Preserving St. Louis' intangible cultural legacy; Stagolee, Frankie and Johnny, the Club Plantation.

   Billy Lyons may have had three little children and a very sickly wife, 

but when he wasn’t gambling, he worked as a short order cook.

   A lot of the truth has been lost in the retelling of the fable of badman Stagolee and Billy, two men who were real people living in St. Louis over a hundred years ago. In fact, the real lives of Billy Lyons and Lee Shelton have never been told.

   And as far as world famous legends go, Stagolee is about as big as they get. The story and song tell of the murder of Billy Lyons during a card game. But over the years, the prose outlived the facts and the buildings are gone. No artifacts remain. And that’s St. Louis’ fault.

   The city has what seems like a compulsion for demolishing buildings. And although there are individuals and groups concerned with the preservation of old buildings, those efforts are often more interested in architecture, rather than what happened within the buildings. Unfortunately, the sites of most of St. Louis’ culturally important landmarks are not the unique or ornate buildings. 

   The stories are our intangible cultural legacy, and it’s a kind of demo by neglect when it’s lost because we didn’t fight to save it. Stories, traditions and folklore are as significant to civilizations as their monuments. We have a world-famous legacy. We need to preserve our heritage and we need to be the advocates for our cultural history to preserve it. 

   Frankie Baker revisits the empty lot where the rooming house stood 

where she shot Allen Britt in 1899. The song Frankie And Johnny 

was created by the musicians of the city and became an international 

favorite and one of the oldest and most popular American standards. 

The Palladium building in Grand Center, site of the St. Louis Club Plantation is under threat of demolition.

 The site of where Chuck Berry's Club Bandstand stood in 1958.

Stagger Lee: Invention and legend.

The legend of Stagger Lee has a mystery within it: Why was Billy shot? 

That can be discussed and pondered, though there probably isn't anything that can prove why he was killed. But there are things that aren't mysteries, they're just false, just made up.

Like Cecil Brown's book, Stagolee Shot Billy - it just made up the story that Lee Shelton was a pimp.

Shelton wasn't a pimp. And there is nothing that says he was other than Brown's book. Brown made it up. It's just that simple.

Many people assume Brown's book proved that Shelton was a pimp, but there are no footnotes to factual sources.

Starting with his very first mention of Stagolee Shelton 

as a pimp on page 8:

                 "The fact that Stagolee was a pimp…"

No footnote. That's just the author writing his own personal statement.

And everytime the word "pimp" is used with Shelton's name, no proof is provided. Each time is simply the author repeating his conjecture or making more things up:

• p. 11; "...a real Stagolee, a well-known figure in St. Louis’s red-light district during the 1890s, a pimp…" No footnote. 

• p. 12; "The hero of the ballad was a pimp…" No footnote.

• p. 16; "…the black pimps in St. Louis” No footnote.

• p. 23; "Lee Shelton belonged to a group of exotic pimps" No footnote.

• p. 33; (Song lyrics, no footnote.)

• p. 45; "...if Lee Shelton was a pimp even before arriving in St. Louis"  No footnote.

• p. 46; "If he was a successful pimp..." No footnote.

• p. 50; "Shelton, a pimp who became a legend" No footnote.

• p. 84; "The Stags were probably the first party of pimps" No footnote. 

• p. 103; "Shelton… owned a club called the Modern Horseshoe Club, drove a carriage, and was known to be a pimp."  No footnote.

• p.104; "...since he was both a pimp and a gambler"  No footnote.

• p. 116; "Shelton had been a pimp, a political figure, a saloonkeeper"  No footnote.

• p. 218; "We have seen how the Stagolee narrative has been associated with the pimp and the prostitute, begining with ragtime music" No footnote.

Each of these statements are the author's musings. None of these statements have basis in historical fact. There was no pimp named Stagolee in St. Louis. There was no pimp club or pimp political party. Shelton was not a club owner, a maquereaux, mack, or pimp. Simply, there are no police arrests, legal documents, newspaper articles, or other factual sources that provide proof that Lee Shelton was a pimp.

There may be lyrics, opinions, and dreams that say Staggerlee was a pimp or whatever else, but those aren't facts.

