A bestselling music historian follows legendary 1920 New Orleans pianist Jelly Roll Morton on a journey through the hidden worlds and forbidden songs of early blues and jazz.
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...is one of the most illuminating music writers working today ... 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 ... enriches our sense of how the world used to sound.
This isn’t a book for the fainthearted. It’s certainly not for the puritanical. This magnificent, raunchy exploration of early blues lyrics contains references so scabrous they would make a pirate weep.
A pleasing—and often pleasingly salacious—stroll through the annals of American popular music ... An illuminating, deeply researched study of roots music, decidedly not suitable for work.
