Jelly Roll Morton

Induction Year: 1998

Induction Category: Early Influence

Inductee: Jell Roll Morton (piano, vocals; born 10/20/1890, died 7/10/41)

Jelly Roll Morton is a seminal figure in the birth and development of jazz in the early decades of this century. A multi-talented pianist, composer, arranger and bandleader, he has been called “one of the handful of Atlases upon whose shoulders rests the entire structure of our music” by jazz historian Orrin Keepnews. Morton wove disparate musical strands-blues, stomps, and ragtime, plus French and Spanish influences-into the fabric of early jazz. A native of New Orleans, he played on the streets and in in the honky-tonks of that wide-open city, helping to give birth to the jazz idiom as it took shape in the infamous red-light district known as Storyville. Morton recorded solo and with small groups, and the festive stamp of his hometown was evident in every note he played. He was the driving force behind Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers, which recorded and toured in the late Twenties. Their performances combined ensemble work in the New Orleans style with space for soloing, which was the then rage on Chicago’s jazz scene. Morton’s pioneering work with the Red Hot Peppers was contemporaneous with the innovations made by with his Hot Five and Hot Seven. It is doubtful that the Jazz Age or the Swing Era could have happened without either of them.

In the words of music historian David McGee, “What Elvis Presley’s Sun recordings are to rock and roll, the Red Hot Peppers’ canon is to jazz.” During a four-year span of small-band sessions for RCA Victor - especially the milestone recordings from September 1926 through June 1927 - Morton cut a series of ebullient stomps and forceful blues. His band included such jazz legends as cornet player Kid Ory, clarinetist Johnny Dodds and drummer Baby Dodds. Morton fell on hard times during the Depression and labored in obscurity as his kind of music fell from favor. He was found tending bar in 1938 by musical archivist Alan Lomax, who thereupon documented him playing piano and telling stories. Though Morton died three years later, he was rediscovered again in the Nineties via a Broadway tribute to his life and times, entitled Jelly’s Last Jam.

Morton heads a lineage of groundbreaking jazz pianist-bandleaders that includes Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Thelonius Monk. In his high-spirited blues, stomps and ragtime pieces from the Twenties one can also detect what would become the foundational sound of rock and roll. On a personal level, Morton was “just about the most flamboyant, colorful and exasperating personality imaginable,” according to the liner notes of a 1953 reissue, which would seem to make him of a rock and roll forebear as well.

TIMELINE

October 20, 1890: Ferdinand Joseph Lematt (a.k.a. Jelly Roll Morton) is born in New Orleans.

1912: After years spent playing the clubs of New Orleans’ Storyville district, Jelly Roll Morton moves to Chicago.

1915: Jelly Roll Morton publishes his first composition, “The Jelly Roll Blues.”

June 1, 1923: Jelly Roll Morton cuts six original compositions for the Indiana-based Gennett label.

January 18, 1924: Jelly Roll Morton cuts 11 more sides for Gennett in January and 24 piano rolls for the Vocalstyle Company at midyear.

September 15, 1926: Jelly Roll Morton records the classic “Black Bottom Stomp” in a Chicago studio at the first of many small band sessions. His seven-man band, the Red Hot Peppers, includes such esteemed musicians as trombonist Kid Ory and banjoist Johnny St. Cyr.

June 1, 1927: Chicago sessions with a version of the Red Hot Peppers that now includes Johnny Dodds on clarinet and Baby Dodds on drums yield such Jell Roll Morton classics as “Mr. Jelly Lord,” “The Pearls” and “Wolverine Blues.”

June 11, 1928: Jelly Roll Morton records “Georgia Swing” and “Kansas City Stomps” in New York at one of his later RCA Victor sessions.

July 10, 1941: Jelly Roll Morton died at the age of 50 in Los Angeles, CA.

1991: ‘Jelly’s Last Jam’, a theatrical production of Jelly Roll Morton’s life story, opens on Broadway, rekindling interest in his legacy.

January 12, 1998: Jelly Roll Morton is inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at the thirteenth annual induction dinner. is his presenter.

Essential Songs

Black Bottom Stomp
Dead Man Blues
Steamboat Stomp
Original Jelly Roll Blues
King Porter Stomp
Mr. Jelly Lord
The Pearls
Red Hot Pepper
Smokehouse Blues
Sidewalk Blue

Recommended Reading

Jelly Roll Morton’s Last Night at the Jungle Inn
Samual Barclay Charters. New York: M. Boyers, 1984.

Mister Jelly Roll: the Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and Inventor of Jazz
Alan Lomax. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.