Stagolee Shot Billy (review)

Lee Shelton, a pimp also known as "Stack Lee," was virtually unknown outside St Louis's vice district until Christmas night 1895, when he shot William Lyons in a fight over a Stetson hat. More than a century later, "Stack Lee" (also known as Stagolee, Stack O' Lee or Stagerlee) has become a celebrated folk figure for a portion of the African American community that still sings, raps, or recounts the story of "that badman Stagolee." Despite the diversity of the legend's variations in oral tradition and in mass media, Stagolee remains a powerful symbolic archetype that shapes African American culture in both literature and politics and has resulted in the discursive creation of a "black ethos" among African Americans living at the bottom of the social ladder.

In Stagolee Shot Billy, folklorist and novelist Cecil Brown tells the story of the man and the legend, presenting a comprehensive study of a myth in the making. Integrating multiple theoretical perspectives, Brown describes how Stagolee became a metaphor for the enduring struggle of young African American men in American society.

Brown provides a meticulous account of the actual event in a literary narrative style, laying out the authentic facts, or "narrative events," as derived from legal, journalistic, and oral history sources. Using performance theory, he tackles discrepancies between "narrative events" and "narrated events," notably highlighting the conventions of oral literature according to which a performer blends fact with fiction to dramatize the story. Blurring the line between formally documented narrative events and orally narrated events through what Victor Turner calls "inversio" and what Jean Baudrillard describes as the "dissolution of reality into fiction" (p. 70), Brown explains that storytellers transformed historical incidents into oral literature by recounting them from the viewpoints of their audiences, emphasizing their emotional and psychological desires. Drawing on the observations of Walter Burkert, Richard Bauman, and Walter Benjamin, Brown explores this interdependence of fact, fiction, and function in oral narratives and explains how storytellers use it to turn social drama into myth, the content of which, as Burkert observed, secondarily or partially refers to something of collective importance.

Considering narrative structure, Brown reminds us that binary opposition, which Claude Lévi-Strauss considers basic to myths and folktales, established Lee Shelton and Billy Lyons as polar opposites, though it altered the actual facts and distorted the original event. "Allomotives" (details that may fluctuate to make the story consistent with the cultural grammar of its audience) have transformed the original narrative through time (for example, in a 1927 variant, a pimp takes out his bamboo and smokes his opium; in a 1903 version, the drug of choice is cocaine), but Stagolee has preserved approximately the same archetypal structure.

Brown provides a detailed depiction of the sociocultural context of the initial social drama, describing the political links of Shelton and the prestige of the pimp or "mack." Relying upon expertise in African American folkways and signifying practices, as well as Kevin Mumford's research on urban areas in the early twentieth century, Brown provides enlightening explanations of the glamorization of the pimp and sportsman. His clarification of the symbolic value of Stetson hats and of nicknames in this folk group provides insight into contemporary African American cultural productions and social practices. For instance, the vehement reaction of Spike Lee's character in Do the Right Thing when an individual stains his new "Air Jordan" basketball shoe—an episode reminiscent of Shelton and Lyons's fight over the hat—is elucidated by Brown's explanation of the symbolic importance of clothes and commodities that prevailed in the African American community at the time. Similarly, Brown explains the possible origins of the name Stagolee in terms of traditional nicknames connoting looks, occupation, or geographical origin, for example, "Fat Head," "Burndown" (an arsonist), or "22" (a convict serving a twenty-two-year sentence), which persists in rap music with names like "Fat Joe," "Chali2NA" (from California), and "Pusha T."

The core of Brown's analysis is a study of the various media that facilitated...