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Stagolee Shot Billy

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From: Artforum
Date: 20030701
Author:Dean, Eddie

BY CECIL BROWN

CAMBRIDGE, MA: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS. 384 PAGES. $30.

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer." When D.H. Lawrence made this diagnosis in 1923, he was referring to Deerslayer, the white-man-gone-native protagonist of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales. That year also marked the first phonograph recording of the Stagolee saga, the public debut, as it were, of the most enduring and elusive hero in black folklore. Like Deerslayer, Stagolee is an archetypal American outlaw, but he has proved far more resilient. For more than a century, ...

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