Stagolee and John Henry: Two Black Freedom Songs?
Published By: The African American Folklorist Newspaper (Editor Lamont Jack Pearley)
Written By: Jim Hauser
Are the African American ballads “Stagolee” and “John Henry” freedom songs? What I mean is, Do they express racial resistance, protest, and rebellion? I’ve been researching both ballads for well over a decade, and I believe the answer to this question is “Yes.” A key thing necessary to really understand these songs is to realize that they are both about black manhood and that they both originated and became extremely popular during a time when African Americans were denied their manhood—and their humanity–by the dominant white majority. It also helps to have some knowledge of black history and what everyday life was like for African Americans in the Jim Crow era. If we possess that knowledge and keep in mind the importance of black manhood in both ballads, then we are better equipped to “hear” the resistance, protest, and rebellion when we listen to recordings of these ballads. And maybe we might even see the possibility that Stagolee’s fight with Billy over a Stetson hat and John Henry’s race against a mechanical steam drill could be symbolic of the African American fight for manhood and the struggle for black freedom. But before taking a closer look at these ballads, I want to bring your attention to the quote below.
These songs didn’t come out of thin air… If you sang “John Henry” as many times as me– John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said “a man ain’t nothin’ but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I’ll die with that hammer in my hand.” If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you’d have written “How many roads must a man walk down?” too. —Bob Dylan (from his MusiCares Person of the Year speech, February 2015)
Let’s start by looking at an important function of ballads. According to Paul Oliver in his book Blues Fell This Morning, “A ballad symbolized the suppressed desires of the singer when he could see no way of overcoming his oppression. It is a vocal dream of wish-fulfillment.” He goes on to say that the ballad singer “projected on his heroes the successes that he could not believe could be his own.” So when a black musician sang about Stagolee fighting Billy to get back his stolen Stetson hat, exactly how did that battle symbolize fulfillment of the singer’s wishes? And when a black worker sang about John Henry challenging a steam drill to a race and defeating it, what unreachable success was that worker projecting on his hero John Henry? Could it be that the fight over the Stetson and the race against the steam drill symbolized something of great importance to them and had something to do with their freedom? It certainly seems possible to me. Let’s investigate that possibility by taking a closer look at each of the ballads.
Let’s begin with “Stagloee.” According to folklorist and educator Cecil Brown, in his book Stagolee Shot Billy, to understand the meaning of Stagolee “we must search for the symbolic meaning behind constantly recurring motifs such as the Stetson hat.” He explains that at the time the ballad originated in the late 19th century, African American men wore Stetsons as symbols of masculinity, status, and power. In other words, the Stetson was a symbol of manhood, or to be more specific, black manhood.
Is Brown correct about what the Stetson represented? Through my research, I’ve found a good bit of evidence which supports his claim. Specifically, I’ve identified a number of early black musicians who clearly wore Stetsons to project a certain image, and that image had much to do with male sexuality and manliness. For example, in his autobiography Stachmo: My Life in New Orleans, Louis Armstrong wrote that Stetson hats were a prized possession which were often purchased by African Americans on an installment plan. He also noted that “when a fellow wore a John B. Stetson, he was really a big shot.” Armstrong’s book also describes an incident in which his woman chased after him with a razor because she believed he had cheated on her. He lost possession of his Stetson while fleeing, and she took it and immediately sliced it up with the razor. With her use of the razor, she was sending a message to Armstrong about what she was angry enough to do to him… or certain parts of him (i.e. his “manhood”). Also, two of Armstrong’s fellow jazz musicians wore Stetsons. The stride piano player Willie “The Lion” Smith wrote in his autobiography, Music on My Mind, that he regularly wore a twenty-five-dollar Stetson hat. And in Jelly Roll Morton’s 1938 Library of Congress recordings with Alan Lomax, the jazzman related that there was a time when he yearned for a Stetson and didn’t rest until he got one.
