Somewhere, sometime, a murder took place: a man called Stack-a-lee— or Stacker Lee, Stagolee, or Staggerlee —shot a man called Billy Lyons. It is a story that black America has never tired of hearing and never stopped living out, like whites with their Westerns. Locked in the images of a thousand versions of the tale is an archetype that speaks to fantasies of casual violence and violent sex, lust and hatred, ease and mastery, a fantasy of style and steppin’ high. At a deeper level it is a fantasy of no-limits for a people who live within a labyrinth of limits every day of their lives, and who can transgress them only among themselves. It is both a portrait of that tough and vital character that everyone would like to be, and just another pointless, tawdry dance of death. Billy died for a five-dollar Stetson hat: because he beat Staggerlee in a card game, or a ’crap game; because Stack was cheating and Billy was fool enough to call him on it. It happened in Memphis around the turn of the century, in New Orleans in the twenties, in St. Louis in the eighties. The style of the killing matters, though: Staggerlee shot Billy, in the words of a Johnny Cash song, just to watch him die. Sometimes it was a cautionary tale, as in Mississippi John Hurt’s version, recorded in 1929. Po-lice officer, how can it be You can 'rest everybody, but cru-ej Stagolee That bad man, Oh, cru-el Stagolee Billy the Lion tol’Stagolee Please don’t take my life I got two little babes, and a darlin' lovely wife That bad man, Oh, cruel Stagolee What I care about your two little babes Your darlin ’ lovely wife You done stole my Stetson hat I ’m bound to take your life That bad man. Oh, cruel Stagolee Boom-boom, boom-boom, went a .44 Well, when I spied o l ' Billy the Lion He was lyin 'on the floor That bad man. Oh, cruel Stagolee Gentlemens o f the jury, what you think o f that Stagolee shot Billy the Lion 'bout a five-dollar Stetson hat That bad man, Oh, cruel Stagolee If that was something like the original idea of the story, it didn’t hold up very long. Usually, no white sheriff had the nerve to take Stack on, and he got away. When he didn’t—when he was caught and hung—it was only for a chance to beat the devil. The song carried Staggerlee down to hell, where he took over the place and made it into a black man’s paradise. Innocent Billy was no longer seen as a helpless victim, but as a hapless fool. Staggerlee’s secret admirers came out of the woodwork; the women (all dressed in red) flocked to his funeral II. Stack-o-lee (it was the best money could buy). Stagolee was a winner. “GO!” shouted Lloyd Price, caught up in the legend, “GO! GO! Staggerlee!” Nobody’s fool, nobody’s man, tougher than the devil and out of God’s reach—to those who followed his story and thus became a part of it. Stack-o- Lee was ultimately a stone-tough image of a free man. In the blues, Stack changed names, but little else. He was the Crawling Kingsnake; Tommy Johnson pouring Sterno down his throat, singing, “Canned heat, canned heat is killing me” ; Muddy Waters’ cool and elemental Rollin' Stone; Chuck Berry's Brown-Eyed Handsome Man; Bo Diddley with a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind; Wilson Pickett’s Midnight Mover; Mick Jagger’s Midnight Rambler. Stack rode free as the Back Door Man in the deadly electric blues of Howlin’ Wolf (“ ’Clise me for murder/ First degree/Judge's wife cried. Let the man go free!// am . . . ” ), and gave up the ghost, proud never to rest easy, in “Going Down Slow.” Stagolee was a secret, buried deep in the heart as well as ruling the streets: in Bobby Marchan’s "There Is Something on Your Mind.” Stackerlee crawled out of a man who only wanted love and pulled the trigger that turned love into death. When the civil rights movement got tough, he took over. And Staggerlee would come roaring back on the screen in the seventies, as Slaughter, Sweet Sweetback, Superfly. "Stagger Lee shot B i l ly . . . . ' ' The line echoes from Lloyd Price's rock 'n' roll hit through fifty years of black culture, passing, on its way back to its hidden source, thousands and thousands of Staggerlees and Billys. There is an echo for Jimi Hendrix, a star at twenty-two and dead at twenty-four; for Sly Stone, "not.” as was said of Bob Dylan once, “burning his candle at both ends, hut using a blow torch on the middle” ; for young men dead in alleys or cold in the city morgue; for a million busted liquor stores and a million angry rapes. Stack and Billy merge into a figure innocent on one level and guilty on another; into Robert Johnson, living from town to town and woman to woman, driven and searching for sin and peace of mind; into junkies twisted from their last OD's; into a young George Jack- son. drunk and out for easy money, or his brother Jonathan, rising years later with a gun in his hand. Look and you will see King Curtis, stretched out dead in front of his house; Muhammad Ali; Rap Brown, so bad that Congress passed a law against him. Farther on are pimps like Big Red Little. Jack Johnson in a car full of white women, Sportin' Life steppin’ out. It is an echo all the way back to the bullet that went through Billy and broke the bartender's glass, a timeless image of style and death. III. King of the Delta Blues ROBERT JOHNSON Johnson’s vision was of a world