Unearthing the censored history of American folk and popular song
JELLY ROLL BLUES: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories By Elijah Wald Hachette, 352 pp., $32
In 1938 Jelly Roll Morton, a major New Orleans jazz pioneer, sat down for a series of extensive interviews and performances with a young folklorist named Alan Lomax. Sound recordings of these interviews have been issued in various packages since the 1940s, but as Elijah Wald tells us in the opening of “Jelly Roll Blues,” the full set of them was not made available until 2005. The material that was held back, including a singular 30-minute track that Lomax titled “The Murder Ballad,” was marked by language and subject matter that “polite” audiences of the mid20th century would have considered obscene. A sample couplet, from “The Murder Ballad,” goes: “If you don’t leave my [expletive] man alone … I’ll cut your throat and drink your [expletive] blood like wine.”
Digging into these deliberately obscured and censored facets of American folk and popular song, with the Morton/Lomax recordings as a primary guide, Wald seeks not only to reconstruct a little-known body of music, but to explore and reveal the social world out of which that music came — a world of working-class leisure in which racial lines were alternately blurred and defended, where linguistic and musical codes were often illegible to outsiders. This was, by Wald’s account, the world out of which the blues and other major strains of American music emerged. It remains inadequately understood because subsequent scholars and collectors have reproduced the biases of those who originally collected the material and chose to keep much of it out of earshot. “Jelly Roll Blues” provides a major corrective to these tendencies and should appeal to any readers who want to deepen their knowledge of the foundations of American music.
Wald, a former Globe critic, is one of the most illuminating music writers working today. In previous books, he has provided a fresh understanding of the music of blues great Robert Johnson, offered the definitive account of
Bob Dylan’s pivotal 1965 Newport Folk Festival performance, and covered a plethora of styles from ragtime to hip-hop to narcocorridos with unique insight. “Jelly Roll Blues” most parallels his book on Johnson, “Escaping the Delta,” in using a recognized
Black music icon as a springboard for wider inquiry into the social history of American music traditions. Morton provides a through line for the book, but Wald is not so interested in the music for which the pianist and composer became best known, his solo piano and ensemble recordings made from 1923-30 that helped define and refine jazz. His mission, instead, is to follow clues that Morton offered in his interviews with Lomax about how the earliest blues might have sounded before it started to be put on record.
“The Murder Ballad” and other pieces played during these sessions, such as “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor” and “Winding Ball,” derive from an early period in Morton’s life, essentially the first decade of the 20th century. They were part of an oral culture where they served, as Wald suggests, as a medium of storytelling and an occasion for a musician like Morton to show off his capacity for verbal and melodic invention. As true folk culture, these songs consist of lines and stanzas that were widely borrowed and circulated, but each one also contains portions that are wholly unique to the performance. Wald is truly virtuosic in the way he disentangles key lines and phrases and traces them across different sources, demonstrating how these works accumulated and discarded meanings as they moved across time and place.
The vulgarity of these songs was essential to their entertainment value. Morton, in these early years of his career, was commonly performing in the company of prostitutes and their patrons, or saloon hall customers out for a night of carousing. Conventional wisdom has held that the most graphic and obscene material was used to stir the passions of johns-in-waiting or to build a sense of male-to-male camaraderie, but Wald provocatively — and convincingly — questions this assumption, intimating that women were just as likely to be the principal audience, and that female singers were foundational to this body of work. Tracing a piece called “Mamie’s Blues,” Wald offers a capsule history of the sexual economy of turn-ofthe-century New Orleans that includes this telling anecdote from musician John Handy: “When the girls come out of them cribs, they go home and take their bath and straighten theirself up and put on some clothes and came out there and just throw away some money. … It wasn’t nothing for them to come up there and give you four or five dollars to play a number.”
“Jelly Roll Blues” can be read to learn how phrases like “winding ball” and “hog-eye” carried sexually suggestive connotations that have become largely lost to history, and it is a rollicking book on that score alone. Its deeper significance, though, comes from the way it uncovers the mechanisms by which we learn about the past in the first place. Wald admires Lomax for his willingness to pull songs and stories out of Morton that the latter was sometimes hesitant to share, but also lays bare how unequal their relationship was: the white folklorist and the Creole musician. Pushing past where even Lomax was willing to go, “Jelly Roll Blues” enriches our sense of how the world used to sound.
Steve Waksman is the Elsie Irwin Sweeney Professor of Music at Smith College and author of “Live Music in America: A History from Jenny Lind to Beyoncé.”