The Rolling Jelly Series (8): Indians

[Here is Part 8 of the Rolling Jelly Series] Jelly Roll Morton’s discussion of jazz-funeral violence (in his 1938 conversations with Alan Lomax) was not the only context for simultaneous fighting and celebration in the New Orleans of his younger days. The Mardi Gras Indians could be a violent lot as well, he explained to [...]

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The Rolling Jelly Series (7): Celebrations & Violence

[Here is Part 7 of the Rolling Jelly Series.] There’s a good deal of violence in New Orleans, and it’s not all that unusual for that violence to unfold in what seems like a strange context: during parades. In an incident earlier this year, for example, an 18-year-old guy shot up a funeral parade, wounding [...]

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The Rolling Jelly Series (6):

[Here is Part 6 of the Rolling Jelly Series.] So since I devoted the last installment of the Rolling Jelly Series to defending New Orleans from accusations that it’s somehow an unusually segregated or racially tense place, it’s only fair to parse some of Alan Lomax’s interviews for evidence of, yes, racial tension. I’m going [...]

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The Rolling Jelly Series (5): Free, easy New Orleans

[Here is Part 5 of the Rolling Jelly Series.] New Orleans at the turn of the 20th Century was, as Jelly Roll Morton described it to Alan Lomax, “a free and easy place. Everybody got along just the same.” Perhaps, in the wake of Katrina, that sounds quite different from the modern New Orleans, which [...]

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The Rolling Jelly Series (4): Sartorial Matters

[ Here is Part 4 of the Rolling Jelly Series.] In an earlier post I touched on some of the sartorial matters relating to “St. James Infirmary.” And at various points in his conversations with Alan Lomax, Jelly Roll Morton had a thing or two to say on the subject of style. It’s clear Morton [...]

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The Rolling Jelly Series (3): More On Songwriting

[Here is Part 3 of the Rolling Jelly Series] In the first — and admittedly way too long — installment of the Rolling Jelly series, I recounted some of what Jelly Roll Morton had to say about authorship and intellectual property issues. There is one footnote on that from Alan Lomax’s 1949 interviews with other [...]

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The Rolling Jelly Series (2): Places About Town

[Here is Part 2 of the Rolling Jelly Series] One of the things that was interesting to me about listening to the Jelly Roll Morton stuff was his occasional mentions of specific spots in New Orleans. It was because of this, in fact, that I launched yet another Letters From New Orleans new-technology extravaganza: The [...]

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The Rolling Jelly Series: Copyright Issues

Some months ago I bought Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings. This is an eight-CD set, with two books, in a box that’s supposed to look like a piano. Pretty fancy. The material itself has been released in various forms before, many times, for many years. But it was new to me. [...]

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