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Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and "Inventor of Jazz"
- Author: Lomax, Alan
Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and "Inventor of Jazz"
- Author: Lomax, Alan
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About
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.
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
