STACK-O-LEE - a new history

 

Image, 1910, courtesy Eric McHenry

SJI, of course, is not the only song with a long and convoluted history.

I thought I had tracked the earliest sheet music for "Stack-O-Lee Blues." I had discovered a silly song, copyrighted in 1920, showing that "Stack-O-Lee" or "Stagger Lee" or any variation of these titles had been performed long before anything else had been printed or recorded. It was an old old song.

But, from the 1920 sheet music, it was obviously already well-known:

"Stack O' Lee Blues. Play it over for me, I go crazy when I hear it, anywhere I may be, I long to hear them play that Stack O' Lee. Eeny, meeny, miney mo, they'll play some more, now let us catch a nigger by the toe."

And so on. Horrible.

A couple of days ago a friend sent me a really interesting article from The American Scholar website, detailing Eric McHenry's search for the origins of "Stack-O-Lee Blues." This is brilliant stuff, and a tale more than well worth the read!

Was Lee Shelton (aka Stacka Lee) really a bad man, the devil that Mississippi John Hurt portrayed? Did he ever exist? Was the man he killed, William Lyons, a real person? Did Lyons really have "two little babies and a darlin'' lovin' wife"?

McHenry pulls back the covers. Thank you.

Cab Calloway, The Beatles, St. James Infirmary

A young Cab Calloway

A friend sent a link to Cab Calloway and multiple video versions of his song "Minnie the Moocher." Check it out, it's a lot of fun: Minnie the Moocher.

Calloway's theme song was once "St. James Infirmary," but when he became the feature performer at Harlem's prestigious The Cotton Club, he wanted a song that was more, uhm, original. As detailed in my book, I Went Down to St. James Infirmary, he and manager Irving Mills cobbled together something that borrowed the orchestration and melody of "St. James Infirmary" and the lyrics of a traditional American song about drug dreams called "Willie the Weeper."

It was the biggest chart success of the year. 1931.

Three decades later, February 23 1964, Calloway appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show to perform, not "Minnie the Moocher," but "St. James Infirmary."

The Beatles were on that same Ed Sullivan TV show - performing three songs, including this:

It was an exciting Sunday night. Like most people I (and my family, parents included) were tuned in for the Beatles. Calloway was a diversion, a fill-in, as were the other acts that evening. When Sullivan introduced Calloway, though, he reminisced about the fantastic days when Cab captured everyone's imagination.