Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe (born Lemott, later known as Morton; around September 20, 1890–July 10, 1941), professionally called Jelly Roll Morton, was an American blues and jazz pianist, bandleader, and composer of Louisiana Creole heritage. Morton was the first person to arrange jazz music, showing that a style based on spontaneous playing could still keep its main features when written down. His piece "Jelly Roll Blues," published in 1915, was one of the earliest jazz compositions ever printed. Morton also said he created the genre.

Morton wrote other songs, including "King Porter Stomp," "Wolverine Blues," "Black Bottom Stomp," and "I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say." The last song honored New Orleans musicians from the early 1900s.

Morton’s claim that he invented jazz in 1902 was questioned. Music critic Scott Yanow noted that Morton’s exaggerated statements about his importance hurt his reputation after his death. However, Gunther Schuller stated that there is no proof Morton’s claims were false and that his many achievements support his contributions to jazz.

Biography

Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, later known as Jelly Roll Morton, was born into a Creole family in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans around 1890. He claimed to have been born in 1884 on his World War I draft registration card in 1918. Both of his parents had Creole ancestry that traced back four generations to the 18th century. No birth certificate was ever issued for Morton, and the law requiring birth certificates for citizens was not enforced until 1914. His father, Martin-Edouard Joseph Lamothe, was a bricklayer and occasional trombonist, and his mother, Louise Hermance Monette, was a domestic worker. His parents were never legally married, and his father left when Morton was about three years old. After his mother married William Mouton in 1894, Morton adopted his stepfather’s surname, changing it to Morton and using “Ferd” as an unofficial first name. He had two sisters, one of whom, Eugénie, married Ignace Colas in 1913.

At age 14, Morton began working as a piano player in a brothel. He used the nickname “Jelly Roll,” which was African-American slang for female genitalia. He lived with his great-grandmother, who believed he worked as a night watchman in a barrel factory. When she discovered he was playing music in a brothel, she disowned him. She told him that playing jazz in a “sporting house” had disgraced the family and warned that “devil music” would lead to his downfall. The cornetist Rex Stewart later said Morton used the name “Morton” to protect his family from shame if he was linked to a brothel.

Around 1904, Morton began touring the U.S. South, performing in minstrel shows, gambling, and composing music. Songs like “Jelly Roll Blues,” “New Orleans Blues,” “Frog-I-More Rag,” “Animule Dance,” and “King Porter Stomp” were created during this time. Stride pianists James P. Johnson and Willie “The Lion” Smith saw him perform in Chicago in 1910 and New York City in 1911.

Between 1912 and 1914, Morton toured with his girlfriend Rosa Brown as a vaudeville act before moving to Chicago for three years. By 1914, he started writing his compositions down. In 1915, “Jelly Roll Blues” became one of the first jazz compositions to be published. Around 1916, Morton worked for Ben Shook Jr., who was connected to a Jubilee club led by Mabel Lewis, a contralto singer and former member of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers. In 1917, Morton traveled to California with bandleader William Manuel Johnson and Johnson’s sister, Anita Gonzalez. His tango “The Crave” became popular in Hollywood, and he was invited to perform at the Hotel Patricia nightclub in Vancouver, Canada. Author Mark Miller described this period as a time when Morton worked as a pianist, vaudeville performer, gambler, and, according to some stories, a pimp. He returned to Chicago in 1923 to claim authorship of “The Wolverines,” which later became known as “Wolverine Blues.” He released his first commercial recordings, starting with piano rolls and then on record, both as a solo pianist and with jazz bands.

In 1926, Morton signed a contract with the Victor Talking Machine Company, allowing him to bring a well-rehearsed band to record his arrangements in Chicago. These recordings, made by Jelly Roll Morton and His Red Hot Peppers, included musicians such as Kid Ory, Omer Simeon, George Mitchell, Johnny St. Cyr, Barney Bigard, Johnny Dodds, Baby Dodds, and Andrew Hilaire.

After moving to New York City, Morton continued recording for Victor. Although he had difficulty finding musicians who wanted to play his style of jazz, he recorded with Omer Simeon, George Baquet, Albert Nicholas, Barney Bigard, Russell Procope, Lorenzo Tio, and Artie Shaw, as well as trumpeters Ward Pinkett, Bubber Miley, Johnny Dunn, and Henry “Red” Allen, and others like Sidney Bechet, Paul Barnes, Bud Freeman, Pops Foster, Paul Barbarin, Cozy Cole, and Zutty Singleton. His New York sessions did not produce a hit.

Due to the Great Depression, RCA Victor did not renew Morton’s recording contract in 1931. He continued playing in New York but struggled financially. He briefly had a radio show in 1934 and later toured with a burlesque band. In 1935, his 30-year-old composition “King Porter Stomp,” arranged by Fletcher Henderson, became Benny Goodman’s first hit and a swing standard, but Morton did not receive royalties from the recordings.

In 1935, Morton moved to Washington, D.C., to manage and play piano at a bar called the Music Box, Blue Moon Inn, and Jungle Inn in the African-American neighborhood of Shaw. He served as master of ceremonies, bouncer, and bartender. The club owner allowed her friends free admission and drinks, which made it hard for Morton to run the business successfully. During his short time at the Music Box, folklorist Alan Lomax heard him play. In 1938, Lomax invited Morton to record music and interviews for the Library of Congress. The sessions were meant to be short but expanded to over eight hours, with Morton talking and playing piano. Lomax conducted interviews but did not record them. He was interested in Morton’s time in Storyville, New Orleans, and the risqué songs of the era. Although Morton was reluctant to record these songs, he agreed. Some of the Library of Congress recordings were not released until 2005 due to their suggestive nature.

