Entry · catalog no. 1109
Stagger Lee
/ /ˈstæɡɚ ˈli/ /STAG-er LEE
proper noun · St. Louis, Missouri · 1890s
✓ Verified
1.
The same St. Louis badman as Stagolee, under the spelling that reached the pop charts. This form entered wide circulation through Lloyd Price's 1958 recording, which softened the story into a dispute over a dice game and dropped most of what the toast tradition carried. Also spelled Stackolee, Stack-a-Lee, Stack O'Lee, and Stacker Lee, depending on region and performer.
“Everybody's grandmother knows the Stagger Lee record; almost nobody outside the tradition knows the toast it came from.”
Origin & Attribution
Same origin as Stagolee: the 1895 killing of Billy Lyons by Lee Shelton in St. Louis. The Stagger Lee spelling is the one that traveled through commercial recording, and it is the form most Americans have heard. Treating this spelling as the original inverts the record — the Black oral versions came first and ran for six decades before the hit, and the hit is the version that removed the pimp, the politics, and most of the menace.
1895
Lee Shelton shoots Billy Lyons in St. Louis
1928
Mississippi John Hurt records his version
1958
Lloyd Price's 'Stagger Lee' becomes a number one pop record
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Midwest
St. Louis, Missouri · 1890s
Spoken by
Black St. Louis sporting-life men; later a national record-buying audience
$STAGGEThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady131 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
80/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1895
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@chitown
Chicago, IL
@detlex
Detroit, MI
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Mississippi John Hurt, 'Stack O' Lee Blues,' recorded for Okeh — 1928
song · recorded
■
Lloyd Price, 'Stagger Lee,' ABC-Paramount — 1958
song · recorded
■
+ Cite a sourceCecil Brown, 'Stagolee Shot Billy,' Harvard University Press — 2003
book · documented
Also spelled
See also