Fictional Blues

Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White

Kimberly Mack

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781613767962
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The familiar story of Delta blues musician Robert Johnson, who sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads in exchange for guitar virtuosity, and the violent stereotypes evoked by legendary blues "bad men" like Stagger Lee undergird the persistent racial myths surrounding "authentic" blues expression. Fictional Blues unpacks the figure of the American blues performer, moving from early singers such as Ma Rainey and Big Mama Thornton to contemporary musicians such as Amy Winehouse, Rhiannon Giddens, and Jack White to reveal that blues makers have long used their songs, performances, interviews, and writings to invent personas that resist racial, social, economic, and gendered oppression.Using examples of fictional and real-life blues artists culled from popular music and literary works from writers such as Walter Mosley, Alice Walker, and Sherman Alexie, Kimberly Mack demonstrates that the stories blues musicians construct about their lives (however factually slippery) are inextricably linked to the "primary story" of the narrative blues tradition, in which autobiography fuels musicians' reclamation of power and agency.

1

The Narrative Blues Tradition

Tall Tales, Myths, and Black American Folklore

The earliest written-down version of the Stagolee ballad that San Angelo, Texas, art teacher Ella Scott Fisher sent to folklorist and teacher John Lomax on February 9, 1910 begins as follows:

’Twas a Christmas morning,

The hour was about ten,

When Stagalee shot Billy Lyons

And landed in the Jefferson pen.

O Lordy, po’ Stagalee!1

In her note Fisher states,

This is all the verses I remember. The origin of this ballad, I have been told, was the shooting of Billy Lyons in a barroom on the Memphis levee, by Stack Lee. The song is sung by the Negroes on the levee while they are loading and unloading the river freighters, the words being composed by the singers. The characters were prominently known in Memphis, I was told, the unfortunate Stagalee belonging to the family of the owners of the Lee line of steamers, which are known on the Mississippi from Cairo to the Gulf. I give all this to you as it was given to me. The effect of the song with its minor refrain is weird, and the spoken interpolations add to the realism. It becomes immensely personal as you hear it, like a recital of something known or experienced by the singer.

An incomplete record of the ballad—just ten stanzas—was later included in American Ballads and Folk Songs, published by John Lomax and his son Alan Lomax in 1934. The ballad tells the dramatic tale of an African American bad man named Stagalee who shot another Black man called Billy Lyons “Dead on the barroom floor” with his “forty-four gatlin’ gun.” 2 This early version was based on the real-life story of William Lyons’s shooting death at the hands of Lee Shelton, a.k.a. Stack Lee, in a St. Louis, Missouri, saloon on Christmas night in 1895. However, it did not include details that would emerge in later published versions, and in earlier variants circulated orally, reflecting the true events of that evening. One missing detail in particular stands out: the fact that Shelton killed Lyons, in part, because of a Stetson hat, and, according to a story on December 26, 1895, in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, “When his victim fell to the floor, Sheldon [sic] took his hat from the hand of the wounded man and coolly walked away.”3

Stagolee. Stacker Lee. Stagalee. Stackolee. Stack Lee. Stack-o-lee. These are just a few of the names for the folk hero whose story—the essence of which is unchanged from song to song—resonates for generations of Black people in general, and Black men in particular.4 Cecil Brown, for instance, relays his experience hearing the story of Stagolee while growing up in the South during the late 1950s and early 1960s: “As chanted in the form of a ‘toast’ by my Uncle Lindsey, the narrative presented a young god of virility.” And he later suggests that “Stagolee’s influence persists in rap music in the use of the first-person narrator, the performers’ adoption of nicknames, the social drama, the humor, and participation in the commodity culture,” demonstrating how this African American folk narrative, told orally and in song, continues to leave its traces.5

This story about a Black man who killed another Black man over a hat, and then showed no remorse, has been told and retold in varied mediums, including poems, books, songs, ballads, graphic novels, and plays. The tale was turned into a lengthy ballad as early as 1903. As noted by Brown and D. Quentin Miller, this narrative eventually moved beyond ballads and the blues and into American literature, with writers such as Richard Wright in his novel Native Son (1940), Toni Morrison in her novel Song of Solomon (1977), and James Baldwin in his poem “Staggerlee Wonders” (1985) engaging the myth of the bad man.6 As Miller notes, though, by the time we see Stagolee as rendered by Morrison and Baldwin, he is distinct from Wright’s Bigger Thomas, who was rooted in the tradition of the protest novel: “Baldwin and Morrison appropriate Staggerlee not as a hero of a protest movement, but rather as a figure ancillary to the heroes of their works, one who can clarify the dangers of uncontrolled anger and at the same time provide a path to salvation for the actual heroes.” 7 In other words, over time, Stagolee’s literary depictions move away from romantic glorification to considering how his violent story might be instructive for young Black men and women. The bad man tale also evolves over time to include women tellers. Ma Rainey’s 1926 recording of “Stack-o-Lee Blues” not only clears the ground for other contemporaneous blueswomen, but it allows Amy Winehouse to perform her own live version of “Stagger Lee,” generations later in 2011, months before she died, demonstrating how the tale crosses boundaries of race, gender, and time.8

