Jelly Roll Morton, pianist and composer, and considered to be one of the founders of jazz, was born Ferdinand Joseph LeMenthe in New Orleans on October 20, 1890. He boasted of being the originator of “jazz stomps and blues,” and of having written some 1,400 songs during his lifetime. He remains one of jazz music’s most colourful figures.
As a young child, Morton played the Jew’s harp and guitar. At the age of 10 he heard “a proper gentleman” playing ragtime on the piano; afterwards he decided that the piano was to be his instrument. Two years later he was playing ragtime himself, together with songs, dances, and bits of light opera, in the “sporting houses” of Storyville, red-light district of New Orleans. He became a travelling musician, working the cities of the southern states, playing in gambling houses and dance halls, and appearing in vaudeville and minstrel shows. During this time he was assimilating many musical idioms, including Caribbean dances and songs, black spirituals, blues and ragtime, and white operetta and popular songs. All this became fused together in the kind of music that was starting to be called jazz.
By 1923 he was based in Chicago, where he began recording piano solos. His “King Porter Stomp” and "The Pearls” date from this period. In 1926, he was appearing with the Red Hot Peppers band, with whom he made a number of recordings for the Victor Record Company. Morton directed the sessions, which were carefully rehearsed, and produced masterpieces such as “Sidewalk Blues” and “Black Bottom Stomp.” The recordings from these years are classics, both of Morton’s career and of New Orleans jazz. However, Victor failed to renew Morton’s contract in 1930.
Morton moved on to New York in 1928, but already his career was in decline. Big bands were becoming popular and he found it difficult to get work. He made almost no recordings during the thirties. He left New York to try his luck in Washington, D.C. as a fight promoter, but eventually found work as a nightclub pianist. Among the patrons one night was folklore historian Alan LOMAX.
Lomax was curator of the Library of Congress folklore archives. He persuaded Morton to make a mammoth seven-hour recording of songs and anecdotal material for the Library of Congress in 1938. In the resulting 12-album set, Morton described in words and music the beginnings of jazz in New Orleans at the start of the 20th century. “It is one of the great moments in the history of the phonograph," wrote critic William Youngren in The Atlantic Monthly. “You feel as though you were listening to Homer, rather than to a 48-year-old jazz musician down on his luck.”
These recordings revived Morton’s career, although briefly. He returned to New York in 1939 and started playing in jam sessions, which he abhorred as they ran counter to his approach to music. When he heard that his godmother had died in Los Angeles in November 1940, Morton left New York to care for his godfather. But Morton’s own health was failing, and he died in Los Angeles, in July 1941, of complications from heart trouble and asthma.
Stories about Morton abound. Whitney Balliett, the New Yorker jazz critic, said that “Morton properly belongs in the 19-century American mythology of Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed and Davy Crockett … of the circuses and minstrel shows. He made hustling his life’s work.”
Linda Daily Paulson
SEE ALSO:
BLUES; JAZZ; NEW ORLEANS JAZZ/DIXIELAND.
Lomax, Alan. Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz” (London: Virgin, 1991)
Blues and Rags from Piano Rolls; Blues and Stomps from Rare Piano Rolls; Jelly Roll Morton Centennial: His Complete Victor Recordings (five CD-set); Jelly Roll Morton: Greatest Hits; Jelly Roll Morton: The Library of Congress Recordings; Kansas City Stomp: The Library of Congress Recordings, Vol. 1; The Pearls.