An article written by David Joyner in the October/November 1997 issue of Jazz Player magazine, titled “Early Jazz Pianists: Issues of Image and Style,” helps us to understand why Stetsons were so popular. Joyner points out that early jazz piano players such as Morton and Smith were particularly concerned with their image and sexual identity. He writes that Morton revealed to Lomax that he was reluctant to take up the piano as a youngster because it was thought of as a woman’s instrument. In Morton’s words, “I didn’t want to be called a sissy. I wanted to marry and raise a family and be known as a man among men when I became of age.” It sure seems likely that this fear of being thought of as womanly played a part in creating Morton’s great desire for a Stetson. Joyner’s article also discusses Willie Smith’s commanding appearance and his reputation for intimidating fellow pianists. His nickname “The Lion” appropriately reflected the image of authority and manliness which he projected, an image which he must have deliberately reinforced through his sporting a Stetson hat.
So if the Stetson represented manhood, then Stagolee and Billy’s fight for possession of it could have been symbolic of the black man’s fight for manhood. And I believe that we could take that one step further and say that if it symbolized the black man’s fight for manhood, then it also symbolized the struggle for black freedom. And that’s because black manhood and freedom are inextricably linked. I can quote a fairly long string of black leaders and writers who have commented on the connection between the two, but I shouldn’t need to go any farther than to quote Martin Luther King, Jr. who said, “If the negro is to be free, he must move down into the inner resources of his own soul and sign with a pen and ink of self-assertive manhood his own emancipation proclamation.”
Those readers who are familiar with the historical roots of the legend of Stagolee might argue that it does not make sense to claim that the fight over the Stetson symbolized the fight for black freedom. They would point out that the legendary figures Stagolee and Billy DeLyon were based upon the real-life historical figures Lee “Stag” Shelton and William Lyons, both of whom were black. And they would ask how a fight between two black men could have come to symbolize a struggle between the black and white races. They’d ask, wouldn’t one of them have had to be white and the other black?
I can think of two possibilities to counter that argument. First, the symbolism may not have developed until years after the song was created and history had been transformed into legend. As the years passed and as the ballad spread from St. Louis (its place of origin) to other parts of the country, the connection between the ballad and the historical event which inspired it would have been lost. At that point, those who sang “Stagolee”– and those who heard them sing it — would not have known that the real-life figures behind the ballad were both black, and this would have freed them to use their imaginations as far as the racial identities of Stagolee and Billy were concerned. And considering the symbolic nature of the Stetson to African Americans, it’s likely that many of them would have imagined Stagolee to be a black man and Billy a white man.
Now let’s look at a second possibility of how the Billy DeLyon of legend could have been thought to be a white man even though the historical William Lyons was black. Possibly Lyons occupied the role of a black surrogate for the white power structure. If that happens to have been the case, then the ballad about Stagolee and Billy may have symbolically represented the black struggle for freedom right at the very moment it first took shape. And that’s because even though Lyons was black, he would have been an ally, a tool, an agent of the white system of power.
So if Lyons was a black surrogate for white power, how did that happen? Possibly through his occupation and through his reputation for being a bully. According to Brown’s book, Lyons worked as a levee hand and the local police knew him as “Billy the bully.” “Levee hands” were men who built and repaired levees, but the term may also have been applied to other men who labored on the levees such as the roustabouts who loaded and unloaded cargo from steamboats. But it doesn’t seem likely to me that Lyons would have performed the dangerous and backbreaking work of constructing/repairing levees or loading/unloading the heavy cargo of steamboats. Not likely because he probably lived a relatively advantaged life for a black man – according to Brown’s book, Lyons came from a family that was fairly well-off financially and he was the brother-in-law of Henry Bridgewater, one of the wealthiest and most politically connected black men in St. Louis. Considering his relatively high status, Lyons’s job on the levee must have been less dangerous and less physically demanding than performing the hard manual labor involved in levee construction or in being a roustabout. Possibly he worked on the levee in a position of authority. His bullying disposition may have led him to be employed as black muscle for controlling the levee hands, roustabouts, and other tough rivermen who worked on the levee. In that case, his occupation would have been the St. Louis counterpart to Mississippi’s armed shack bullies and murderous hired guns that Alan Lomax wrote about in his book The Land Where the Blues Began. Black muscle was used to redirect the anger of the brutally treated laborers away from the white bosses and towards other black men. So if William Lyons – the historical figure behind the legendary figure of Billy DeLyon – worked in a position in which he bullied black levee hands, this may have become incorporated into the legend and this would have resulted in Billy being a surrogate, a black agent for the white system of power. And it would have followed that, in doing battle with Billy, Stagolee also would have been symbolically doing battle with the white system of power. And, of course, the connection between history and legend would eventually have been lost, thereby allowing Billy to be transformed from a black surrogate for white power into a white man who was part of the white power structure.
