Crash Course Timeline, No. 9: OG Jass & a Few of Its Pioneers

What the hottest bands of the 1920s probably looked like...

I hadn’t planned on either doing a general post on 1920s jazz or touching on more half-forgotten names, but, when I learned that one of the first songs Bix Biederbecke learned by ear was the Original Dixieland Jass/Jazz Band’s “Tiger Rag,” the lack of context started to bug me. And so…

What is jazz, who started it and where? To tackle the first question, and contra Jelly Roll Morton claim that he invented it, no one really knows the answer. One can nail down some specific firsts - say, that Jelly Roll Morton wrote the first published jazz composition, or that the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (hereafter, “ODJB”) recorded the first 78 rpm album featuring jazz (“Livery Stable Blues,” b/w “Dixieland Jass Band One-Step,” Victor 18255) - but jazz, like the blues, had a long unwritten history that most people have the good sense not to fill in. In structure and theory, it has roots in blues and ragtime. Getting the a more useful answer, however, involves a couple twists and turns that still leave a handful of open questions.

“When Broadway picked it up, they called it 'J-A-Z-Z'. It wasn't called that. It was spelled 'J-A-S-S'. That was dirty, and if you knew what it was, you wouldn't say it in front of ladies.”
- Eubie Blake (quoted from Wikipedia’s overview, the main source for a lot of this)

Something forbidden, in other words, some new thing let loose in the wild of "real America." And yet the crowd went wild; in one of the oldest tales of American history, "real America" wanted jazz. The first ODJB 78 was sold as a novelty, only to surprise everyone by becoming a hit. Before too long, jazz and the people who played it came to dominate pop culture and ultimately become a big enough part in daily life that sense of the forbidden fall away. And, as often happens (which, here, means almost always), that didn't take long.

To return to the question of what jazz is, the Wikieditor had one theory on the origins of its name: it might have come from the slang term, “jasm,” which means “pep and energy” (...but when?). To flag some other, appealing theories:

“Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Jazz has roots in West African cultural and musical expression, and in African-American music traditions.”

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:

One Hit No More, No. 3: Frankie Ford & His "Sea Cruise" to a Hall of Fame

Fascinating dude, honestly.

“He was playing this schmaltz stuff in a bar. We requested 'Alimony,' which is one of his songs he hadn't played in years. He was overjoyed. He stopped playing and came and talked to us. And we were thrilled.”
- Robert Plant, yes that one

I'd put real money on a bet that the majority of the people who know Frankie Ford's, “Sea Cruise,” only know it as a jingle for a Red Lobster commercial. It could have been a Skipper's commercial for all that it matters, but more people would come up with that before they could dredge up Frankie Ford. Again, that's my bet. Alternately, a rock legend like Plant “thrilled” (his word) on meeting Ford and taht tells another story. I always get a kick out of stories like that. It’s not just the bond between artists, it’s also how they go to deeply unexpected places.

The two obituaries I read for Ford note the same thing, only without saying it outright: Ford never stopped working. To extrapolate a little from a line in the obituary in the New Orleans Times-Picuyane, his world shrank a bit after “Sea Cruise” plopped him on the national stage. (“[Ford] held down regular gigs at the Ivanhoe, the Backstage 500 Club, the Gateway, his own club at Toulouse and Bourbon, and finally Lucky Pierre's, presiding over a lounge-style act peppered by risque one-liners.”) Still, the man played American Bandstand, sure as that’s Dick Clark pitching a pack of gum in the introduction, and no one can take that away from him.

All that said, there’s a wart in this story and there’s no point talking around it. To preface it, I lifted this out of The New York Times’ obituary:

“In the late 1950s, [Ford] came to the attention of New Orleans record producers and label owners who were keen to craft “teen idols” - white singers who might tap into a larger market than what was available to black rhythm & blues singers.”

While I wouldn't state outright that Frankie Ford climbed to his big break up another man’s ladder - and I can't, really, not on this little research - the history of rock ‘n’ roll in general (see above) makes a pretty good case that I should be talking about Huey “Piano” Smith right now. According to Smith's Wikipedia page (scroll down), he recorded the first version of "Sea Cruise," only to have the label strip his vocals and replace them with Ford's. There could be more to the story, sure - during his induction into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame at Baton Rouge (“LMHOF BTR”), Ford explained this as a touring issue (i.e., Smith didn’t travel, whereas Ford did) - and Smith’s Wikipedia page doesn’t make any references to him leaving Louisiana. It also doesn’t mention any hang-ups about traveling, but it does note that Smith had two more gold records than Ford, so draw whatever conclusions from that that most brighten your day.