THE BARTENDER'S GLASS

    Somewhere between fact and fiction lies myth, that intangible essence that influences both truth and its telling. The fact is that the St. Louis Globe Democrat of December 28, 1895, reported that on Christmas night of that year, Lee Shelton, also known as Stagger Lee, fatally wounded his friend Billy Lyons, shooting him to death with a forty-four caliber revolver because Mr. Lyons failed to return Mr. Shelton’s five-dollar Stetson hat within a reasonable amount of minutes. The fiction, as written by Richard Wright in the 1940 novel, Native Son, is that Bigger Thomas, in a panic over being discovered in a young white woman’s bedroom, murdered Mary Dalton and later executed his own girlfriend, Bessie Mears, as a way of making his escape. The myth is that Bigger Thomas was Stagger Lee, just as Stagger Lee was also Rap Brown, Bobby Seale, and Huey Newton; just as he was a young Eldridge Cleaver and a Donald DeFreeze before he kidnapped Patty Hearst; just as he was Stockley Carmichael, Malcolm X, Cassius Clay and Angela Davis; just as he sometimes turned up as the father in the Temptations’ hit song, “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” the lead character in the movie Superfly, or as Rodney King, driving while black through the night in Los Angeles, the cops closing in. Stagger Lee is, as Bigger Thomas was, in the words of Julius Lester, “So bad that the flies wouldn’t even fly around his head in the summertime, and snow wouldn’t fall on his house in the winter.” Stagger Lee is the boxer Mike Tyson biting off an opponent’s ear. He is, as Greil Marcus admits, Johnny Cash, shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die. And he is Bigger Thomas, a man whose plight was summarized by his American Communist Party attorney when he said, “We are dealing here not with how man acts toward man, but with how a man acts when he feels that he must defend himself. . . . against the total natural world in which he lives.”

     The Stagger Lee mythology jumped out of Bill Curtis’ saloon over night. By the start of the Twentieth Century appeared in myriad murder ballads, many of which were to move from the oral tradition to the recording studio. The first published version was by John Lomax in 1910. The earliest recorded take of the song may be by Mississippi John Hurt who, in 1929, followed Stag from the executioners’ gallows down to Hell, where he ascended to the throne and established a paradise of his own. The most commercially successful version appeared thirty years hence, when singer Lloyd Price found Stagger Lee and Billy Lyons gambling late at night. This rendition is exuberant, celebratory, and offended Dick Clark so much that he refused to permit Price to appear on “American Bandstand” even with the record being Number One for four straight weeks. As of today, more than 400 versions of the story have been recorded, sufficient for the tune and legend to qualify as legitimate American culture. 
    On Price’s recording, a New Orleans jubilation, there is no chorus and the only refrain is the singer urging on the bad man: “Go, Stagger Lee! Go!”

The night was clear
And the moon was yellow
And the leaves came tumbling down.
I was standing on the corner
When I heard my bulldog bark
He was barking at two men
Who were gambling in the dark.
Stagger Lee and Billy
Two men who gambled late
Stagger Lee threw a seven
Billy swore that he threw eight.
Stagger Lee told Billy
“I can’t let you go with that.
You done won all my money
And my brand new Stetson hat.”
Stagger Lee went home
And he got his forty-four
He said, “I’m going to the barroom
Just to pay that debt I owe.”
Stagger Lee went to the barroom
And he stood across that barroom floor
He said “Nobody move”
And he pulled his forty-four.
“Stagger Lee,” cried Billy
“Oh, please don’t take my life!
I got three little children
And a very sickly wife.”
Stagger Lee shot Billy
Oh he shot that poor boy so bad
That the bullet went through Billy
And broke the bartender’s glass.

     A 1970 take on the tune by Pacific Gas & Electric turned up on the Quentin Tarantino half of the movie Grindhouse. And in the 2007 film Black Snake Moan, Samuel L. Jackson sings the song from the killer’s perspective. In between, the song has been interpreted, revised and reproduced by Beck, Bob Dylan, Tom Jones, Cab Calloway, Dr. John the Night-Tripper, Wilson Pickett, Charley Pride, Elvis Presley, Pat Boone, Mary Wells, the Clash, Wolfman Jack, Nick Cave, James Brown, Memphis Slim, Duke Ellington, Neil Diamond, and, of course, Snatch and the Poontangs. The saga has entered academia by being researched by Cecil Brown in the 2003 book Stagolee Shot Billy. It has gone the way of pop culture by being the subject of a long comic book by Derek McCulloch and Shepherd Hendrix. And now it is one of the subjects of this article.

