Discovering history: Jelly Roll Morton

JELLY ROLL MORTON

Stephen Winick - [Alistair] Cooke took part in the accomplishments of the Library of Congress folksong archive behind the scenes. For example, he contributed to one of the archive’s most important early recording sessions, a long and detailed oral history of jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton. During his trips to Washington to consult with [Alan] Lomax about I Hear America Singing, Cooke made Morton’s acquaintance by strolling into a bar called the Music Box on U Street, where Morton was playing. Cooke, a blues and jazz fan since his university days, was thrilled to meet one of his idols. He later recalled the evening on one of his recordings:

He was playing a sour piano in a really smelly café, the sort of place where they never serve a meal. Just a neon sign with two bulbs missing and a cab driver leaning up against a glass of beer. It was like meeting the President in a shoe-shine parlor.

According to a talk given here by Alan Lomax’s biographer, John Szwed, it was at Cooke’s suggestion that Lomax dropped by the Music Box to visit with Jelly Roll Morton. This led to Morton’s historic series of recording sessions at the Library of Congress, at which Lomax recorded Morton’s repertoire of blues, jazz, and folksongs. The nine hours of speech and song recorded by Lomax over a month of sessions constitute the first extended oral history of music, and one of the first extended oral histories of any kind recorded in audio form. Cooke, through his interactions with the Library of Congress folksong archive in the 1930, thus played an important role in the development of both oral history and roots music biography–two important activities of folklorists to this day.

At the age of fourteen, Morton began as a piano player in a brothel. He often sang smutty lyrics and used the nickname "Jelly Roll", which was African-American slang for female genitalia. While working there, he was living with his churchgoing great-grandmother. He convinced her that he worked as a night watchman in a barrel factory. After Morton's grandmother found out he was playing jazz in a brothel, she disowned him for disgracing the Lamothe name. "When my grandmother found out that I was playing jazz in one of the sporting houses in the District, she told me that I had disgraced the family and forbade me to live at the house...She told me that devil music would surely bring about my downfall...."