On Christmas night 1895, at Bill Curtis's notorious St. Louis saloon, a gun-toting carriage driver named Lee Shelton shot and killed his friend William Lyons. According to an account of the incident in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, "an argument was started" between the heavy-drinking hotheads, "the conclusion of which was that Lyons snatched Sheldon's [sic] hat from his head. The latter indignantly demanded its return. Lyons refused, and Sheldon drew his revolver and shot Lyons in the abdomen. ... When his victim fell to the floor Sheldon took his hat from the hand of the wounded man and coolly walked away."

That night, a man died and a legend was born. Shelton--alias Stack Lee--would be memorialized in song, becoming perhaps the most significant figure in African-American folklore. In a 1911 article in the Journal of American Folklore, the sociologist Howard W. Odum presented several versions of the song, which he'd been collecting throughout the American South:

Stagolee killed a man an' laid him on de flo',

What's dat he killed him wid? Dat same ole fohty-fo'.

Oh dat man, bad man, Stagolee done come.

Mississippi John Hurt, Cab Calloway, Woody Guthrie, James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Tina Turner, Bob Dylan, and Beck are among the hundreds who have sung a version of Stagolee's story. Lloyd Price took a rollicking rendition of "Stagger Lee" to the top of the pop charts in 1959.