On the face of it, the story is not particularly noteworthy. It was not the only murder that occurred in St. Louis that night—according to the July 14, 1896, edition of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, four other similar crimes were committed.9 So what was it that made the story compelling enough for it to be the urtext for a wide range of twentieth-century songs across multiple genres, including blues, jazz, folk, rock and roll, R & B, and soul? It is my contention that what is left out of the story drives the legend rather than what is there. The gaps in the Stagolee tale allow the tellers to add to the narrative, serving not only as storytelling collaborators but also as cocreators and reinventors of the original event. The longevity of the Stagolee tale is reflective of the beloved nature of stories, especially of the fantastical variety. The Stagolee tale has been performed as songs and instrumentals in a jazz style by artists such as Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway; as a blues song by more than one hundred bluesmen and women, including Ma Rainey and Mississippi John Hurt; and as an R & B or soul song by Lloyd Price, James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Ike and Tina Turner, and the Isley Brothers. In the 1930s and 1940s, John and Alan Lomax recorded prisoners singing the songs as folk protest music. Numerous pop and rock artists, such as the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Huey Lewis and the News, and the Clash, have performed versions of the Stagolee ballad.10 And Greil Marcus might have been the first rock critic to recognize the Stagolee legend as a metaphor for the Black artists themselves, as he discusses Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On through this lens.11

As Brown and Richard Bauman suggest, oral literature, and its power, is tied to its “individual, social, and cultural” context.12 David C. Rubin also argues that “oral traditions are viewed as human behavior, not reified texts.” 13 In other words, the resonances of this oral and then written-down folk tale outline the people who told and retold the stories. As Fisher says of the Stagalee ballad, “It becomes immensely personal as you hear it, like a recital of something known or experienced by the singer.” 14 Here Fisher suggests that the singer of a ballad, though working with a version far removed from the original text, can still find a way into the narrative, effectively making it his or her own. Moving from person to person, and across time and space, the song retains the story. As Rubin notes, “Remembering a piece for an oral tradition does not require the recall of exact words: recall of the general meaning and form is sufficient.” And, as Rubin suggests, “one specific variant of a song is not being transmitted at all. Rather, what is being transmitted is the theme of the song, its imagery, its poetics, and some specific details.”15

In the case of Stagolee, the core of the story revolves around the aftermath of a senseless murder on a Christmas evening in St. Louis—but the various singers, tellers, and retellers of the story can add verses to the narrative. These additions may, as in the example of Stagolee, include details that will draw the listener deeper into the tale, motivating them to invest just a little bit more in the narrative. In the version that Fisher presented to John Lomax, Stagalee goes to jail, but he is ultimately released after his “old woman” posts “a ten-thousand-dollar bail.” 16 This version hews somewhat closer to the real-life story, in which instead of being immediately caught, tried, and sentenced to hanging, as in the Stagolee tale published by Howard Odum in the Journal of American Folklore in 1911, Shelton’s well-regarded white lawyer Nat Dryden argued that Shelton killed in self-defense, resulting in a hung jury. Dryden died on August 26, 1897, before Shelton’s second trial, where he was convicted of murder and began a twenty-five-year sentence at Missouri State Penitentiary in October 1897.17 On Thanksgiving 1909, Shelton was paroled, only to be arrested on robbery and assault charges two years later.18 He ultimately died in prison on March 11, 1912.19

In the version of the Stagolee ballad that circulated during the 1930s in Texas and Louisiana—one collected by John Lomax—after Stagolee goes to prison and he briefly runs away, he is recaptured and killed by Chief Maloney.20 While in real life it appears that Shelton, who was involved with the Democratic Party, and Lyons, a member of an influential Republican family, had a deadly argument over politics, in this version, and in others, the two spar over a gambling disagreement.21 In this variant, Stagolee has a reputation that precedes him—when the police chief comes looking for Stagolee in the bar, he finds him “drunk an’ layin’ on de barroom floor.” When the chief asks the bartender who that is, the bartender replies, “Speak softly.” . . . It’s dat bad nigger Stagolee.” In this iteration there is mention of the hat: “Slowly Stack walked from de table, he said, ‘I can’t let you go wid dat. You win all of my money an’ my milk-white Stetson hat.’” He is no longer the “po’ Stagalee” from the version Miss Fisher gifted to John Lomax. He is now a “bad nigger” who is feared by the teller, the local community, law enforcement, and even, ultimately, the devil:

De hangman put de mask on, tied his han’s behin’ his back,

Sprung de trap on Stagolee, but his neck refused to crack.

