Mister Jelly Roll
The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and "Inventor of Jazz"
$19.95, £11.95 paperback
978-0-520-22530-5
Available Now
367 pages, 5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches, 30 line illustrations, 19 music examples
December 2001, Available worldwide
Categories: Music; American Studies; Autobiographies & Biographies; Jazz; Folklore & Mythology; History; African American Studies; Jazz
December 2001, Available worldwide
Categories: Music; American Studies; Autobiographies & Biographies; Jazz; Folklore & Mythology; History; African American Studies; Jazz
"Alan Lomax has fashioned a biography that, for utter candor and spontaneity of utterance, rivals the self-revelations of Rousseau and Saint Augustine."—Chicago Tribune
"You get a fresh idea of what was behind the development of the new music that said so many things to so many people. You see that jazz was actually a cultural transmission, as Mr. Lomax puts it, a 'wordless counterpoint of protest and pride.' No one with even the slightest feeling for the subject can afford to miss this book."—San Francisco Chronicle
"You get a fresh idea of what was behind the development of the new music that said so many things to so many people. You see that jazz was actually a cultural transmission, as Mr. Lomax puts it, a 'wordless counterpoint of protest and pride.' No one with even the slightest feeling for the subject can afford to miss this book."—San Francisco Chronicle
When it appeared in 1950, this biography of Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton became an instant classic of jazz literature. Now back in print and updated with a new afterword by Lawrence Gushee, Mister Jelly Roll will enchant a new generation of readers with the fascinating story of one of the world's most influential composers of jazz. Jelly Roll's voice spins out his life in something close to song, each sentence rich with the sound and atmosphere of the period in which Morton, and jazz, exploded on the American and international scene. This edition includes scores of Jelly Roll's own arrangements, a discography and an updated bibliography, a chronology of his compositions, a new genealogical tree of Jelly Roll's forebears, and Alan Lomax's preface from the hard-to-find 1993 edition of this classic work. Lawrence Gushee's afterword provides new factual information and reasserts the importance of this work of African American biography to the study of jazz and American culture.