And if I were to write that Lee Shelton was a laborer and footnote it to the Missouri State Penitentiary Register Book V, State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, Jefferson City, Missouri, that then is a sourced fact.

This is a blogpost to correct inaccuracies concerning the incident of Billy and Staggerlee. An earlier post shows that a house said to be Shelton's house is the wrong house. It's important to note that made-up stuff is OK, that's the legend. But why make a swindle out of it?

Devil At The Confluence was written partly to correct assumptions and errors about the music history of St. Louis. Part of the reason this city's proud history isn't well-known is because many opinions and writings about the history are not, but are assumed to be, fact.

St. Louis bluesman Hi Henry Brown and the Nutpickers Strike

  Last week, St. Louis workers went on strike to protest Missouri's shameful sub-poverty minimum wage and coincidentally next week is the 80 year anniversary of one of the most important labor movement victories in St. Louis. Although this historic incident was certainly well known to the public at the time, it seems that it is mostly forgotten today.

  Devil At The Confluence tells the story of Hi Henry Brown, one of the first protest musicians, and his blues songs of St. Louis during the Depression. In 1932, St Louis bluesmen Brown and Charley Jordan recorded Nut Factory Blues, a song about the sub-standard pay for women workers at a pecan shelling factory in the city. In the midst of the Great Depression, women workers were hired for manual labor jobs at wages of pennies per day. And with most men out of work, this was desperately needed income for many families.

  The song described the hard conditions and may very well have solidified the worker's resolve because in May of 1933, fourteen hundred women workers went on strike against the Funsten Nut company in Deep Morgan (near where the City Museum is today.) After eight days they won and doubled their wages, but more importantly, the demonstration represented a very important triumph for the American labor movement.

  By offering raises only for the white workers, Funsten management had tried to break the strike by inciting racial conflict. A ploy of this kind was successfully used in the 1917 East St Louis, Illinois riots over a decade earlier, but this time the workers remained unified. They were successful and their victory had a tremendous effect in St. Louis in bringing other workers to action such as the clothing workers and ladies’ garment workers.

  It's very rare that such a blatant protest blues song was recorded in the 1930s, and it could only have been done in St. Louis. This was well before Woody Guthrie began recording songs and the idea of music as activism - a man finding wrong in the world and using his songs for social justice - was something very unique. Hi Henry Brown's blues music was part-documentary and part-call for action, and like the best of the St. Louis blues, it was about how hopelessness is negated by hope.

Stagger Lee's house

   There are a lot of things said about Lee Shelton. A lot of really sensational things that people made up. That's what being legendary is, I suppose, the made-up stuff is more well known than the real stuff. But Shelton was a real man living in St. Louis around the turn of the century. He wasn't a gang boss, nor involved in prostitution, and he didn't own a nightclub.

  And Lee Shelton never owned a house. He lived by the day or by the month in tenement houses in St. Louis. One such place was 914 North Twelfth street, where he was living in December of 1895. That's the address that the police had for him when they arrested him for the murder of Billy Lyons and that's what the St. Louis Globe Democrat newspaper printed the next day, December 26, 1895.

  But just about everytime someone writes about Shelton's shooting of Lyons they say the house at 911 North Twelfth street is Stagger Lee's house. But that's the wrong address. 

The mistake first appeared around 2002 when someone transcribed the newspaper story into a Usenet posting. The number could be misread as 911, but if you look up the microfilm copy it's obviously 914.

   Then in 2004, a book titled, Stagolee Shot Billy by Cecil Brown, used the wrong address from Usenet. Then a comic book titled, Stagger Lee, repeated the error from Brown's book. And since then the wrong address has been reposted too many times to count.*

   The building standing today at 911 N. 12th street looks pretty old, but the 1895 fire insurance map shows that there was no 911 address at that time. Across the street, the even-numbered side, is where the tenement house stood where Lee Shelton had rented a room.

   The song of Stagger Lee is mostly made up by people over the years and that's how it became a great American folktale. And the folktale is an important part of St. Louis' music legacy - a long history of very important contributions to American culture. But sadly, the city has few landmarks left standing to show for it. 

"Ledgendary" shouldn't mean that all the real stuff is gone and only the made-up stuff remains, but sometimes it seems like that's what we're doing.

