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I grew up on the old blues: heard it, felt it, danced to it, but a lot of people didn’t hear the real stuff, because somebody else was controlling the narrative. This book is searching out those voices, keeping them from being lost, and helping to transfer that ancestral information to a new generation.
— Taj Mahal
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This book is riveting. Elijah Wald brings the world of the New Orleans demi-monde to raucous life through his excavation of the censored lyrics of early jazz and blues. Moreover, in showing how women participated in this musical culture—as musicians in their own right, audience participants, and prostitutes enjoying some leisure time after hours—he reveals a world scarcely glimpsed before and all but erased from history. What Wald recovers here borders on the miraculous.
— Emily Landau, author of Spectacular Wickedness: Sex, Race, and Memory in Storyville, New Orleans
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Wald’s book is a fascinating exploration of the lyrics, dances and performances of early 20th century Black Americans, much of which has been buried in libraries and archives. He masterfully connects jazz to contemporary popular music, relates the struggles of Black performers, examines the changing standards for censoring popular culture, and adds to the epic that was Jelly Roll Morton’s life. Essential reading.
— John Szwed, author of Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World and historical notes for Jelly Roll Morton: The Library of Congress Recordings
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Elijah Wald is one of our most skilled and affable guides to the hidden, governing currents within the long stream of American music, and with Jelly Roll Blues he navigates one of the most important: the erotic, provocative, and just plain dirty songs at the heart of jazz and blues. With Jelly Roll Morton's legendary 1939 interviews with folklorist Alan Lomax at the center, this book travels into the heart of the sporting life, vividly recounting a time when working women and dandyish men invented a musical language that not only celebrated life's greatest pleasures but told truths that other art forms were too tame to touch. A hot and essential read.
— Ann Powers, NPR Music Critic and author of Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black & White, Body and Soul in American Music
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Elijah Wald’s latest excavation of American popular culture reminds us that music is meant to reflect life as it is, despite the genteel aspirations of commercial window-dressers who seek to protect the public from itself. Jelly Roll Blues gives by far the most realistic and satisfying account of Morton’s cultural environment to date, while also revealing the importance of cultural networks that operated beneath the commercial mainstream. Highly recommended.
— Bruce Boyd Raeburn, curator emeritus, Hogan Archive of New Orleans Music and Jazz, Tulane University
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Elijah Wald’s incisive, deeply researched, and hugely entertaining new book reminds us of the power of stories and storytelling to both shape and illuminate worlds, and what is lost when those narratives are disrupted. Using Jelly Roll Morton’s fascinating 1938 Library of Congress musical memoir as a jumping off point, and through his careful engagement with previously censored lyrics and obscured lives, Wald invites us on an important journey toward correcting incomplete historical accounts of early blues and jazz.
— Kimberly Mack, associate professor of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and author of Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White
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I enjoyed Jelly Roll Blues immensely. Whatever one’s estimate of Morton’s importance and credibility, there is no doubt about his ability to be in interesting places at interesting times, doing interesting things. Wald guides the reader round that world with admirable clarity. For blues enthusiasts, some of his observations about the history and origins of the form will be required reading.
— Tony Russell, author of The Blues: From Robert Johnson to Robert Cray and Rural Rhythm