Cecil Brown. Stagolee Shot Billy.

Cecil Brown. Stagolee Shot Billy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003. 295 pp. $29.95.

Cecil Brown's Stagolee Shot Billy tracks more than a century's songs and tales celebrating the violent doings of the legendary killer Stagolee. Brown also discovers the sources of Stagolee lore in 1893 St. Louis newspaper accounts about the murder of one Billy Lyons by a rival pimp/gambler/ political leader, Lee Shelton, sometimes known as Stag. The origins and variations of the latter's name are discussed as well, though no firm conclusions are reached. There is other intriguing Americana in Brown's sweeping survey, but sadly the book suffers from editorial neglect. First, however, how the book is structured.

Brown divides his book into three unequal sections. The first and longest, and perhaps the most interesting, relates conflicting accounts of the murder which in all probability took place in a bar in 1893 in one of St. Louis's working-class African American districts. Brothels drew many whites to this area, and the community also drew occasional visits from white politicians seeking Negro votes. Both Billy Lyons and possibly Lee ran black social or "lid" clubs as fronts for local Republican and Democratic organizations. The clubs, along with politicians and police, drew profits from prostitution and also served as gambling dens. Pimps were often admired not only for their ostentatious garb (presumably signaling success) but because they protected prostitutes from abusive white customers--although the pimps themselves were not always averse to committing violence against women. In this regard Brown believes that they embraced the extremes of an American masculinist culture. Negro males may also have felt that they were reasserting the dominance and virility that had been taken from them during slave times.

Clearly another sign of virility was one's hat, a sort of symbolic male organ, says Brown, citing Freud. In many versions of the Stagolee legend, Billy grabs Stagolee's Stetson hat and refuses to relinquish it, whereupon Stagolee shoots him. In real life, however, Lee was far less bold or defiant than numerous songs make him out to be. Indeed, in some respects, Billy Lyons appears to characterize the "bully" pride and bravura attributed to Lee. Lee apparently had enough money to hire an expensive white lawyer and served only a short jail term. Years afterwards, he was arrested for robbery and assault, and he died a solitary and forgotten figure in 1913. By then, romanticized versions of Stagolee's deeds were well underway. What is most interesting about Billy and Stagolee is that their lives serve to illuminate the subculture, institutions, and values of struggling fin de siecle African American communities in cities like St. Louis. Brown identifies persons like Lee as lumpenproletarian (this time citing Marx), but one wonders whether Lee's purported African American style is quite what Marx had in mind. Besides Marx and Freud, Brown alludes to a host of other authoritative figures--among them Walter Benjamin, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Foucault--to reinforce his cultural observations. Whether or not the allusions add very much, readers must decide for themselves.

The second part of the book is called "The Thousand Faces of Stagolee," and these pages tell in the main who sang and related Stagolee stories. They partake, Brown believes, of black oral traditions whose singers and audiences were initially roustabouts, convicts, and share croppers. But by the 1920s and '30s, Stagolee was also taken up by blues singers (black and white), jazz musicians like Sidney Bechet and Duke Ellington, and even white cowboy and hillbilly performers. Needless to say there were constant variations in melody and narrative, but in general, theme and structure remained the same. Stagolee confronts one or more antagonists; he kills and is subsequently feared, admired, or lamented. Women sometimes adore him, but not of course the families of his victims. Brown also mentions Stagolee musical recordings, some of which sound truly appealing (here a selective discography would help)--but why in the world would Stagolee attract genteel white dance bands like those of Fred Waring and Frank Westphal who made the first Stagolee recordings in the 1920s?

The third and shortest section Brown calls "Mammy-Maid: Stagolee and American Identity." The emphasis in this section is on largely post-World War II Stagolee depictions. The increasingly urbanized African American now had less reason to conceal his anger and frustrations at racist humiliations, and Stagolee comes overtly to express these emotions, emerging more flagrantly as the "bad nigger," with views not unrelated to those chanted in the "dozens" or "gangsta rap." But Stagolee's outlook is not exclusively his alone; Brown sees Stagolee criminality in elements of the largely white counterculture of the 1960s. Reaching even further back, Brown seems to imply that ragtime syncopation may be an unconsciously hostile or sardonic comment on European-American rhythms.

If this latter perception appears something of a stretch, so are some of Brown's literary allusions. He views the protagonists of Richard Wright's "Big Boy Leaves Home" and Native Son as Stagolee figures. But Big Boy kills a white man in self-defense rather than for reasons of racial pride, and Bigger Thomas inadvertently kills a white woman out of fear rather than from feelings of racial resentment. This does not mean that Wright's characters are not resentful but rather that their crimes are motivated by exigencies of the moment. Stagolee as outlaw hero is not, of course, the exclusive province of African American culture. One thinks of Milton's Satan, or Robin Hood, or the Macheaths of The Beggars' Opera and The Threepenny Opera. The American West, too, has produced legends about such dubious figures as Jesse James and Billy the Kid, and even more recently Bonnie and Clyde. Moreover the first twentieth-century "bad nigger" novels are not Richard Wright's but the twisted racist works of Thomas Dixon.

Still, granting these reservations, there are riches to be gleaned from Brown's book. What is unforgivable is the lack of editorial scrutiny. Surely someone could have curbed the study's excessive repetitions. As one example, we are told again and again of the venues where blacks heard and sang of Stagolee. On the other hand, some generalizations are made and left hanging--demanding further amplification, as when Brown tells us that in the twenties and thirties the majority of black males in the South and Southwest were either sharecroppers or prisoners, or that after Emancipation "poor blacks were pushed out of the church." What church? Whose church? When did they attend the same church services as whites? In addition there are downright sloppy readings, as in the Acknowledgments, where Quincy Troupe's name is mentioned twice--or as on page 205, where Bigger Thomas's name is substituted for that of James Baldwin. Finally, Brown often uses very specialized jargon like "mack" or "toasts" or "dozens" whose meanings may not be immediately accessible to the uninitiated.

In the last analysis, though, one has to admire the research that Brown had to undertake to produce this book--but for this reader there is as well a certain pathos to what the book seems to say. If indeed Stagolee is a rebellious black culture hero, how sad that so much of his violence is directed against other black males and women rather than the underlying enemies. Still, perhaps Stagolee lore is not always so fraught with meanings. Perhaps there is simply the sheer pleasure of lyrics and melody. To paraphrase one of Brown's authoritative references, sometimes a song may be only a song.

Edward Margolies

City University of New York