* (Some repostings on the web of the wrong address found in Brown's book):

http://www.thecabinet.com/darkdestinations/location.php?sub_id=dark_destinations&letter=l&location_id=lee_sheltons_house

http://www3.clearlight.com/~acsa/stagroot.htm

http://voices.yahoo.com/the-lee-sheldon-william-lyons-story-behind-ballad-87595.html

http://www.troubleinrivercity.com/2008/11/25/stagger-lee/

http://www.the-clash.co.uk/enlighten/Stagger%20Lee.htm

http://wcbsfm.cbslocal.com/2011/05/26/behind-the-hits-stagger-lee-by-lloyd-price/

http://illfolks.blogspot.com/2007/02/18-versions-of-stagger-lee.html

https://sites.google.com/site/thestaggerleefiles/

http://staggerlee.typepad.com/stagger_lee/2006/11/photos_from_the.html

http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=1829

http://sixeyes.blogspot.com/2009/11/nick-cave-and-more-stagger-lee-mp3s.html

http://www.marseillefigs.org/slee.html

A number of published books copied the error including True Crime: Missouri, and Wicked St. Louis,

and the wrong address was repeated by the St Louis Police Veteran's Association:

http://www.slpva.com/historic/police220chestnut.html

Save the Palladium - Club Plantation building in Grand Center. Collected posts from August/September.

More of the postings from the Save-The-Palladium-Building-At-Grand-Center Facebook group - https://www.facebook.com/pages/Save-The-Palladium-Building-at-Grand-Center/198466843570157

The St. Louis Palladium is on top of the 2012 Most Endangered List from Landmarks Association.

THE PALLADIUM - CLUB PLANTATION IS ONE OF THE TEN OLDEST BUILDINGS IN GRAND CENTER

Only ten over 100 years old remain.

ST. LOUIS DANCE LEGEND HORTENSE ALLEN

Born in St. Louis, Missouri and dancing from the age of 14, Hortense Allen got her break at producing and choreographing shows at the Plantation, the largest club in town, with a revue and her own chorus line by the time she was twenty.

She produced and danced in shows at the Rhumboogie in Chicago and the Club Harlem in Atlantic City, choreographing hundreds of shows, dancing every style of dance, sewing costumes for her lines, traveling in road shows, playing all the major houses, teaching thousands of younger women. She fought the color prejudice that effectively barred any but the lightest African American women from dancing in chorus lines. She produced shows that headlined boxing champion (and tap dancer) Sugar Ray Robinson, bandleader Louis Jordan, and singer James Brown. "I just let 'em call me as a chorus girl and choreographer, because it was hard, really hard, for a woman, in my time, to be a woman producer, to come up. Because they wouldn't take you."

From JERRY BERGER Q&A, PD Magazine, Sunday, June 2, 1996.

"Looking through old family photos, I found some taken at the Plantation Club on Delmar Boulevard before World War II. Do you have any information on the club?"

-- John Ferguson, St. Louis 

Club Plantation, 3617 Grandel Square, was closed in June 1947 because it was caught in a squeeze between state law, which required early closing hours for such places, and the high fees that entertainers demanded. Anthony Scarpelli, operator of the popular club, which featured big-name entertainers, reportedly attributed the final blow to salary demands by the Mills Brothers. 

The musical group asked for $3,500 for a 12-night engagement. At the time, the Mills Brothers was a popular act on radio and in recordings. Other big-name stars that appeared at the club were Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, the Ink Spots and Louis Armstrong. 

(©1996 St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

ST. LOUIS CLUB PLANTATION HAS ALWAYS BEEN A TARGET OF THE VETERAN'S ADMINISTRATION

In the 1940s, after taking the historic Vandeventer Place neighborhood down, the V A hospital demanded that the city demolish the Club Plantation and everything else near them in Grand Center.

