Playing a Mean Guitar: The Legacy of Staggerlee in Baldwin and Morrison

Abstract

“Staggerlee was a had man.” So begins Mississippi John Hurt in a spoken preface to a live recording of “Staggerlee Blues” at Oberlin College in 1965. This assessment sums up Staggerlee’s story in a succinct way, but it also opens it up to interpretation. The familiar figure of the had black man (also known as “baaadman,” or “bad nigger”) is an ambiguous one, and Staggerlee is one of its most enduring incarnations. Daryl Cumber Dance has defined the “bad nigger” as “tough and violent. He kills without blinking an eye. He courts death constantly and doesn’t fear dying” (224). “Bad” can mean lawless, feared, or respected in this context. “Bad” can mean all three at the Caine time, and in the ultimate resistance to fixed meaning in language, what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., would call “Sigrrifyin’” (46), it can even mean “good.” Staggerlee, made famous in popular song and oral narrative and recently explored in detail in Cecil Brown’s 2003 study Stagolee Shot Billy, is an ambiguous figure of resistance and fierce individualism. He is had in his lawlessness and his will to commit cold-blooded murder, but perhaps good insofar as his story can inspire rebellion against injustice, as it frequently did during the civil rights and black power movements. Houston Baker notes, “Stackolee represents the badman hero who stands outside the law; he is the rebel who uses any means necessary to get what he wants” (37). The fiction and drama of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison preserve the “rebel” aspect of this definition, but treat Staggerlee less as a “hero” than as an influence on heroes who are expected to grow into complete humans capable of love as well as rage.