Songfacts®:

• On the night of December 25, 1895, "Stag" Lee Shelton shot dead his underworld rival William "Billy" Lyons in a St. Louis saloon following a dispute. The crime soon became the subject of songs as well as folktales and poems. The best known version of "Stagger Lee," by Lloyd Price, reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1959 - Dick Clark insisted the violent content of the song be toned down when Price appeared on American Bandstand Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' sweary interpretation tells the story from a neutral perspective and is set in the 1930s.
• The recording of the song for the Murder Ballads album was a happy accident. "It was a real last-minute miracle," drummer Jim Sclavunos told NME. "I came into the studio towards the very end of the sessions, and I showed Nick a book called The Life, which was a collection of black hustler prison poetry. I pointed out an old really nasty version of 'Stagger Lee', and he got quite excited. Just a few minutes later, we piled into the live room, and recorded the song, fully realized, totally off-the-cuff, in one take."