Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories

By:

Sign Up Now! Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into Bookshare to access this title. Learn about membership options, or view our freely available titles.

Synopsis
A bestselling music historian follows Jelly Roll Morton on a journey through the hidden worlds and forbidden songs of early blues and jazz. In Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories, Elijah Wald takes readers on a journey into the hidden and censored world of early blues and jazz, guided by the legendary New Orleans pianist Jelly Roll Morton. Morton became nationally famous as a composer and bandleader in the 1920s, but got his start twenty years earlier, entertaining customers in the city&’s famous bordellos and singing rough blues in Gulf Coast honky-tonks. He recorded an oral history of that time in 1938, but the most distinctive songs were hidden away for over fifty years, because the language and themes were as wild and raunchy as anything in gangsta rap. Those songs inspired Wald to explore how much other history had been locked away and censored, and this book is the result of that quest. Full of previously unpublished lyrics and stories, it paints a new and surprising picture of the dawn of American popular music, when jazz and blues were still the private, after-hours music of the Black "sporting world." It gives new insight into familiar figures like Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong, and introduces forgotten characters like Ready Money, the New Orleans sex worker and pickpocket who ended up owning one of the largest Black hotels on the West Coast. Revelatory and fascinating, these songs and stories provide an alternate view of Black culture at the turn of the twentieth century, when a new generation was shaping lives their parents could not have imagined and art that transformed popular culture around the world—the birth of a joyous, angry, desperate, loving, and ferociously funny tradition that resurfaced in hip-hop and continues to inspire young artists in a new millennium.
Copyright:
2024

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
ISBN-13:
9780306831423
Related ISBNs:
9780306831409
Publisher:
Hachette Books Ireland
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Elijah Wald
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
History, Entertainment, Nonfiction, Biographies and Memoirs, Music
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

Reviews

No Rating Yet