Crash Course Timeline, No. 4: Jelly Roll Morton...Which Was as Dirty as It Sounds

That's really him. "Jelly roll" is a tough search.

Jelly Roll Morton claimed to have invented jazz in 1902, which, according to one record would have made him 12 years old at the time and, according to another, 17. Most people (or Wikipedia, at least) has 1890 for his year of birth, but Morton claimed 1885. He didn’t have a birth certificate, so the world may never know…

…he does, however, popularly get credit for producing the first published jazz composition: the semi-autobiographical “Jelly Roll Blues” way back in 1915. (That version will sound pretty damn ragtime, by the way.) His specific contribution aside, Morton became one of the first great names in jazz. Though he was multi-instrumentalist, he mostly played and composed on the piano. He operated all over the country and wrote and arranged scores of jazz numbers and at a time when many of his contemporaries either refused to or couldn’t, as well as ragtime, “stomps,” and several at least titled as “blues.” By leading one of the first “big bands,” he popularized the idea before the big band/swing era of the 1930s. For all that, Morton didn’t leave much for the historical record - and what he did leave, historians take with a grain of salt (bit of a fabulist) - a detail music critic named Scott Yanow summed up like so:

“Jelly Roll Morton did himself a lot of harm posthumously by exaggerating his worth...Morton's accomplishments as an early innovator are so vast that he did not really need to stretch the truth.”

Whenever it happened, Jelly Roll Morton was born in New Orleans as Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe. Reading between the sources, his family seemed reasonably well-to-do, or at least well-established in New Orleans’ Creole community. Squaring that thought with some details of his upbringing takes some doing. His father, a bricklayer named Edward Joseph Lamothe, left when he was three. Louise Hermance Monette, “a domestic worker,” raised him as a single mother until she married a man named William Mouton shortly after Monette's lover left. According to Wikipedia’s account, “Morton” came from an anglicization of “Mouton.” Other sources say differently…

Blackpast.org offers the most romanticized take on his early life, not least by accepting 1885 as his date of birth. It also names a working, lightly-itinerant trombonist named E.P. LaMenthe as his father, and the figure who “encouraged” Morton’s musical abilities. Another source, 64 Parishes, shrugs off the mechanics of his childhood, but brings in a detail that supports both Morton coming from a family of some standing and a particular influence of music within it:

“’We always had musicians in the family,’ Morton explained ‘but they played for their own pleasure and would not accept it seriously, and always considered a musician (with the exception of those who would appear at the French Opera House, which was always supported with their patronage) a scalawag, lazy, and trying to duck work.’”

When Morton’s mother passed away when he was 14 years old, Morton moved in with his godmother Eulalie Echo and his aunt Lallie. He started working around the same time, doing either “menial work” (Blackpast) or claiming to work as “a night watchman at a barrel factory” (Wikipedia), but all sources agree that he started moonlighting as a pianist in New Orleans brothels - “sporting houses” was at least one of the euphemisms - and making far better money doing it. This was also when he adopted the stage name, “Jelly Roll” and maybe even the “Morton” that followed it. As Wikipedia’s entry puts it, “'He often sang smutty lyrics and used the nickname ‘Jelly Roll,’ which was African-American slang for female genitalia.” He picked up the new handle to protect his family’s reputation, but that didn’t stop them from kicking him out of it.

The details of Morton’s career become a succession of destinations, associations and events from there and, as such, not terribly interesting. The most thorough accounting of any period covers his days in New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama, and most of that was given to famous music folklorist, Alan Lomax, in an extended 1938 interview later entered into a Library of Congress collection. It’s pretty damn granular stuff, a tangle of New Orleans legends meeting a day-to-day of hustling pool and dueling pianos. I finally found a transcript - as well as a pair of short clips on Youtube - but, given the time period discussed, it doesn’t speak to names that any modern reader would know, probably not even super-fans of 1920s popular music. But here’s that career…

Morton left the South with Will Benbow’s Chocolate Drops, maybe starting in 1904 (again, the timeline is a bugger) and he wrote his earliest numbers while touring - e.g., “New Orleans Blues,” “King Porter Stomp,” “Jelly Roll Blues,” “Animule Dance,” and “Frog-I-More Rag.” He spent time as far afield as Los Angeles, and later slipped across the border for a spell to Vancouver, British Columbia, for “an extended period of itinerancy as a pianist, vaudeville performer, gambler, hustler, and, as legend would have it, pimp.” Jelly Roll Morton’s best years took place in Chicago, IL, where he made his first recordings in 1922 - starting with Paramount Records. He switched over to the Victor Talking Machine Company for his most influential period - i.e., his time fronting a big band called the Red Hot Peppers (which included, Kid Ory, Omer Simeon, George Mitchell, Johnny St. Cyr, Barney Bigard, Johnny Dodds, and Andrew Hilaire). The Red Hot Peppers laid the foundation to the big band era…

…which leads to what I read as a telling anecdote. One among the several things that prompted Morton to move to Chicago was an attempt to claim the rights to one of his songs, “The Wolverine Blues”; he succeeded in doing so in 1923. He had less luck in 1935 when he tried to secure royalties after Fletcher Henderson arranged “King Porter Stomp” for Benny Goodman’s band, giving the latter his first big hit. As with most stars of the 1920s, Victor dropped Morton’s contract in 1931 when The Great Depression cratered the recording industry. Worse, the style of jazz he played fell out of fashion, supplanted by the big-band/swing style that bandleaders like Goodman made famous. The timing of each attempt to reclaim a song at least suggests Morton's stature, and later lack thereof, helped him once and hurt him later.

