JELLY ROLL MORTON’S CHICAGO STORY
Pivotal chapter in jazz history began in 1923 at Melrose brothers’ South Side music store
Twenty-five years afterward, Lester Melrose still had vivid memories of how they met on a May evening in 1923.
“A fellow walked in to our store with a big red bandanna around his neck and a ten gallon cowboy hat on his head and hollered, ‘Listen everybody, I’m Jelly Roll Morton from New Orleans, the originator of jazz.’”
Morton’s claim was an exaggeration, but Melrose’s ears perked up. Unlike other African American musicians who, upon moving to Chicago, checked in at Melrose Brothers Music on Cottage Grove Avenue, Morton could read music. Set down on paper, his tunes could be copyrighted.
Shortly a partnership was formed that made a Black man famous and a white man wealthy. Some jazz aficionados celebrate Melrose as its first promoter. Others consider him a thief.
“I never got paid a penny of salary from the big companies as a talent scout,” Melrose told a Library of Congress curator compiling an oral history of Morton’s career. “I took my chances on some of the tunes I recorded being hits, and I wouldn’t record anybody unless he signed all his rights in those tunes over to me.”
But while Melrose’s motive wasn’t laudable, he created an invaluable anthology of jazz’s tricks of the trade that subsequent generations of musicians could study: The distinctive sound of an ensemble rather than a singer accompanying himself on a guitar or piano, and syncopated rhythms and riffs on the blues and Latin music.
“If you can’t manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz,” Morton said.
Melrose grew up far from the Louisiana juke joints where Spanish music was played or the cotton fields where the blues were sung. Born in Sumner, a small town in Illinois, in 1891, he moved to Chicago in 1914, hoping to play catcher for the White Sox.
When that didn’t happen, he joined his older brother Walter, who had opened a music store in a garage in the 6300 block of Cottage Grove Avenue, near the Tivoli movie theater.
The Great Migration gave the store a customer base. Chicago provided refuge from Jim Crow, but it was hardly a land of milk and honey. Blues music continued to resonate with Black newcomers. Like the lyrics of a number Morton recorded on Dec. 16, 1926, at the Webster Hotel, overlooking Lake Michigan.
Hello Central give me Doctor Jazz He’s got what I need, I’ll say he has When the world goes wrong and I’ve got the blues He’s the man who make me get out both my dancing shoes.
Some say musicians moved north in part because New Orleans authorities shut down the bordellos where jazz was the background music. Jelly Roll Morton began playing in the red-light district as a teenager. He took his stage name from its vulgar argot — his real name was Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe.
In 1925, Lester Melrose sold his interest in the music store and began producing so-called Race phonograph records aimed at Black consumers. Morton also left, having incurred Walter’s wrath for having a card printed reading: “Jelly Roll Morton, composer and arranger for the Melrose Music Company.”
Walter Melrose pooh-poohed Morton’s role, saying he had only been given sporadic assignments. Lester eventually supplemented his brother’s put-downs.
“Old Jelly was a good orchestra man, but he couldn’t write music, so we had to have an arranger take down his stuff,” Lester Melrose would claim.
In fact, it was the other way around. Lester Melrose could neither read music nor play or sing a note. Morton is credited with demonstrating that jazz can be set down in musical notation without losing the feeling of improvisation that birthed it.
In 1997, after a cache of Morton’s manuscripts surfaced in New Orleans, Howard Reich, the Tribune’s jazz critic and a trained musician who at one point studied the documents, noted “the obvious meticulousness, precision and clarity of his writing — in an era when many jazz musicians could not read music.”
In Chicago, Morton assembled and led the studio orchestra that performed the arrangements he wrote and made the Melrose brothers wealthy.
That involved a sleight of hand. Walter Melrose, who died in 1973, was credited as a record’s producer and again as its lyricist. That gave him a bigger chunk of the royalties than Morton got for the score, while robbing Earl Hines, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Benny Goodman of the rights to some of their compositions.
Lester Melrose subjected musicians to an industrial process. In 1937 and 1938 his recording studio was the Sky Club on the top floor of the Leland Hotel in Aurora.
Among those who stood in front of the microphone were Sonny Boy Williamson, Tampa Red, Big Joe Williams, Washboard Sam and Big Bill Broonzy. All would be revered as giants of jazz or the blues.
According to the Fox Valley Music Foundation, the sessions were models of efficiency. A lead performer on one song would be an accompanist on another. Playing with each other repeatedly musicians could get it right the first time. A record could be promptly sent to Bluebird Records, a subsidiary of RCA Victor.
On May 3, 1937, alone 37 songs were recorded. Twenty songs a day wasn’t unusual. Most were done in one or two takes. The “Bluebird Sound” helped make blues music popular.
Morton had done well in the 1920s, the publication of his songs made him a big-name performer. He got $1,500 for an appearance with his band, the Red Hot Peppers. But his music, at least the way he performed it, went out of fashion in the 1930s.
“Everyone today is playing my stuff, and I don’t even get credit,” Morton told DownBeat magazine in 1940.
Resentful of the split the Melrose brothers gave him, he wrote to the U.S. Department of Justice.
“Melrose knew nothing about music,” Morton complained in that 1940 letter. “Melrose never wrote a hit in his life.”
The letter coincided with an efforts to help Morton gain control of his songs by an amateur jazz musician to who also was Treasury Department official — down on his luck, Morton was managing a down-market nightclub in Washington, D.C.
Yet Morton ultimately rejected the fan’s plan, as the Chicago Defender announced with an Aug. 10 headline: “Jelly Roll Morton Won’t Ask For Cash (From) Melrose Company.”
No explanation was given. When Morton died in Los Angeles, in 1941, he was destitute. The Defender lambasted the performers who didn’t attend his funeral, despite being indebted to him for their success. Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, and Ella Fitzgerald were playing local engagements but were no-shows.
Lester Melrose continued producing and filching songs into the 1950s, then retired to Florida, where he died in 1968. He had acquired the copyright to 3,000 songs, among them: “Dippermouth Blues,” “Why Don’t You Do Right?,” “Barrel House Stomp,” “I Guess I’ll Be on My Way” and “High Society.”
Ever since, they’ve borne witness to a pivotal chapter in music history. Their shady underside and the infectious sounds preserved in their groves echo the era when jazz arrived in Chicago.
It opened with a gaudily dressed fellow walking into a dusty garage on Cottage Grove Avenue and telling the Melrose brothers: “I’m Jelly Roll Morton, from New Orleans.”