One big reason I believe that many African Americans envisioned Billy DeLyon as a white man deals with Stagolee’s reputation as one of the baddest of all black badmen. In African American speech, referring to someone as “bad” could denote that the person is viewed unfavorably, as in “no good”, “mean” or “evil.” Or, it could mean that the person is viewed favorably, as in “good,” “impressive,” or “great.” But, regardless of the intended meaning, for a man to become famous as one of the baddest of badmen there exists the implication that he is extremely powerful, tough, aggressive, and/or fearless. During the days of Jim Crow, probably the baddest thing a black man could do was challenge or fight a white man, especially a white bully or a white lawman or other white authority figure. It rarely happened, and that was because of the terrible consequences it would bring. Professor Molefi Kete Asante, in his book Erasing Racism, points out that “even the baddest man in town would seldom attack the vilest white man.” If that was the case, then the key to measuring the degree of Stagolee’s badness involves looking at how the ballad’s figure of Billy existed in the minds and imaginations of the black singers of “Stagolee” and their black audiences. Was Billy thought to be a white man or a black man? If Billy was thought to be black, then Stagolee’s reputation for being one of the baddest of black badmen would seem to have been extremely overblown. But what about the other possibility? What if Billy actually did exist in the minds and imaginations of African Americans as a white man, and possibly even as a white bully, or a bullying or racist white lawman? If that was the case, then Stagolee’s battle with and victory over Billy would have served as proof that he truly did possess an exceptional degree of badness,andhis reputation as one of the baddest of black badmen would indeed have been well-deserved.
One version of “Stagolee” in which Billy most likely played the part of a white man is the classic 1927 recording titled “Original Stack O’ Lee Blues” by The Downhome Boys, a duo made up of two obscure black musicians named Long “Cleve” Reed and Papa Harvey Hull. In this version, Billy is clearly a lawman because one verse references him putting people under arrest. At the time the recording was made, some black men did serve as police officers or other lawmen, but probably most African Americans who heard this version of the ballad, would have envisioned Billy as a white lawman – one of the most potent symbols of the white system of power.
One particularly outstanding feature of this version is that it makes no mention of the Stetson hat. The symbol of black manhood and the struggle between Stagolee and Billy over that symbol are absent. They have been replaced by a new struggle: Stagolee’s fight to survive Billy’s intention to murder him. “Original Stack O’ Lee Blues” is a story of police brutality in its most extreme form. This version of the ballad strips away the symbolism of the battle over the Stetson and replaces it with a cold hard reality of African American life in the days of Jim Crow. Here is the key verse:
Stack said to Billy, “How can it be?
You arrest a man just as bad as me,
But you won’t ‘rest Stack O’ Lee
I listened to this recording numerous times before I finally understood the meaning of Stagolee’s words in the above verse. Before I came to realize their actual meaning, I assumed that Stagolee’s words were a taunt. Stagolee’s great reputation for badness misled me into thinking that he was taunting Billy over his failure to arrest him. But, in actuality, Stagolee (Stack) was asking Billy to arrest him. More specifically, he was asking Billy to arrest him rather than kill him. He was saying, You’ve arrested other men who were just as bad as me, so why are you going to kill me instead of arrest me?
In the next verse, Stagolee pleads with lawman Billy for mercy while he is apparently being held at gunpoint. This verse makes it clear that in the prior verse Stagolee was not issuing a taunt but making a request to be arrested rather than killed.
Stack said to Billy, “Don’t you take my life
Well I ain’t got nothin’ but two little chillens and a darlin’ lovin’ wife
In almost all other versions of the ballad, it is Billy (not Stagolee) who asks for mercy, and this led Paul Oliver, in his book Songsters and Saints, to claim that there is an error of reversal in The Downhome Boys recording. But it is clear there is no error once you recognize that, in this particular version of the ballad, Billy intends to murder Stagolee.
