Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories

A bestselling music historian follows Jelly Roll Morton on a journey through the hidden worlds and forbidden songs of early blues and jazz.

In Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories, Elijah Wald takes readers on a journey into the hidden and censored world of early blues and jazz, guided by the legendary New Orleans pianist Jelly Roll Morton. Morton became nationally famous as a composer and bandleader in the 1920s, but got his start twenty years earlier, entertaining customers in the city’s famous bordellos and singing rough blues in Gulf Coast honky-tonks. He recorded an oral history of that time in 1938, but the most distinctive songs were hidden away for over fifty years, because the language and themes were as wild and raunchy as anything in gangsta rap. 
Those songs inspired Wald to explore how much other history had been locked away and censored, and this book is the result of that quest. Full of previously...