Stagolee Shot Billy

For myself, the first third of this book is not particularly interesting. It is the telling of a story that happened in St. Louis, of a man shooting another man over a dispute. After that, the book gets more interesting. It starts to delve into the variations of this story, and how it spread over time and place. Stagolee Shot Billy traces the changes of the main characters, and shows how people changed it to fit their circumstances. The main character changes from black to white, and bad to good. There are example of this story in song, and sometimes the character changes to a point that only the murder is consistent.Over all, I would not recommend this book to someone who is looking for a good story. If you are looking for something informative, or are interested in learning how stories spread and change in time, then this book is for you. Or if you are just interested in some St. Louis history, this would work. It is required reading for a class I am taking.

The story of Stagolee (aka Stack O'Lee; Stagger Lee) has been told many times in song by artists as diverse as Doc Watson, Fats Domino, Lloyd Price and Bill Haley; and seemed to resurface anew in the early 70s as Jim Croce's "Leroy Brown". Author Cecil Brown has written a wonderfully researched story about this mercurial folk-villian, delving into the official archival news records of the time to track down the actual confrontation between a Lee Shelton and Billy Lyons, resulting in the shooting death that gave birth to the legend and the song, similar perhaps to the manner of events that gave birth to the equallly legendary "Wreck Of The Old 97".This book is a very intriguing story, telling the story of both characters, the conditions of the town they lived in for this particular period in history--the late 1800s, and not that long after the Civil War had ended.

This review is only for the Kindle version itself, not the book. The book is great. Love the scholarship, the thorough history, the details the author brings to light.The Kindle version renders the scholarship almost completely unusable. The notes aren't linked, so to follow anything up is impossible.Takeaway: The Kindle version is completely useless for scholarship, despite the book itself being a model of scholarship.

Fantastic

Given as a gift; the recipient enjoyed it immensely.

This book tells the tale of Stagolee. Highly recoomended for those that like the idea of reading lesser-known footnote of history.

Thank You good book

As disappointed as I am by the other reviewers here, is how overjoyed I am, now that I have read this book. Upon coming across this book wandering in a book store (sorry, Amazon), I literally tossed aside the other books in my hands and proceeded to read most of the book in the store, before rushing up to the register and tossing over my hard-earned cash for this incredible story!I had heard the song - the Lloyd Price version - on oldies stations as a child; it had never occurred to me that it might actually be based upon a true story. And once that possibility came to light, I needed to know everything there was to know about Stagger Lee. But the more the is to learn about Stagger, the more there is to know, as myth and legend are wound together with what we believe we know to be true.The author tries to bring us along the path he took, the journey he made to uncover the real Stagger Lee; this leads to what the other reviewers decribe as "poor editing", when what we thought we learned as fact on one page turns into just another rumor. And when you have a story that grows as organically as this one has and a tale with this many authors who claim to be the original, then this is bound to happen.At the end, even being able to say, "we think this is how it went down", provides a fascinating case study of late 19th century Negro life, in that post-slavery, post-Reconstruction world in which being black meant anything you were able to claim as your own was tenuous, at best. And sometimes, getting into a fight over a hat was the best choice to be made.