In the next verse, Billy responds to Stagolee’s request for mercy by telling him that the next time he sees his children it will be in another world, thereby revealing that he has decided not to arrest but instead kill Stagolee. In a later verse, Stagolee emerges triumphant as he overcomes Billy’s advantage and kills his oppressor.
Stagolee’s execution by hanging is another reason I believe that many African Americans imagined Billy to be a white man. According to the book Deep South (which reported on the findings of a study of race and class in Jim Crow America), executions were not normally carried out as punishment for homicides involving one black person killing another black person. The guilty person would have been sent to prison, not executed. But since Stagolee was executed, many African Americans must have imagined Billy to be a white man.
Another reason I believe that “Stagolee” may be symbolic of the black struggle for freedom is that this symbolism would explain how Stagolee could have been such an important black hero despite the fact that he is often portrayed in the ballad as a cruel killer, a man so heartless that he refuses to spare Billy’s life for the sake of his wife and children. According to Zora Neale Hurston, Stagolee was the equal of John Henry. In an article titled “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” she wrote, “John Henry is a culture hero in song, but no more so than Stacker Lee, Smokey Joe, or Bad Lazarus.” And Sterling Brown, in his 1932 poem “Odyssey of Big Boy,” places Stagolee in a place of honor alongside John Henry and Casey Jones. How could a cruel killer be the equal of these other folk heroes? The answer must be that the ballad is coded. James Cone, in his book God of the Oppressed, writes, “The victories of Stagolee and High John the Conqueror embodied [an oppressed people’s] struggle for dignity.” And in Risks of Faith, Cone writes, “If freedom is found in our experience, it must have something to do with the triumph of the weak over the strong. This is the theme of black folklore with Br’er Rabbit, High John the Conqueror, and Stagolee.”
Why do some recordings of “Stagolee,” including versions by The Downhome Boys, Vera Hall, and Blind Pete, refer to the battle between Stagolee and Billy as a “noble fight?” Could it be because the fight was not really about a piece of headwear but about something much, much more important? My best guess is that the noble fight was a fight against oppression, a fight for freedom. And black writers have created stories about Stagolee in which he takes on that fight, including a 1973 novel by John Dee titled Stagger Lee, a story by Julius Lester titled “Stack O Lee” which appears in his 1969 book Black Folktales, and a 1949 radio drama titled “Tales of Stackalee” written by Richard Durham. All of the above suggest that Stagolee’s killing of Billy was not a senseless murder but a symbol of a great victory, a victory of the weak over the strong.
Now let’s move on to look at the ballad about the great black steel drivin’ man named John Henry. Before discussing the ballad, I want to stress that in order to understand what “John Henry” meant to African Americans, I believe it is of utmost importance that we put his story in the context of the African American experience during the days of Jim Crow. This is because, after many years of being a part of popular culture, the legend of John Henry has been transformed from being the story of a heroic black worker trying to make a place for himself in a world of white oppression into a tale of a race-neutral “everyman hero” trying to prevent his job from being replaced by a machine. An attempt to interpret the real meaning of the ballad – that is, its meaning to the people who originally composed and sang it – hasn’t got a chance to be successful if we view John Henry as a race-neutral everyman. The real-life man or men upon whom the legend was based lived in a world in which the black worker was routinely treated inhumanely and did backbreaking work under extremely dangerous and difficult conditions. These men’s lives were considered to be expendable by the white men who put them to work. “Kill a mule, buy another. Kill a ni**er, hire another” is a saying that I’ve come across regularly in books about black history and music. It meant that the life of a black worker had less value than the life of a mule – if a black worker was killed on the job, his employer would simply replace him with another black worker; but if a mule was killed, the employer would have to go to the expense of buying a new mule to replace the dead one. Putting the story of John Henry in the context of the black worker in Jim Crow America helps us to realize that his job of carving tunnels out of mountains with a long steel rod, a sledgehammer, and explosives was extremely brutal and life-threatening. And it helps us to see that John Henry’s greatest struggle was not to save his job, but to survive his job.
