- Publisher: Hachette
- Year: 2024
- Format: Hardback
- Pages: 352pp
- Illustrated: Yes
- Dimensions: 235x160mm
- Condition: New
- Weight: 0.6kg
- ISBN: 9780306831409
- Product code: 546650
Jelly Roll Blues
Censored Songs and Hidden Histories
Elijah Wald New Hardback Illustrated
Postscript summary
Early in the 20th century, jazz and blues were a part of the private, after-hours music favoured by the ‘sporting world’ of boxing, racing and gambling. Elijah Wald uses a 1938 interview with Jelly Roll Morton to explore this lesser known part of black music history, in which lewd songs were performed in bordellos and honky-tonks before they got watered down for white audiences.
Product information
Full publisher description
Bestselling music historian Elijah Wald 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 Full of previously unpublished lyrics and stories, it paints a new and surprising picture of the dawn of American popular music, when jazz and blues were still the private, after-hours music of the Black "sporting world." It gives new insight into familiar figures like Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong, and introduces forgotten characters like Ready Money, the New Orleans sex worker and pickpocket who ended up owning one of the largest Black hotels on the West Coast.
Revelatory and fascinating, these songs and stories provide an alternate view of Black culture at the turn of the twentieth century, when a new generation was shaping lives their parents could not have imagined and art that transformed popular culture around the world-the birth of a joyous, angry, desperate, loving, and ferociously funny tradition that resurfaced in hip-hop and continues to inspire young artists in a new millennium.
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 unpublished lyrics and stories, it paints a new and surprising picture of the dawn of American popular music, when jazz and blues were still the private, after-hours music of the Black "sporting world." It gives new insight into familiar figures like Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong, and introduces forgotten characters like Ready Money, the New Orleans sex worker and pickpocket who ended up owning one of the largest Black hotels on the West Coast.
Revelatory and fascinating, these songs and stories provide an alternate view of Black culture at the turn of the twentieth century, when a new generation was shaping lives their parents could not have imagined and art that transformed popular culture around the world-the birth of a joyous, angry, desperate, loving, and ferociously funny tradition that resurfaced in hip-hop and continues to inspire young artists in a new millennium.
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546650
Jelly Roll Blues
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/New Arrivals
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/Non-Fiction/Categories/Music/Jazz, Blues & Soul
Early in the 20th century, jazz and blues were a part of the private, after-hours music favoured by the ‘sporting world’ of boxing, racing and gambling. Elijah Wald uses a 1938 interview with Jelly Roll Morton to explore this lesser known part of black music history, in which lewd songs were performed in bordellos and honky-tonks before they got watered down for white audiences.
Hardback
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0
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rrp_info:£28.00
productId:186830
bic_code:AVGJ, AVH, BGF
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£28.00
Elijah Wald
General
235x160mm
Hachette
No
Hardback
