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Jelly Roll Morton's Parole from Hell
Dead Man Blues: Jelly Roll Morion Way Out West, by Phil Pastras, The University of California Press.
Jelly's Blues: The Life, Music, and Redemption of Jelly Roll Morion, by Howard Reich and William Gaines, Da Capo.
"WHEN JELLY ROLL was a boy, his loving godmother sold his soul to the devil in return for a gift of boundless musical talent." So begins Alan Lomax's preface to the 1993 edition of Mister jelly Roll, first published in 1950, the book that codified the enduring conventional portrait-and self-portrait-of Jelly Roll Morton as a mythic character out of darkest New Orleans. In 1938, three years before Morton's death, Lomax sat him down at the piano in the auditorium of the Library of Congress, plied him with leading questions and booze, and taped his extended disquisitions on the origins of jazz, sportin' life in old Louisiana, the greatness of Jelly Roll Morton, and related subjects. Lomax built his book from verbatim (if sometimes misheard) chunks of the transcripts of those interviews, supplemented by the recollections of others and framed by Lomax's own prose, which favors apostrophic verve over precision and explanatory force: for example, "This is the master formula of jazz-mulatto knowingness ripened by black sorrow."
If Lomax wanted to salvage Morton's reputation-and it appears that he honestly did want to-he went about it the wrong way. Mister Jelly Roll presented Morton as a founding father of jazz, true, but one who had fallen on hard times and become merely colorful, and perhaps tragically ridiculous - still wearing a diamond in his tooth and playing "Spanish tinge" music redolent of turn-of-the-century cathouses, still complaining that these here whippersnappers they got playing jazz now were getting credit for ideas stolen from him, still boasting of having invented jazz near-single-handedly. Snakebit, hoodooed, robbed of dignity and currency by the advent of fresher styles and the machinations of business associates who had hustled the self-styled hustler, Morton had become a big-talking hasbeen. For more than half a century, anybody wanting to say anything new about him or his music has had to reckon with this conventional Morton who emerges from Mister Jelly Roll.
According to Lomax, Morton's "Faustian story parallels that of Robert Johnson." Mortons story,...