It also helps us to gain a better understanding of the meaning of certain key verses of the ballad, including one frequently appearing verse in which John Henry tells his baby son, “I want you to be a steel drivin’ man.” According to Russell Ames in his article “Protest & Irony in Negro Folksong,” African Americans often used irony to express protest in their music. I believe that when a black man sang that verse in which John Henry expresses his wishes to his son – his hopes for his son’s future – the words spoken in that wish were pure irony.
Looking for the meaning of John Henry by keeping in mind the world and time in which he and other black workers lived helps reveal certain aspects of racial protest in the ballad, protest which has largely gone unrecognized for some 150 years. For example, let’s take a look at a verse which appears in many versions of the ballad.
When John Henry was a little baby, sittin’ on his mama’s knee
He picked up a hammer and a little piece of steel
And said “This hammer’s gonna be the death of me.”
This verse is often commented upon as being about John Henry, while still only a baby, seeing his fate or predicting his tragic end. But what went through the mind of an African American mother of a newborn baby son in Jim Crow America as she heard this verse? Is it possible that she thought of her own child and the fact that he shared a similar fate with John Henry, a fate in which he would have to work himself to death in order to survive? Of course! Surely, this would have crossed the minds of many black mothers. And also the minds of many black fathers, fathers who saw that their son’s fates were sealed at birth, just as John Henry’s was, and just as their own fates were sealed when they were born. And the same could be said of black mothers and fathers of baby girls. There is a protest hidden in that line in which the baby John Henry predicts his death, a protest which he makes for all black children. And for their parents.
Just as black manhood played a crucial role in the legend of Stagolee, it also had a crucial part to play in the legend of John Henry. John Henry was the black man’s “greatest symbol of manhood” according to the black writer Sterling Stuckey. And Sterling Brown, another black writer, paid tribute to John Henry and his manhood in the poem “Strange Legacies” by praising him for his courage, strength, persistence, and pride, and for showing African Americans how to “go down like a man.” John Henry was a quite potent symbol of black manhood, and he held that symbolic value during a time when black men were denied their manhood by the social, legal, governmental, and economic systems of America. Therefore, it seems quite possible that John Henry’s race against the steam drill – a race which was an epic battle in which John Henry’s manhood was put to the test – was not just a contest between man and machine, but a symbol of John Henry fighting a heroic battle for black freedom.
Is there any evidence to support the idea that John Henry’s race with the steam drill symbolized the fight for freedom? Yes. For one thing, the race was a battle between black and white forces: John Henry and his black manhood on one side and the steam drill – a product of the white man’s technological know-how – on the other side. This idea that the race represented a battle between black and white is further supported by the fact that there are a good number of versions of the ballad in which John Henry challenges not only the steam drill but also the captain, a white man. He does this by referring to the steam drill as your steam drill when he addresses his captain.
John Henry said to the captain
A man ain’t nothin’ but a man
Before I let YOUR steam drill beat me down
I’ll die with a hammer in my hand.
That the race was a contest between John Henry and his captain – and therefore a contest between black and white – can also be seen in verses in which John Henry’s victory over the steam drill is clearly also a victory over his captain as he openly gloats to the captain of defeating him and the steam drill.
John Henry said to his captain,
“Look yonder at what I see
Your steam drill is broke and your hole is choked
And you can’t drive steel like me.”
Of crucial importance is the fact that the adversarial relationship between John Henry and his captain is based upon racial opposition and oppression. We can see this when John Henry defiantly asserts racial equality to his captain. He makes that assertion in the most frequently appearing verse of the ballad, a verse which I refer to as the “A man ain’t nothin’ but a man” verse. The first two lines of that verse are:
John Henry said to the captain
“A man ain’t nothin’ but a man”
The line “A man ain’t nothin’ but a man” is an assertion of racial equality, a way of saying, I am a man. And a man, whether he be black or white, is only a man. I know this phrase is an assertion of racial equality because through my research I have found six examples in which African Americans have used those words, or variations to them such as “A man ain’t but a man,” to assert racial equality. One of those examples appears in bluesman John Lee Hooker’s “Birmingham Blues,” a song he wrote in response to events which occurred in Birmingham, Alabama during the series of civil rights protest demonstrations which took place during the spring of 1963. (You can find all six examples on my website John Henry: The Rebel Versions.)
