A bestselling music historian follows Jelly Roll Morton on a journey
through the hidden worlds and forbidden songs of early blues and
jazz.
In Jelly Roll
Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories, Elijah Wald takes
readers on a journey into the hidden and censored world of early
blues and jazz, guided by the legendary New Orleans pianist Jelly
Roll Morton. Morton became nationally famous as a composer and
bandleader in the 1920s, but got his start twenty years earlier,
entertaining customers in the city's famous bordellos and singing
rough blues in Gulf Coast honky-tonks. He recorded an oral history of
that time in 1938, but the most distinctive songs were hidden away
for over fifty years, because the language and themes were as wild
and raunchy as anything in gangsta rap.
Those songs inspired
Wald to explore how much other history had been locked away and
censored, and this book is the result of that quest. Full of
previously unpublished lyrics and stories, it paints a new and
surprising picture of the dawn of American popular music, when jazz
and blues were still the private, after-hours music of the Black
"sporting world." It gives new insight into familiar
figures like Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong, and introduces
forgotten characters like Ready Money, the New Orleans sex worker and
pickpocket who ended up owning one of the largest Black hotels on the
West Coast.
Revelatory and
fascinating, these songs and stories provide an alternate view of
Black culture at the turn of the twentieth century, when a new
generation was shaping lives their parents could not have imagined
and art that transformed popular culture around the world--the birth
of a joyous, angry, desperate, loving, and ferociously funny
tradition that resurfaced in hip-hop and continues to inspire young
artists in a new millennium.