walking upstream…
Jelly Roll Morton
photo: bloom photograph studio, chicago · public domain ↗Jelly Roll Morton
sourcesdoctorjazz.co.uk — Library of Congress recordings transcript, 23 May & 12 Jun 1938 (Morton's own testimony on Carroll, Jackson, and Desdunes) · The New York Times (2000) — The Man Who Made Jazz Hot (Tony Jackson as the only pianist Morton considered his equal or better) · Encyclopedia.com — Jelly Roll Morton biography (meeting Tony Jackson, the 1902 jazz-invention claim, Schuller's synthesis thesis) · The Syncopated Times (2022) — Mamie Desdunes
In the summer of 1938, broke and half-forgotten, Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton sat at a piano in the Library of Congress's Coolidge Auditorium and told Alan Lomax's recording disc, across roughly nine hours of talk and playing, that he alone had invented jazz in 1902. Historians have argued with that boast ever since. Born in New Orleans in 1890, Morton learned piano in Storyville's sporting houses as a teenager, toured Southern vaudeville circuits for over a decade, and made his name in 1920s Chicago leading the Red Hot Peppers before the Depression flattened his career. But the same sessions that carry his loudest self-mythology also carry his most generous testimony: pressed to explain his own playing, the self-proclaimed inventor of jazz named, specifically and repeatedly, the New Orleans pianists who taught him first.
the sound in question
1926
Black Bottom StompJelly Roll Morton
walk the tributaries ↓
Mamie Desdunes1900s · Blues
Mamie Desdunes lived next door to Morton's godmother in New Orleans's Garden District, and two fingers of her right hand were missing, so she played her blues with three. As a boy Morton made himself her "can rusher," fetching beer for the house in trade for the chance to listen. Introducing her tune on record in 1939, he told Alan Lomax: "This is the first blues I no doubt heard in my life... to try to learn it, I made myself the... the can rusher." It is the rare moment the self-declared inventor of jazz names exactly where his blues came from.
listen: upstream & heresource: doctorjazz.co.uk — Portraits from Jelly Roll's New Orleans (biographical detail on Albert Carroll, Tony Jackson, and Mamie Desdunes) ↗
No known recordingMamie Desdunes
1939
Mamie's BluesJelly Roll Morton
listen forThere is nothing of Desdunes's own playing to cue up — she never recorded, and no one else did either. What survives is Morton's memory of it, played straight: on "Mamie's Blues," listen for the plain, unhurried left-hand figure under the melody, and for how little the tune varies from verse to verse. That repetition is the point — a blues you play the same way every morning because it is the only one you know that well, passed on note for note by the boy who used to fetch her beer.
Tony Jackson1900s · Ragtime / Jazz / Blues
No pianist got a bigger send-off in Morton's Library of Congress sessions than Tony Jackson, the Storyville entertainer who never committed a note to disc. "Tony was considered among all who knew him, the greatest single-hand entertainer in the world," Morton told Alan Lomax in 1938, insisting there was no opera or show tune or anything ever printed that Jackson couldn't play from memory — and crediting him bluntly: "he was very much instrumental in me going to Chicago first." The New York Times later called Jackson the only pianist Morton ever considered his equal or better.
listen: upstream & heresource: doctorjazz.co.uk — Portraits from Jelly Roll's New Orleans (biographical detail on Albert Carroll, Tony Jackson, and Mamie Desdunes) ↗
No known recordingTony Jackson
1939
The Naked DanceJelly Roll Morton
listen forJackson left no recording, so listen instead to the one Morton insists is his: on "The Naked Dance," cut in 1939, Morton names it on the record itself as "one of Tony Jackson's fast speed tunes," the specialty New Orleans "professors" played to keep dancers moving in the Storyville houses. Listen for the relentless right-hand drive and the way the tune never lets up for a breath across the whole performance — the showman's stamina Morton says he borrowed, not invented.
Albert Carroll1900s · Ragtime / Jazz
Albert Carroll died in 1916, too soon for a Black New Orleans pianist to have recorded, but Morton ranked him among the handful of players he felt he couldn't outplay. In a 1938 written fragment sorting his "No. 1 class" of models, he singled out "Albert Cahill, with his so soft, sweet, non-exerting perfect perfection of passing tones and strange harmonic's cool and collective style." The site doctorjazz.co.uk separately reports a claim by pianist and publisher Clarence Williams that Jelly Roll was more influenced by Carroll than anyone else — third-party testimony this record can't verify, but rare praise for the self-mythologizing Morton to have written down about someone else.
listen: upstream & heresource: doctorjazz.co.uk — Portraits from Jelly Roll's New Orleans (biographical detail on Albert Carroll, Tony Jackson, and Mamie Desdunes) ↗
No known recordingAlbert Carroll
1923
The PearlsJelly Roll Morton
listen forNo recording of Carroll survives, so listen for the trait itself: on "The Pearls," one of Morton's own most harmonically restless solos, listen for the chromatic passing tones sliding between chords, unsettling the melody before it resolves — exactly the quality he praised in Carroll's playing. It's Morton's tune, not Carroll's, and the pairing is stylistic rather than a direct cover — but it's the sound he said, in his own hand, that he learned to reach for.