The third, fourth, and fifth lines of the “A man ain’t nothin’ but a man” verse are:
Before I let that/your steam drill beat me down
I’ll die with a hammer in my hand
I’ll die with a hammer in my hand
If the first two lines of the “A man ain’t nothin’ but a man” verse consist of John Henry asserting racial equality to his captain, how should we interpret the third through fifth lines? One possible interpretation would be that these three lines are coded, and they are coded to conceal a threat of racial rebellion. Specifically, John Henry may be telling his captain, I am a man. And if you do not treat me like a man – if you mistreat or overwork me, or if you physically beat me – I’ll fight back with my hammer and I won’t stop until I’m dead. That’s right. Not until I go down and die like a man.
Is my suggested interpretation above correct? Is John Henry threatening to fight back to the death if his captain beats or mistreats him? If I’m correct, then the uncoded meaning of “Before I let that/your steam drill beat me down” would be Before I let YOU beat me down. Regardless of whether or not I’m correct, there do exist at least two documented versions of the ballad which contain a verse in which John Henry asserts racial equality and then makes that defiant Before I let you beat me down threat. One of them appears in Guy B. Johnson’s John Henry: Tracking Down a Negro Legend, and the exact wording of the defiant line is “Before I’d let you beat me down.” The other one appears in Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson’s Negro Workaday Songs, and the wording is “Befo’ I let you beat me down.” In these two versions, the threat that John Henry makes to his captain is not coded, but direct and clear. A similar line in which John Henry expresses that same defiant threat after asserting racial equality appears in a version performed by Minerva Williams (collected by Mary Wheeler); the exact wording of that threat is “And before I take any abuse from you.”
The verses which I have just discussed strip away the coded symbolism of the race with the steam drill to reveal the race rebel in John Henry. I refer to these as “rebel verses” or “rebel versions” and have identified a total of 12 of them on my website. In these rebel versions – almost all of which are from black performers or informants – John Henry does something quite extraordinary: he challenges his captain by refusing to be physically beaten, mistreated, or overworked. In doing so, he steps over the boundaries established by white society for black men in the days of Jim Crow. In those days, acts of resistance such as the ones by John Henry against his captain – by a black man against a white authority figure – amounted to acts of defiance and rebellion against the white system of power, and were threats to the existing racial hierarchy. These rebel versions serve as evidence that at least a substantial number of African Americans associated the story of John Henry with racial rebellion and protest. And who knows, possibly it was more than just a substantial number and actually a large majority.
When Paul Oliver wrote about ballads symbolizing the suppressed desires of the singer, he referred to the racehorse in the ballad “Stewball” – a chain-gang song which was extremely popular among African Americans – as “the unbeatable Stewball,” and pointed out that he “ran a race for the Race.” If “Stewball” held that symbolism for African Americans, then maybe John Henry’s race against the steam drill held that same symbolic meaning of being “a race for the Race.” Personally, I believe that when African Americans sang about John Henry racing and defeating the steam drill, many of them would have imagined that race – that epic struggle between a flesh and blood man and an unfeeling machine – as symbolic of a struggle between two combatants, a black man and a white man, a struggle between a heroic John Henry and the man who oppressed him each and every day: his inhuman, unfeeling captain. And after a long hard day of working for that cruel and abusive captain, some laborers would sing “John Henry” and others would listen. And as they sang or heard about him defeating that steam drill, they would imagine that John Henry was overcoming his captain. And they would also have had in mind their wish that they themselves could overcome their own captain. For them, singing the line from an old work song that went, “If I could hammer like John Henry I’d be a man” may have actually meant, If I could hammer like John Henry I’d be free. The ballad may have carried an unspoken message, a message of what it meant to be a black man and a free man, and of the price that many black men – men like John Henry and men like Stagolee – would have to pay in fighting for that manhood and for attaining that freedom.