This article is from 1947. That threat was made over 60 years ago and it was repeated a month ago: http://fox2now.com/2012/07/10/sweetie-pies-offered-buyout-for-va-expansion/

LEGENDS OF THE CLUB PLANTATION

The Missouri State Archives program on the history of pre-World War II St. Louis blues music.

http://www.stlamerican.com/news/local_news/article_7a9a5a84-f06a-11e1-9be5-001a4bcf887a.html

Carnahan announces program on the history of the pre-war blues music of St. Louis

Posted: Monday, August 27, 2012 12:27 pm

Special to The American 

Jefferson City, Mo. – Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan today announced a program on the history of pre-World War II St. Louis blues music. The program will be held at the Missouri State Archives, a division of her office, on Thursday, August 30, 2012, at 7:00 p.m. Artist and historian Kevin Belford will be discussing his new book, Devil At The Confluence: The Pre-War Blues Music of St. Louis.

Devil At The Confluence is the first comprehensive book ever published on the history of St. Louis blues music. It tells the fascinating story of the profound connection between St. Louis bluesmen and their city.   Kevin Belford uses original illustrations, vintage advertising and rare photographs to detail the chronology of blues music in St. Louis. For Belford, what originally began as a desire to paint a portrait series on St. Louis blues artists ultimately turned into a 15-year historical inquiry. After combing through census records and other public documents, Belford pieced together musical profiles of many of the forgotten St. Louis-based blues recording artists from the 1920s and 1930s.

Belford reveals the untold history of the St. Louis blues movement and its contributions to American popular music. Show More Show Less

The Missouri State Archives is the official repository for state documents of permanent historic value and is located at 600 West Main Street in Jefferson City. All programs at the Archives are free of charge and open to the public, with seating available on a first-come, first-served basis.

I arrived hours early to do some searching and I was amazed. The Archive library is a pleasure to do research in. The staff is exceptionally helpful and the databases are swift and easy to search through. What an amazing state-of-the-art  facility. If you can't visit, Secretary Of State Robin Carnahan has done a terrific job to get the records available on the website: http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/

This repository is a fine model of helpfulness and access that hopefully other archives will emulate.

The lecture went over very well. The audience was very interested in the stories of St Louis blues. It was a really great crowd in our state's Capitol city, and they genuinely share our pride in our historical legacy. We recieved a very nice compliment from Stephen Siwinski on the Facebook page: "Hands down the most entertaining and informative presentation to grace the James C. Kirkpatrick State Information Center. Big thanks to Kevin for painting such a vivid picture of pre-war blues in St. Louis." Thanks, Steve. If we ever get T-shirts made, we'll send you one.

The effort to save the Historic St. Louis Palladium / Club Plantation building gains momentum.

There have been a lot of postings to the Save-The-Palladium-Building-At-Grand-Center Facebook group -
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Save-The-Palladium-Building-at-Grand-Center/198466843570157
and they should be posted here as well, so here they are in random order:

Stride piano player Buck Washington and the legendary rhythm tap dancer John Bubbles Sublett performed with Brooklyn, Illinois' George Hudson in 1944 at the St Louis Club Plantation as announced by this clipping from Billboard magazine.

More graphics donated to the preservation effort.

There was a strange news report made by the John Cochran VA Medical Center with the misleading title, "Sweetie Pie's offered buyout for VA expansion." Strange, because the VA is not trying to buy Sweetie Pie's, nor do they say they want it, nor do they admit to anything. "Associate Medical Director" Keith Repko, having called the TV station out to interview him, does not discuss his scheme, nor any expansion options such as the surrounding lots, North, East and West, and he makes no acknowledgement of the bigger property next door, the 100 year old Palladium building.
Either they want to scare the new employees of Sweetie Pie's or our Veteran's Administration is playing around to create a false dilemma of which building, the new one or the old one, should be razed.

Could VA Hospital Expansion Force Sweetie Pies Upper Crust Out?
ST. LOUIS, MO (KTVI) – An expansion is planned for the John Cochran VA Medical Center, but it could affect...
http://fox2now.com/2012/07/10/sweetie-pies-offered-buyout-for-va-expansion/

The Five Red Caps appearing at the St Louis Club Plantation in the Forties playing their hits: Mama Put Your Britches On, Sugar Lips, Mary Had A Little Jam, Boogie Woogie On A Saturday Night, and It's Got A Hole In It.


There will be more to come as the effort gains support. Please spread the word and like the Facebok page! Thank you.