With the entertainment industry as a whole limping through the Depression, Morton found work where he could. Washington, D.C., where he became the bartender/bouncer/emcee at a saloon alternately named the Music Box/Moon Inn and/or the Jungle Inn, became a final destination of sorts. The woman who owned the place wounded him twice over - once, by letting friends regularly cadge free drinks, and a second time when an associate (possibly of hers) stabbed Morton in the head and chest during a fight. He suffered the fate that only reportedly befell Bessie Smith (or so I’ve read), getting refused at a white hospital, then getting sent to a black hospital where they left his already mistreated wounds on ice too long, making total recovery impossible.

Going the other way, the "Music Box Interviews” only came about when Lomax discovered (and to Lomax's delight) that he had a jazz legend within walking distance of his home. At least one source dubbed the Music Box Interviews “exploitive” because they didn’t find Morton at his best - which seems unfair; Lomax found him when he found him - but they also helped give modern people a chance to hear Morton's story in his own voice. Even the people don't always trust his spin on events agree that he was innovative. The 64 Parishes bio slipped in this little note about one of his unique contributions:

“Morton introduced a hybrid of these two traditions that he called ‘the Spanish tinge,’ incorporating Afro-Cuban rhythms such as the rhumba and habañera into his song ‘The Crave’…The “Spanish tinge” and related forms of syncopation were also key components in the New Orleans rhythms collectively known as ‘second-line’ beats, which continue to thrive.” (“Tin Roof Blues,” for example…maybe? “Grandpa’s Spells”?)

His playing impacted some future styles/genres as well - as Wikipedia noted toward the end of its entry:

“Morton's piano style was formed from early secondary ragtime and ‘shout,’ which also evolved separately into the New York school of stride piano. Morton's playing was also close to barrelhouse, which produced boogie-woogie.” (A good example: “The Crave.”)

To my ear, Jelly Roll Morton sounds more contemporary than the old Blues queens, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. Better recording quality does some of the lifting, but just having a rhythm section that sounds enough like they do today goes miles toward making what I hear from Morton sound like what I think of as “popular music.” It’s still very dated, but also more familiar.. If you’ve watched a chaotic, crowded establishment montage in a black-and-white Warner Bros (e.g., “Georgia Swing”) cartoon, you’ve heard something very close to Jelly Roll Morton. It’s definitely not big band - his later material, especially - and, if I had to explain to someone what makes big band different from early jazz, I’d play Jelly Roll Morton. The concept is there, but it’s definitely sparser.

All the same, if you’ve listened to enough late 19th century, and early 20th century popular music (I’ve done more than most), and you listen to Morton in that frame of mind, you can hear why it freaked out older people. Against that material, it was busy, loud, and they played it fast. More than anything else, it had a beat. A signal that helped the body keep time, that made…those kinds of dances easier. Small wonder they hated them…

…which just goes to show how far bacl the whole fear/fascination with American Black culture goes in American pop culture. And sex, of course. Ragtime time spooked them, for God’s sake.

About the Sampler
As I did in the Bessie Smith post, I built the sampler around the songs that came up in the sources I read. I bulked it up to 20 songs from there by adding songs I either liked or that featured a hook of some sort that triggered the things I like, even when I can’t identify them [Note - This is the Visionquest of all my music projects]. It’s a mix of jazz, songs that sound like straight-up ragtime, and a mix of the two - e.g., “Kansas City Stomps” or “Jelly Roll Blues.” (At least the version linked to above.)

Here’s my best stab at listing them by genre, because he moves around a bit:

Jazz predominates on the sampler…which makes sense, and the simplest/dumbest way I can describe it: what you hear in your head when you think “New Orleans funeral parade,” just with an impractical amount of piano. Because most of them same like a riff on the same thing, I’m just going to list them here: “West End Blues,” “Black Bottom Stomp,” “Smoke House Blues,” “Don’t You Leave Me Here,” “Steamboat Swamp,” “Courthouse Bump” “Beale Street Blues,” “Boogaboo,” and the jam for the house band, “Red Hot Pepper,” which gives them all a bow.

Morton’s ragtime material comes from a later school, in that it’s more intricate and (pleasantly) melodic than…a lot of the songs I heard when I tried to enjoy ragtime. If you’re a fan, I’d call “Mr. Jelly Lord,” “Wolverine Blues” “Tin Roof Blues” a decent shout for the top end of the genre.

Finally, I…more or less invented a category I called “pop.” I included just a couple here: “I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say” and “Doctor Jazz.” I called these “pop” because they had a big enough vocal section. Celebrity strictly as a vocalist wasn’t exactly new at this point, but it did start to become more of a career option within the industry. This could be a stretch, but seeing a “jazz person” add that element strikes me as the beginning of crossing over.

Crossing over into what? That’s the journey, I guess.