Episode 76: “Stagger Lee” by Lloyd Price
A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs
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The Lee Line Steamboats
The Lee Line was a line of steamboats that went up and down the Mississippi. They were notorious, even by Mississippi Riverboat standards, for paying its staff badly. This meant that some people enjoyed working on the ships despite their low pay. The boat's reputation for prostitution led to a 30-year-old pimp in St. Louis named Lee Shelton taking on the name Stack Lee at some time before Christmas Day 1895. He became known as Billy the Bully but he didn't quite mean what it means today. A bully is both a pimp and a bag man for a political party. There was far more overlap in the late 19th and early 20th centuries between politics
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