version of "Stagger Lee" in the late 1950s reflected the fact that the badman had evolved into a champion for black rights. Now we will take a look at black history and relate it to Stagger Lee's legend in order to gain an understanding of how this major transformation may have come about. In doing this, we will see that the legend's evolution seems to have mirrored major social and political changes. Let's examine these changes by taking a look at the world of the black man in 1928, and then jumping three decades ahead to 1958 to see how that world had changed.
When Mississippi John Hurt recorded his classic 1928 version of the Stagger Lee legend, blacks were living under the Jim Crow system, a system which demanded that they be absolutely submissive to the white race. In commenting on this system in his book Why We Can't Wait, Martin Luther King pointed out that any African-American who did not defer to whites and who instead showed a "spark of manhood", was likely to be threatened by the police, thrown in jail, and/or beaten. This is why blacks admired a figure like Stagger Lee. He had no fear of the law, he stood up to and defied the white man's system. But he was not a real hero who could bring about real change. Instead, he was a destroyer, a nihilist with supreme power, a man who blacks could envision as being able to totally obliterate the white man's world. The popularity of his legend among African-Americans was probably a reflection of the fact that, after so many years of enslavement and oppression, there was simply no hope for change in their world. As Lawrence Levine pointed out, the American black man's only hope was for the white man's world to be wiped out so that a better one could be built in its place. And Stagger Lee, the ultimate badman, the man who defeated the devil and took over hell, was the man who could do it.
If we jump ahead now to the time of Lloyd Price's 1958 recording of "Stagger Lee", we see that during that thirty year leap some major changes occurred which resulted in a different and better world for African-Americans. For example, in 1937, Joe Louis became the world heavyweight boxing champion, making him an absolutely huge hero to blacks. Many African-Americans (including Malcolm X, who was so inspired by Louis that he stepped into the ring himself) saw Louis as a symbol of the black man defeating the white man and his racist system. Another advance was made in 1950 with the integration of all troops fighting in the Korean War. And in 1954, in a case known as Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned an earlier decision from over 50 years ago that had allowed school segregation. This was followed, in 1955, by the event that turned the fight for civil rights into a powerful force--the arrest of Rosa Parks in Alabama for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white person. Also in 1955, blacks were breaking down barriers in the music world as Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Fats Domino all brought rock and roll to white America with their first hits on the pop charts. Another landmark was reached when Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1957 which was the first major piece of civil rights legislation passed in over 80 years. Later in 1957, another victory was won when federal troops were used to guard black students in order to bring about the court-ordered integration of a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas.
With all of these advances, "hope" may have no longer seemed like a dirty four-letter word to African-Americans. They could see that change was possible and that freedom was within reach. This major shift was echoed by the transformation of Stagger Lee. Reflecting the changing times and attitudes, he was converted from a totally destructive force into an agent for social change. With this newly found hope, the black badman became a symbolic hero in the fight for civil rights. His ba-a-a-a-dness made him the ultimate warrior in the fight for freedom. Therefore, after a string of encouraging civil rights victories during the fifties, many black people must have heard Lloyd Price's hit record "Stagger Lee--as it began its climb up the charts in late 1958--as a song of hope about their fight for freedom. Viewing the record in this way, the celebratory tone of the music can be heard as the sound of rejoicing over the battles won so far and over the final victory envisioned for the future.
Evidence of Stagger Lee's new role as a civil rights hero can be found in the writings and statements of African-American writers and activists such as James Baldwin and Bobby Seale. For example, Stagger Lee's transformation was pointed out by Baldwin in his foreword to Seale's autobiography. Therein, he suggests that the defiant act of civil disobedience by Rosa Parks allowed the figure of Stagger Lee to achieve his manhood. What he was saying was that the legend had matured, that Stagger Lee had, in effect, grown up by redirecting himself to a social and political agenda. This is what happened with Malcolm X. After discovering the teachings of Elijah Muhammed, he underwent a transformation from a hustler and hoodlum to a civil rights and religious leader for the Muslim group the Nation of Islam. This major redirection in Malcolm X was referred to by Seale during a 1970 jailhouse interview (excerpted in Greil Marcus's Mystery Train) in which he commented on the legend of Stagger Lee and its inspiration and meaning to him. He said that he saw Stagger Lee in himself and in the lives led by Malcolm X and his fellow Black Panther leaders Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. These men all went through transformations similar to Stagger Lee. And, looking back in time, it is clear that (as Marcus has stated) the Black Power movement was inspired to some degree by the legend of Stagger Lee.
