Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs & Hidden Histories

Sometimes, those of us interested in music of the late 19th or early 20th century feel fortunate at the number of recordings available for us to hear. Other times, it’s hard to avoid the depressing notion that there are major gaps in the historical record. We know that only a small number of people were recorded and that the repertoire they recorded was chosen by a recording industry that, apart from chronicling cultural history, had its own agenda: avoiding controversy and making money. Not only was a great deal of music not recorded, it’s hard to shake the thought that song lyrics were seriously watered-down and that much of the recorded history did not deliver the real thing. After you read Jelly Roll Blues, you will know that it did not. Author Elijah Wald clearly shows that from the beginning many voices have been suppressed and that significant musical/cultural history has been lost to prudery and censorship. Black vernacular speech has long been of interest to Wald, who wrote The Dozens: A History of Rap's Mama (Oxford University Press, 2014). What set the book Jelly Roll Blues in motion were two things he heard in the well-known recordings that Jelly Roll Morton made in 1938 at the Library of Congress, recorded by Alan Lomax. The first is the language used by Morton to recreate the music of his youth, which was more profane—more real—by far than any previous versions
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