From New York Times bestselling author & musician, Elijah Wald, an alternate history of early blues and jazz through the culture of the Black sporting world, guided by the recorded recollections of the groundbreaking New Orleans jazz master, Jelly Roll Morton
In the spring of 1938, Jelly Roll Morton, the self-proclaimed inventor of jazz, sat at a grand piano in a concert hall of the Library of Congress and sang an epic ballad of sporting life in New Orleans. Lasting half an hour, with a story that extends over 59 verses, "The Murder Ballad" is a raw epic of the New Orleans Red Light District, in which a woman shoots her romantic rival, goes to prison, and begins a relationship with another woman. Uncensored and infinitely more realistic than the cut down, cleaned up, commercially distributed blues records of the day, the musical memoir that Morton played his way through in that concert hall unveiled a unique and astonishing body of early blues songs that reached back to a time before the music was published or recorded, when it was the private culture of Black communities throughout the South. Morton earned his youthful living as a bordello pianist in the New Orleans Red Light District, but this music was not for the customers; it was the music of the people working in and around that world, and especially the women. He and his peers sang about their and their listeners' lives in plain and often graphic language. Their songs and stories describe a vanished world with a skill and language that reveals the deep roots of the popular music of today, from roadhouse blues to gansta rap, and have been obscured by censorship and prejudice for more than a century—until now.
In Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories, New York Times-bestselling author Elijah Wald, one of the most wide-ranging and respected writers on blues and popular music, traces the beginnings of the music that became our national soundtrack. Using Morton's life and songs as a connecting thread, Jelly Roll Blues suggests an alternate history of blues and jazz, surveying a world of Black and working class culture that at times seems startlingly modern. Exploring songs and stories that have previously been censored and ignored, and the cultures and communities that produced them, Jelly Roll Blues reveals how intimately intertwined sex, race, and music have been throughout American history and how those connections have been simultaneously concealed and sensationalized. Over more than a decade of research, Wald has unearthed a wealth of unexamined material from the early years of blues and jazz, which has never been published or cited elsewhere: song lyrics, raps, and stories that significantly broaden our understanding of those styles and the worlds that gave them shape and meaning.
Jelly Roll Blues takes Morton's songs, stories, and experiences as a guide to ignored and avoided byways of American culture. Some sections trace the histories of particular songs; some trace the stories and experiences of the people who sang or inspired them. Some follow Morton's life and experiences; some explore the lives and experiences of his peers and listeners, and the worlds in which they flourished and struggled. Often surprising, often amusing, sometimes disturbing, these songs and stories provide a deep history and literature of communities that were overlooked, despised, and silenced.
Revelatory and fascinating, this deep exploration of Black culture at the turn of the twentieth century looks at the first years of the twentieth century through the songs of young, adventurous Black entertainers and their communities, less than fifty years after emancipation, expressing their hopes, dreams, frustrations, pleasures, and attempts to shape lives their parents could not have imagined and the dominant culture opposed and suppressed. It is about their language and world, and the languages and worlds that surrounded and informed them—and about how they shaped all of that into music that still echoes in the songs and poems of hopeful, angry, desperate, loving, and ferociously funny young people in the twenty-first century.
