JELLY ROLL BLUES

Bestselling music historian Elijah Wald follows Jelly Roll Morton - the self-proclaimed inventor of jazz - on a journey through the hidden worlds and forbidden songs of early blues and jazz.

In the spring of 1938, Jelly Roll Morton 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. 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. A man who earned his youthful living as a bordello pianist in the New Orleans Red Light District, Morton's songs were part of that world: he and his peers sang about their listeners' lives in plain language, and spun them into graphic and compelling narratives. The songs and stories of these individuals draw a direct line to the popular music of today, yet, whether through censorship, prejudice, or both, they have been obscured for more than a century - until now. Here, 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. Jelly Roll Blues reveals just how intimately intertwined sex, race, and music have been throughout American history and how those connections have been simultaneously concealed and sensationalized. Across 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. At its core, Jelly Roll Blues looks at the first years of the 20th century through the songs of young, adventurous Black entertainers and their communities, less than 50 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 21st century. Elijah Wald is a musician and author of over a dozen books, including Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, The Dozens: A History of Rap's Mama, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of Popular Music, and the bestselling Dylan Goes Electric! He has received significant praise and acclaim for his writing over the years, including a Grammy for providing the liner notes to the Arhoolie Records 40th Anniversary Box. Previously, Wald wrote for the Boston Globe for over 10 years, where he was in charge of world and roots music. He has also written for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and numerous other newspapers and magazines.