Stagger Lee Saturdays - Memphis Slim, Big Bill Broonzy and Sonny Boy Williamson

In 1947, Alan Lomax sat down with three blues musicians and asked them about the blues. The blues, they decided in a recorded discussion, came from trouble. Trouble came from oppression.

And oppression, it need hardly be said, came from white people.

It's been said better by other people, but Stagger Lee, no matter the spelling, is a story about oppression. Stag is a black antihero who fights back against a crooked game, and in most versions cannot escape retribution.

In this version of the song, Stag drags Billy down the street, which you don't hear in a lot of versions. The three men talking and singing on this album would've heard of, or even witnessed, identical acts in the American South of the time. Again, it need hardly be said, the victims would be black, the perpetrators white.

At the time of this recording, as you'll read in the first link above, the three artists wouldn't let Lomax release the album under their own names, fearing violent reprisals against themselves, and their families, for their brutal honesty. The album didn't get released for over a decade, and then under assumed names.

I'm not a person of color; I can't claim to know anything about racial oppression. What I do know is that music and friendships can give people the strength to survive unbearable situations, and fight against incredible odds. What you hear on this record are three men, honestly and openly talking through their political troubles, and singing songs which might help others deal with the same problems.

Memphis Slim, Big Bill Broonzy and Sonny Boy Williamson
mirror 1 -- mirror 2
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Stagger Lee Saturdays: Bama

Alan Lomax is legendary in the field of American music -- he and his father John were largely responsible for preserving a whole musical tradition: chain gang songs and work songs written and passed along by African-Americans for decades. This is what folk music is about: people hear a song from someone, then make it their own and pass it on to others, who change it some more. If you look at the wide variety of lyrics and tunes we've heard about Stag, you'll notice that (until Lloyd Price's 1959 recording, at least) each version is different in some way from all the others.

This is a bare-bones, a capella version of Stag, with a lot of lyrics we've never heard before (Stag tells Billy that if he loves his kids so much he'll have to catch up with them in heaven) and quotes from "Alberta" and "Junker's Blues." (Like Stag, "Junker's Blues" -- aka "Junco Partner" -- has also been covered by Fats Domino, Lloyd Price, Professor Longhair, Dr. John and The Clash -- I smell a Multiple Mondays post of this in the indeterminate near future.) This recording was performed live by a prisoner, in 1947 in the infamous Parchman Penitentiary. You can hear the atmosophere of the jailhouse, with a wicked echo and other people shouting in the background. This is so rough and so raw I can't help but wonder about Bama -- he was gone from Parchman the next year when Lomax returned to record more songs, but he tells us in an interview on this same disc that he's been in and out of prison for the past 18 years.

This whole disc is so chilling and affecting that I cannot recommend highly enough that you use that buy link this week. The used CDs start at two bucks, or Amazon will sell you the whole download for only $5. I'll be posting at least one more track from this sometime soon, but go ahead and buy it now.

Bama - Stackerlee
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