Jelly Roll Blues

Censored Songs and Hidden Histories

By: Elijah Wald

Narrated by: Mela Lee

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 listeners 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 Full of previously unpublished lyrics and stories, it paints a new and surprising picture of the dawn of American popular music, when jazz and blues were still the private, after-hours music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.

©2024 Elijah Wald (P)2024 Hachette Books

Critic reviews

“I grew up on the old blues: heard it, felt it, danced to it, but a lot of people didn’t hear the real stuff, because somebody else was controlling the narrative. This book is searching out those voices, keeping them from being lost, and helping to transfer that ancestral information to a new generation.”—Taj Mahal

“Elijah Wald has done it again. Both a compelling study of blues pioneer and musical genius Jelly Roll Morton's roots and song craft as well as a meticulously researched history of early twentieth-century, ostensibly ‘taboo’ popular music culture, Jelly Roll Blues offers a clear-eyed exploration of Black modernist era vernacular music that pushed the boundaries of social propriety. This is a book that takes seriously graphic forms of cultural expression as articulations of human desire and as complex manifestations of social and economic lifeworlds shaped by racial and gender pressures and inequalities. A deft archival historian, Wald continues to challenge and expand what we know as well as what we think we know about the early blues.”—Daphne Brooks, professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music at Yale University and author of Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound

"This book is riveting. Elijah Wald brings the world of the New Orleans demi-monde to raucous life through his excavation of the censored lyrics of early jazz and blues. Moreover, in showing how women participated in this musical culture—as musicians in their own right, audience participants, and prostitutes enjoying some leisure time after hours—he reveals a world scarcely glimpsed before and all but erased from history. What Wald recovers here borders on the miraculous."—Emily Landau, author of Spectacular Wickedness: Sex, Race, and Memory in Storyville, New Orleans

Absolutely top tier!

Fascinating, gripping and built upon deep scholarship. I’d highly recommended this book. Wonderful performance too. I should note that there are a lot of adult themes/language, so caveat lector!!

Not just a Jelly Roll biography

A great telling of the era & oral traditions. And, kudos for the NON-censorship. I’m not sure how this story could have been properly conveyed otherwise.
Excellent narration on a difficult but necessary sharing of this history! As a huge music lover, I learned a lot.