without salvation, redemption, or rest; it was a vision he resisted, laughed at, to which he gave himself over, but most of all it was a vision he pursued. He walked his road like a failed, orphaned Puritan, looking for women and a good night, but never convinced, whether he found such things or not, that they were really what he wanted, and so framing his tales with old echoes of sin and damnation. There were demons in his songs—blues that walked like a man, the devil, or the two in league with each other—and Johnson was often on good terms with them; his greatest fear seems to have been that his desires were so extreme that he could satisfy them only by becoming a kind of demon himself. When he sings, so slowly, in “Me and the Devil Blues,” Early this morning When you knocked upon my door Early this morning When you knocked upon my door I said, Hello, Satan I believe it's time, to go the only memory in American art that speaks with the same eerie resignation is that moment when Ahab goes ovef to the devil-worshiping Parsees he kept stowed away in the hold of the Pequod. That is a remarkable image, but Johnson’s images were simply part of daily life. Me and the devil, was walking side by side Oooo, me and the devil, was walking side by side I'm going to beat my woman, until I get satisfied It may seem strange that in the black country South of the twenties and thirties, where the leap to grace of gospel music was at the heart of the community, the blues singers, in a twisted way, were the real Puritans. These men, who had to renounce the blues to be sanctified, who often sneered at the preachers in their songs, were the ones who really believed in the devil; they feared the devil most because they knew him best. They understood, far better than the preachers, why sex was man’s original sin, and they sang about little else. This side of the blues did not come from Africa, but from the Puritan revival of the Great Awakening, the revival that spread across the American colonies more than two hundred years ago. It was an explosion of dread and piety that Southern whites passed onto their slaves and that blacks ultimately refashioned into their own religion. The blues singers accepted the dread but refused the piety; they sang as if their understanding of the devil was strong enough to force a belief in God out of their lives. They lived man’s fear of life, and they became artists of the fear. Or perhaps that is not the truth; perhaps Robert Johnson was very different from other blues singers. For all his clear stylistic ties to Son House, Skip James, and others, there are ways in which he stands apart. Part of this is musical—it has to do with the quality of his imagery, his impulse to drama, the immediacy of his singing and guitar playing—but mostly it is Johnson’s determination to go farther into the blues than anyone else, and his ability, as an artist, to get there. Anyone from Muddy Waters to Mick Jagger to Michael Jackson could put across the inspired pornography of Johnson’s “Terraplane [a good, rough car of the thirties] Blues”— I'm gonna get deep down in this connection Keep on tangling with your wires I'm gonna get deep down in this connection Keep on tangling with your wires And when I mash down on your little starter— Then your spark gonna give me fire —but as for “Stones in My Passway,” which was the other side of sex, no one has been fool enough to try. Few men could brag like Robert Johnson: “ Stuff I got’ll bust your brains out, baby,” he sang in “Stop Breaking Down Blues,” “It’ll make you lose your mind.” Women crowded around him at the back country juke joints to find out if it was true, and no doubt it often was. But such tunes gave way to songs like “Phonograph Blues,” where Johnson sings, with far too much emotion, it seems, about his broken record player. “What evil have 1 done. . what evil has the poor girl heard.” That one line shows us how far he is trying to go. The poor girl is the phonograph, softly personified; she refuses to play Johnson's wicked records and breaks dowm. With a blazing insistence, Johnson intensifies his personification, unveils his metaphors. At once, you see him struggling with his machine, and in bed with his girl. The records are his sins; the phonograph his sexuality. The song ends as a confession that the sins his records embody have made him impotent. What Johnson found on his road was mostly this: " . . . the sense that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming satisfactions are not ‘happiness and pleasure’ but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.” So wrote Fitzgerald to his daughter, about what he had found in Lincoln and Shakespeare and “ all great careers.” His words make good company for Stanley Booth’s: “The dedication [the blues] demands lies beyond technique; it makes being a blues player something like being a priest. Virtuosity in playing blues licks is like virtuosity in celebrating the Mass, it is empty, it means nothing. Skill is a necessity, but a true blues player’s virtue lies in his acceptance of his life, a life for which he is only partly responsible. When Bukka White sings a song he wrote during his years on Parchman Prison Farm. ‘I wonder how long, till I can change my clothes.’ 25
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