Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and "Inventor of Jazz" / Edition 1

by Alan Lomax, Lawrence Gushee

Overview

When it appeared in 1950, this biography of Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton became an instant classic of jazz literature. Now back in print and updated with a new afterword by Lawrence Gushee, Mister Jelly Roll will enchant a new generation of readers with the fascinating story of one of the world's most influential composers of jazz. Jelly Roll's voice spins out his life in something close to song, each sentence rich with the sound and atmosphere of the period in which Morton, and jazz, exploded on the American and international scene. This edition includes scores of Jelly Roll's own arrangements, a discography and an updated bibliography, a chronology of his compositions, a new genealogical tree of Jelly Roll's forebears, and Alan Lomax's preface from the hard-to-find 1993 edition of this classic work. Lawrence Gushee's afterword provides new factual information and reasserts the importance of this work of African American biography to the study of jazz and American culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520225305
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	12/19/2001
Edition description:	First Edition, Updated, with a New Afterword by Lawrence Gushee
Pages:	367
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Alan Lomax, with his father John A. Lomax, created the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress and published many anthologies, including American Ballads and Folk Songs and The Folk Songs of North America. Lomax produced the first albums of American folk song in 1939 and has edited more than a hundred recordings from all parts of the world. He received the National Medal of Arts in 1986. Lawrence Gushee is Professor Emeritus at the School of Music, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Table of Contents

Preface to the 1993 Edition
Preface to the 1973 Edition
Prelude

LOUISIANA TOWN
My Folks Was All Frenchmans
Really Tremendous Sports
Money in the Tenderloin

INTERLUDE ONE: The Family

STORYVILLE
Where the Birth of Jazz Originated From
Uptown-Downtown
Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm
INTERLUDE TWO: The Boys in the Bands

ALABAMA BOUND
Half-hand Bigshot
Those Battles of Music
The Lion Broke Down the Door
Jack the Bear
Can't Remember All Those Towns
Jelly Roll Blues

I TOOK CALIFORNIA
The Cadillac in Bloom
Diamonds Pinned to My Underwear
Mama Nita

INTERLUDE THREE:
Hello, Central, Give Me Doctor Jazz

THE BITTERS WITH THE SWEET
Mabel
Red Hot Pepper
It Like to Broke My Heart
Till the Butcher Cut Him Down

Acknowledgments
Appendix One: The Tunes
Appendix Two: The Records
Afterword
by Lawrence Gushee
Select Discography and Bibliography