     Depending on the tale, Stag gets away with the crime. It other versions he is apprehended. But always he is a black man who suffers unfortunate circumstances and does not back down. His legend is that he represents the type of African American who most disturbs white people, which is where the Bigger Thomas edition of the myth emerges. In a long essay entitled “How Bigger was Born,” Richard Wright admits to going for the wrong emotional response in his previous book, Uncle Tom’s Children. 
     "When the reviews of that book began to appear, I realized that I had made an awfully naïve mistake. I found that I had written a book which even the bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it."
     It is likely that few tears were shed for Bigger Thomas, although the conditions that created him may have salted the oceans. In the same essay, Wright confesses that his protagonist is a composite of many Bigger Thomases.
     "The only Negroes I know of who consistently violated the Jim Crow laws of the South and got away with it. . . . Eventually, the whites who restricted their lives made them pay a terrible price. They were shot, hanged, maimed, lynched, and generally hounded until they were either dead or their spirits broken."

     As L. L. Cool J said in an early rap hit, “I keep the suckers in fear with the look on my face.” The Biggers that Wright knew swaggered and calculated their way through life, never showing worry. They defied the white power men. The only thing they dreaded was an unfree future. They were the pride of other blacks who sometimes did back down or who reluctantly did give up a bus seat to a white man. Greil Marcus, in his phenomenal book Mystery Train, samples from history.
     "There is an echo for Jimi Hendrix, a star at twenty-four and dead at twenty-seven; for young men dead in alleys or cold in the city morgue; for a million busted liquor stores and a million angry rapes. . . .It is an echo all the way back to the bullet that went through Billy and broke the bartender’s glass, a timeless image of style and death."
     A bartender’s glass, as any professional drinker knows, is a mirror. It is such a glass which shows a man to himself as others may see him. It is, in that sense, a weapon. But Stagger Lee knocked off Billy and destroyed the mirror all in one motion, all in one action. Bigger Thomas suffocated Mary Dalton while the girl’s blind mother looked on, those empty eyes reflections of suppressed terror and choking rage.

     Richard Wright does nothing to glamorize or mitigate Bigger’s crimes. He does, however, show the two homicides as inevitable. Mary Dalton, the first victim, is the college-aged daughter of Bigger’s new employer. Mr. Dalton is a rich white guy who also owns the company that owns the small apartment Bigger shares with his mother, sister and brother. Mary Dalton’s boyfriend Jan is a communist. He and Mary make the point that they simply adore Bigger or at least they would prefer to if only he could see clear to letting them help him. Wright had met the type, having been himself a member of the Party while the novel was in process. Years later, he wrote a piece for the Atlantic Monthly called “I Tried to be a Communist,” a piece subsequently included in an anthology of disillusioned writers called The God That Failed. In this, Wright explains that while the Party organizers were thrilled to have a member of the black literati on board, none of them could secure a room for him in any Manhattan hotel.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
     Stagger Lee and Bigger Thomas know that they may win, but if so the victory will be for today only. Tomorrow they will lose. They will lose the day after that. On and on they trudged with all their enormous losses punctuated by an occasional “hallelujah,” while at the end of the war they may still be standing. If they do remain afoot, it will not be because of fate, justice, or providence. It will be simply because by the end of all the battles, they will be too exhausted to remember to fall down and die. 