In saying that he saw Stagger Lee in himself and in other militant black leaders, Bobby Seale was romanticizing the legendary outlaw. Seale's views reveal a major switch from the past in the way that badmen were treated in the black folk tradition. Traditionally, the black badman was not a romanticized figure. Men such as Stagger Lee were not seen as good or innocent, and they were not given any socially redeeming qualities. Lawrence Levine discusses this subject in some detail in his book Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom. Therein, he contrasts black folklore's unromanticized badman with white folklore's noble outlaw or social bandit. Levine points out that white badmen such as Robin Hood or Pretty Boy Floyd (whose exploits were celebrated in song by Woody Guthrie) were seen as benefactors to and heroes of the poor and oppressed. He theorizes that white folklore's "good" badmen are generated during times of great social change or upheaval out of the desire for a return to the order of the past. He then concludes that the reason black folklore lacks "good" black outlaws is that the African-American community held no desire for things to return to as they were in the past. Considering the inhumane conditions that they had lived under for so many years, there obviously was nothing to be nostalgic about.
In making his argument, Levine brings out the total hopelessness of the black experience in America. But, with the advances made through the civil rights movement, many of the black men of Bobby Seale's generation finally did have some real hope for a better life. There was even hope for those who had become disillusioned with the civil rights movement--those who saw that its achievements had little effect on the social problems of black America such as poverty and unemployment--and who then turned, in search of a remedy, to the Black Power movement. Even this more radical element had hope for change because the racial turmoil of the 1960s received worldwide attention. The ugliness of America's race problem was being exposed to the world through television news coverage which showed powerful images of the suffering endured by African-Americans and their struggle for equality. Much of the world looked at the plight of black America with sympathy, and this must have been encouraging to African-Americans. This hope for change is what may have led to the romanticization of the black badman and to Seale's speaking of Stagger Lee as a hero. Seale said that there were millions of Stagger Lees in the black community. He held such a deep identification with the legend that he named his son Stagolee. In his jailhouse interview, he explained that he gave his son this name because "that's what his name is" as if to say that "Stagger Lee is who we all are in the black community".
The Meaning of the Stagger Lee Legend
I want to finish up this section by exploring the meaning of the Stagger Lee legend. The black writer and folk tale collector Zora Neale Hurston has stated that every African-American folk tale has had a point to make. All of them have had something to teach black Americans about themselves and the world they lived in. So what was the point or meaning of the story of Stagger Lee? What did it teach? James Baldwin would probably answer these questions with one word: survival.
Baldwin thought that survival was a main ingredient which African-Americans put into their folk tales (Note 1). And the story of Stagger Lee can certainly be understood as carrying a message of survival--Stagger Lee was killed by the white man as punishment for the killing of Billy, but he triumphed in the end as he defeated the devil and turned hell into his own version of paradise. This story offered hope for survival to black men who knew that they could suffer, at the hands of whites, a fate similar to Stagger Lee's--whether it would be by execution, by lynching, or by having their lives slowly sucked out of them bit by bit in any number of ways.
And there may have been a second way that the legend of Stagger Lee dealt with survival. It may have made the point that directly challenging the white man's authority would pose a threat to the black man's survival. After all, if a man as powerful and "bad" as Stagger Lee lost his life by placing himself at odds with the white man's authority, the average black man would not stand a chance challenging the white man. Therefore, the message of the folk tale may have been that blacks would have to bide their time before they could directly challenge their white oppressors. They would have to work indirectly to improve their lot, and use their wits to survive until they could take a chance at defying the white man's discriminatory laws.
And this is exactly what African-Americans did. A great example of this can be seen in the life of the black writer Richard Wright who, while he was a young man, used trickery to get his hands on books which he wanted to read. Living in an area where blacks were not permitted to borrow books from the local library, he would go to the library and pretend that he was on an errand to pick up the books for a white man. Wright would borrow the library card of a white co-worker and write a note to the librarian which he signed with the name of the owner of the card. The note would contain a list of books and request that they be given to "this nigger boy". He would assume a look upon his face which conveyed to the white librarian that he was totally uninterested in the books. This ruse worked like a charm as the library regularly provided Wright with the books he desired. (Note 2)
Note 1: This is discussed by Maya Angelou in her book A Song Flung Up to Heaven. According to Angelou, Baldwin also believed that African-Americans put survival into their poems, songs, dances, clothing, cooking and humor.
Note 2: This story appears in Wright's The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch.