Jelly Roll Morton

3 Pages 814 Words

Ferdinand Joseph “Jelly Roll Morton” LaMenthe was born
in New Orleans, Louisiana on October 20, 1890. As a
child he began to learn how to play the piano at age
10 years old. He was taught by Tony Jackson, composer
of songs like “Pretty Boy” and other hits. Tony
Jackson is among the few musicians whom Morton admired
and respected. He called Jackson “ the greatest
single-handed entertainers in the world.” After the
death of his mother, Morton began playing in
whorehouses and in the bordellos of the Storyville
district of New Orleans. There he became active as a
gambler, pool shark, and a lot of things that caused
his grandmother to throw him out of the house as a bum
and a scalawag. She did not want him around his two
little sisters. As a wanderer, and during the fair of
1904, he began traveling such cities as Chicago, Los
Angeles, St. Louis, and Denver playing with various
musical organizations as an in demand musician but he
could never stay long with one band. “He couldn’t stay
long in one band too long because he was too eccentric
and too temperamental, and he was a one-man band
himself“, said by bandleader George Morrison whom
Morton played for in Denver. Morton really wanted to
be the extreme musician. After that he toured the
south in a minstrel show for about a year and a half.
In a bar in St. Louis where pianist hung out, Morton
had to prove his prowness by playing and reading music
pieces set before him.
In 1912, Morton briefly settled in Chicago’s South
Side where he published his first number, “ The Jelly
Roll Blues,” which was brought out by William
Rossiter. He traveled with this piece as far as New
York and as far west as California where he performed
with the Spike Brother as well as fronting his own
bands. During these years of travel, Morton apparently
fused a variety of black musical idioms- ragtime,
vocal and instrumental blues, items from the minstrel
shows...