     Stagger Lee was Clarence Darrow (who was not black, but only on the outside) asking the jury in the Scopes trial to find his client guilty so that he could hurry up and appeal the decision. Stagger was W.E.B. DeBois sneering at death threats while editing the Crisis magazine for the NAACP. He was Marcus Garvey, leading the largest African American social movement of all time with his Back To Africa project. He was Elijah Muhammad shouting for a separate nation for his people. He was Huey Newton shooting back at the Oakland Police. He was James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner sassing Klansmen Kops as they were being executed. He was Abbie Hoffman (also only technically not black) during a recess in the Chicago Seven Trial, suggesting to Mayor Richard Daley that the two of them could settle their differences with a good old fashioned fist fight and save the aggravation of the court proceedings.
     The motivation is irrelevant. Bigger Thomas would have understood Karl Marx perfectly when the latter said, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” Motivation is nothing more or less than how a man sees himself, so Richard Wright buries us in it. Every chapter, every scene, every page and sentence reflects Bigger’s consciousness and recall. When he accidentally smothers his first victim, he perceives her not as an object of remorse or guilt or even tragedy, but rather as a hateful thing that has, through dying—the stupid bitch!—ruined his life. I must confess that the first time through this book, I was uncomfortable with this sense of detachment. Bigger’s eyes see only his own reflection from the beginning to the end. When someone he murdered dies, he interprets the incident only in terms of how it affects him. After a second reading, it dawned on me that Wright was providing an explanation, not editorializing. After Mary is dead, Bigger knows he must hide her body to avoid detection. He tries shoving her into the furnace but finds her body to be too tall. Adapting to the situation, he seeks out a hatchet and chops off her head, forcing her body into the flames. Throughout this experience Wright immerses the reader in Bigger’s conflux of emotions, a spinning gyre which has nothing to do with the character’s motivations and everything to do with his state of being, a condition which must be multiplied by the number of black people in this country who have had to sublimate conscience in order to survive. On the outside, where pure perceptions are all that exist, this is all fearless style and bravado. And in the reality of this fiction that is certainly relevant because in his world all that Bigger Thomas can claim is his ability to terrorize by mobilizing every prejudice that can possibly be used against him and then go out alone, furious and defiant, even taking credit for crimes he did not commit. 

     It is no coincidence that Stagger Lee is an American, just as it is no coincidence that the first girl Bigger kills believed she was trying to help him. Popular culture is full of such confusions. In an early episode of a distinctly American television program, “Hill Street Blues,” Lieutenant Henry Goldblum, dressed in street clothes, is on his way back to the precinct after investigating the suicide of a black teenager. Goldblum is distressed by this horrible loss of life and only emerges from his despair when he is forced to pull his car over when he gets a flat tire. As the only visible white guy in this part of town, he draws a fast audience, including some young black men who mess with him. “Just a second, son,” Henry says, trying to be charming. “Don’t you ‘Just a second son’ me! I ain’t your son! Ain’t nobody here your son!” Out-numbered and terrified, he fails to discourage them and so resorts to pulling from beneath his jacket a small gun which is quick to get everyone’s attention. He promptly ignores his own flat tire and drives back to the safety of police headquarters. He seeks consolation from a black colleague who tells him that the real reason he is so upset is that the black guys hurt his feelings. And that is exactly right.
     Is such a scene incongruous? Or does it not make clear that so long as our responses to social situations hinge on the colors of the participants, racism will surely remain the most personal issue which each of us must wrestle?


    Here, then, in the keeping with the several themes of News From Earth (and the larger Philropost from which much of it is extrapolated) are twenty-seven songs that either fostered the Stagger Lee myth, were a direct part of the myth, or grew from the myth. 


Furry Lewis: "Billy Lyons and Stack O'Lee.
Furry Lewis: Kassie Jones
Tom T. Hall: "More About John Henry."
Ma Rainey: Stack O'Lee Blues
Frank Hutchinson: "Stackalee."
Woody Guthrie: "Stackolee."
Long Cleve Reed and the Down Home Boys: "Original Stack o'Lee Blues."
Mississippi John Hurt: "Stack O'Lee Blues."
Archibald: "Stack a Lee, Parts I & II."
Dr. John: "Stack A Lee."
Guitar Slim: "The Things that I Used to Do."
Lloyd Price: "Stagger Lee."
Stella Johnson: "Trial of Stagger Lee."
Wilbert Harrison: "Stagger Lee."
The Isley Brothers: "Stagger Lee."
Ike and Tina Turner: "Stagger Lee and Billy."
The Clash: "Wrong Em Boyo."
P J Proby: "Stagger Lee."
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: "Stagger Lee."
Samuel L. Jackson: "Stack-o-Lee."
Schoolly D: "Gangster Boogie."
Ice Cube: "AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted."
Geto Boys: "Mind of a Lunatic."
John Lee Hooker: "Crawling Kingsnake."
Wilson Pickett: "I'm a Midnight Mover."
The Rolling Stones: "Midnight Rambler."
Howlin Wolf: "Back Door Man."