Lee Shelton
[1]: 24–25 A story appearing in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in 1895 read: William Lyons, 25, a levee hand, was shot in the abdomen yesterday evening at 10 o'clock in the saloon of Bill Curtis, at Eleventh and Morgan Streets, by Lee Sheldon [sic], a carriage driver.
[6] The Killer Blues Headstone Project raised money to place a stone on his unmarked grave, and on April 14, 2013, a marker was laid during a public ceremony.
That year, musicologist John Lomax received a partial transcription of the song,[9] and in 1911 two versions were published in the Journal of American Folklore by the sociologist and historian Howard W.
[1]: 35 The 1995 version by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds paints Stagger Lee as a sociopathic, bisexual sexual predator who forces a foe to perform fellatio on him before shooting the man to death.
[13] In 2004, The Black Keys included a song on their third album, Rubber Factory, titled "Stack Shot Billy", telling the tale of the infamous murder.
[14] Frontman Dan Auerbach drew inspiration from his heavy blues background, playing the song in open G tuning, finger plucking on an old telecaster.
[citation needed] Stagger Lee has become an archetype with some black people who admire the gangster type; a parallel to the glorification of the outlaw by a section of mainstream society.
In this variation, he is the embodiment of a tough black man; one who is sly, streetwise, cool, lawless, amoral, potentially violent, and who defies white authority.
[15][16] Within thirty years of Shelton's death, Benjamin Botkin records stories among the superstitious of his having been born with a caul over his face (signifying one with the power to see spirits and destined for trouble), or of having sold his soul to the Devil (in exchange for the hat, said to be magic, over which he killed Billy Lyons).
Additional fantastic legends credit him with the ability to transform himself into animals, of having caused the San Francisco earthquake, and of having fought a duel with Jesse James.
In 2006, Image Comics published the graphic novel Stagger Lee, written by Derek McCulloch and illustrated by Shepherd Hendrix, examining the historical murder of Lyons by Shelton, and the folklore that came out of it, in the framing setting of a fictionalized version of the African-American community in Saint Louis.
Consisting of two novellas, the latter – "My Heart Struck Sorrow" – focuses in large part on a horrific mystery connected to varied acetate recordings made in the 1930s as well as the folklore surrounding "Stagger Lee".