Hangman, he got frightened, he said: “Chief, you see how it be,

I cain’ hang this man, you better let him go free.”

Of course, Chief Maloney does not let Stagolee go free, opting instead to shoot him “six times in de side.” Stagolee finds himself in hell, playfully fighting with a new friend:

Stack he tol’ de devil, “Come on, le’s have a lil fun,

You stick me wid yo’ pitchfork an’ I’ll shoot you wid my 41.”

Stagolee say, “Now, now, Mister Devil, ef me an’ you gonna have some fun,

You play de cornet, Black Betty beat de drum.”

In all of these versions, the teller presents the story as if he or she were there for all of the events. The narrative is immediate and filled with formal elements that improve any story: dialogue, description, and sensory details. It does not matter if the teller really was there, as he or she claims in the 1930s version: “It was early one mornin’ when I heard my little dog bark, Stagolee and Billy Lyon was arg’in’ in de dark.” 22 Whether or not this is an objectively true autobiographical moment is irrelevant. The story becomes the storyteller’s own, and the teller embraces all of it: both what is objectively true, as in the news and eyewitness accounts of Lyons’s real-life murder, and what is constructed. These new elements can either serve as a correction of the record—that missing Stetson hat—or to disrupt the record—Stagolee’s eventual decision to “rule Hell by [him]self.” 23 The tellers have space to blur the line between fact and fiction because of the details that are left out of the original story. These gaps allow for new ballad and song variants. The 1930s’ coda, in which Stagolee and the devil play music together, is a preview into not only how the Stagolee folk tale became part of blues lore but also how the bad man, more generally, became part of the blues tradition.

In this opening chapter, I will explore the ways in which the construction and reconstruction of autobiographical and biographical narratives that move between fact and fiction, while simultaneously inventing and reinventing the tellers, echo storytelling approaches in the blues tradition writ large. Although the mythical narratives—sometimes originating from nonfictional events that mark African American folklore and the blues at the early part of the twentieth century—are fluid and unstable, and are meant to be added to and reimagined by each new teller, later generations of transatlantic white blues critics, scholars, and fans were prone to take these myths as the unadorned truth. Some of these same white blues enthusiasts viewed the makers of blues themselves as “authentic” figures whose songs—and tales that they told about themselves and others—are a kind of reportage, rather than giving bluesmen and women credit for the fictional dynamic of autobiographical and biographical invention and reinvention.

This chapter’s argument is twofold. First, that there are myths—for example, the bad man, and its close relation, the bedeviled bluesman, as well as the transgressive (bad) blueswoman—born in the early part of the twentieth century that resonate into the twenty-first century, affecting the subjects in the rest of this book quite directly. And second, that these early twentieth-century blues artists fight for their voices to be heard through storytelling. Though their stories, songs, and performances are taken as evidence of their natural essential selves by future generations of blues lovers, these tales show that blues personas are built through autobiographical and biographical fictions.

Chapter 1 will survey important foundational cultural artifacts such as the various early tales, songs, and ballads about Stagolee, and the ways in which the bad man archetype extends into engagement and conversation with the devil and its connection to the blues—another thread that circulates through twentieth- and twenty-first-century blues culture. I will show how pervasive these myths are in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in novels, autobiographical narratives, and songs by Albert Murray, Ethel Waters, and the White Stripes.

I’ll place this foundational set of blues myths in dialogue with Texas guitar player, bluesman, and songster Mance Lipscomb’s 1993 oral autobiographical narrative. I Say Me for a Parable: The Oral Autobiography of Mance Lipscomb Texas Bluesman offers insights into how these myths of the bad (blues)man and transgressive (blues)woman continue to evolve in American literature and popular music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Within his narrative are traces of each of the blues myths outlined above, and they transpire in the same ways that Stagolee works, as oral storytelling that becomes a ballad, a song, and then is eventually written down.

Finally, I will demonstrate that blueswomen similarly mythologized themselves. I will focus on early newspaper interviews with Mamie Smith, whose 1920 “Crazy Blues” became the first recorded blues song by an African American woman, and contains the outrageous lyrics

I’m gonna do like a Chinaman, go and get some hop.

Get myself a gun and shoot myself a cop.

I ain’t had nothing but bad news,

Now I got the crazy blues.24

I will also discuss myths about blueswomen Bessie Smith...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments ix
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index