Man vs. myth …

… The Baddest Man in Town. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

In the refrain of his definitive 1928 version, Mississippi John Hurt sings, “That bad man, oh cruel Stack O’Lee.” That the word bad is a versatile one, especially in African-American vernacular English, has allowed the tone of the songs to shift over the course of the 20th century—from disapproving to approving of Stagolee—without their essential vocabulary ever changing. But whether the word is used to celebrate or censure Stagolee, the implication of “bad” is always that he’s dangerous and widely feared. George M. Eberhart, probably the most meticulous Stagolee scholar, calls this a slander on Lee Shelton. In his 1996 essay “Stack Lee: The Man, the Music, and the Myth,” he cites evidence that Lyons was the more belligerent of the two men and that Shelton probably shot him in self-defense. “The original Stack Lee may have been a petty thief and gambler,” Eberhart writes, “but he was no murderer, much less the bloodthirsty, heartless bad man perpetuated in myth and music. After a century of vilification, it’s time to separate Lee Shelton the man from Stackolee the myth.”