In these interviews, Morton claimed to have been born in 1885. Scholars like Lawrence Gushee suggest Morton may have chosen this date to claim he was the inventor of jazz, as being born in 1890 would have made him too young for that role. However, Morton may not have known his actual birthdate. He also said Buddy Bolden played ragtime but not jazz, a view not accepted by some of Bolden’s contemporaries in New Orleans. These contradictions may reflect different definitions of “ragtime” and “jazz.”

In 1938, Morton was stabbed by a friend of the Music Box’s

Personal life

Morton married Mabel Bertrand, a showgirl, in November 1928 in Gary, Indiana. Anita Gonzales, his long-term companion, said he was a very religious Catholic. His gravesite has a large Rosary instead of any music imagery.

Form and compositions

Morton's piano style was influenced by early forms of ragtime and a type of music called "shout," which later developed into the New York school of stride piano. His playing was also similar to barrelhouse, a style that led to the development of boogie-woogie.

Morton often used his right thumb to play the main melody of a song, while using the fingers of his right hand to play harmony notes above the melody. This method sometimes created a rough or "out-of-tune" sound because of the use of a specific type of note called a diminished 5th. This technique was still common in New Orleans. Morton also used major and minor sixths in the bass part of his music, instead of tenths or octaves. He played simple swing rhythms with both hands.

Several of Morton's songs were tributes to himself, such as "Winin' Boy," "The Jelly Roll Blues" (with the subtitle "The Original Jelly-Roll"), and "Mr. Jelly Lord." During the big-band era, Morton's earlier composition "King Porter Stomp" became a popular hit for Fletcher Henderson and Benny Goodman. It was later performed by many other swing bands of that time. Morton said he had written some songs that were later copyrighted by other people, including "Alabama Bound" and "Tiger Rag." The song "Sweet Peter," which Morton recorded in 1926, seems to be the source of the melody for the later hit song "All of Me," which was credited to Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons in 1931.

Morton's musical influence is still seen in the work of Dick Hyman and Reginald Robinson.

Legacy

In 2013, Katy Martin wrote an article stating that Alan Lomax's book of interviews showed Morton in a bad way. Martin did not agree that Morton was selfish or arrogant.

• The Music Box interviews were released after Morton died as a boxed set and won two Grammy Awards. In the same year, Morton received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
• Morton was nominated in 1992 for the Tony Award for Best Original Score for the musical Jelly's Last Jam, which tells the story of his life.
• Morton was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and was chosen as a charter member of the Gennett Records Walk of Fame.
• He was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2008.

Discography

1923–1924: 1923/24. Published by Milestone in 1974.
1926–1927: Birth of the Hot – The Classic Chicago "Red Hot Peppers" Sessions from 1926 to 1927. Published by RCA Bluebird in 1985.
1926–1928: The Pearls. Published by RCA Bluebird in 1988.
1926–1928: Jazz King of New Orleans. Published by RCA Bluebird in 1961.
1939–1940: Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings, Volumes 1–8 (8-CD Box Set). Published by Rounder in 2005.

Representation in other media

• Samuel Charters, a scholar who studies music and folklore, wrote Jelly Roll Morton's Last Night at the Jungle Inn: An Imaginary Memoir (1984). This book expands on Jelly Roll Morton's early stories about his life.
• In the chorus of "And It Stoned Me," the opening song of Van Morrison's important 1970 album Moondance, Morrison sings, "And it stoned me to my soul, stoned me just like Jelly Roll, and it stoned me." This line is believed to reference Morrison's childhood memory of listening to his father's recordings of Morton's music.
• Clarence Williams III plays the role of Jelly Roll Morton in The Legend of 1900.
• Jelly's Last Jam is a musical with a book written by George C. Wolfe, lyrics by Susan Birkenhead, and music composed by Jelly Roll Morton and Luther Henderson.
• In season 1, episode 3 of AMC's Interview with the Vampire, set around 1917 in Storyville, Jelly Roll Morton (played by Kyle Roussel) is the entertainment at a fictional brothel called the Fair Play Saloon, which later becomes the Azalea Hall, owned by the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac. Decades later, in 2022, Louis tells Daniel Molloy in an interview that Lestat's improvisation of Morton's music helped create the recording of "Wolverine Blues."
• The 2011 book The Ghost of the Cuban Queen Bordello, written by Peggy Hicks, discusses the life of Bessie Julia Johnson, also known as Anita Gonzales. As a teenager, Morton first met Bessie/Anita as a prostitute in Storyville. In 1917, he followed her to Las Vegas, Nevada, where she became a madam. They toured the United States together, bought a house in Los Angeles, and later moved to Jerome, Arizona, where she ran a brothel. They married in late 1918, but they often argued and moved frequently before divorcing. Morton traveled alone to Chicago. They stayed in contact over the years, and Morton borrowed money from her. Near the end of his life, Morton reunited with her, and he died in her arms.