by John Szwed
It was at the suggestion of Cooke that Alan Lomax dropped in. Of his meeting with Morton, Alan said, “He was trying to make a living in this night club in Washington, and there he was the ultimate host. When you came there he always served champagne ... at his own expense. A bottle of champagne to the distinguished visitor, whoever that was.”
Because Alan was focusing on documenting American traditions in their original settings, relatively undisturbed by the emerging commercial entertainment industry, he had not really considered recording someone like Jelly Roll Morton. Alan later made no secret of the fact that when he met Morton he was opposed to all that the musician stood for: “He came [to the library] with some friends ... who knew him, and said he wanted to correct the history of jazz. He was the ‘originator of jazz, stomps, and swing,’ and he had been robbed of his music. At that time, jazz was my worst enemy. Through the forces of radio, it was wiping out the music that I care about—American traditional folk music.” And Alan and his father had already written off New Orleans as of little interest to folklorists.
Still, this broke and largely forgotten man presented himself with dignity, eloquence, and grace, dressed in an aging but sharp and carefully preserved suit, with a lavish hand-painted tie of silk, matching shirt, socks, and handkerchief, a watch fob and rings of gold, and flashing a half-carat diamond in an incisor when he smiled. “I looked at him with considerable suspicion. But I thought, I’d take this cat on, and ... see how much folk music a jazz musician knows. The first recording began by [my] asking if he knew ‘Alabama Bound.’ He played me about the most beautiful ‘Alabama Bound’ that I had ever heard.”
Alan had intended to make only a few records with Morton, but he began to understand that he was face-to-face with what he called a “Creole Benvenuto Cellini.”
I said, “Just a minute.” We were on the stage at the Coolidge Auditorium. A bust of Beethoven, and Brahms were up there. We were where the chamber music of the United States was being played. Jelly Roll felt that was just the proper setting for him.... He wasn’t the least bit awed by that. I ran all the way upstairs into the office of my chief—Chief of the Music Division—and said, “Harold, we have an absolute great jam here. I want to get permission to use fifty blank aluminum discs. I think he’ll have something to say.” I think they probably cost altogether about $100, maybe $200, to record this man. On the way back down I decided to do a full-scale interview. I was at top-speed.... I had a bottle of whisky in my office. I put it on the piano.... I sat down on the floor, looked up, and said, “Jelly Roll, where did you come from and how did it all begin?” He then began to play the piano and talk. It came out of nowhere, the fact that he decided to do that. We hadn’t agreed on it at all. Sort of half closing his eyes, he gave that immortal definition of his family, and New Orleans.
Lomax had recorded brief life histories before, and had written a short autobiography for Lead Belly based on his interviews with him (“Lead Belly Tells His Story” in Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly). The idea of oral biography had been discussed by Alan and his father ever since John Lomax had first proposed that interviews with ex-slaves be conducted under government support to create a collective oral history of slavery. Alan had also heard that the Russian folklorists were beginning to write down the autobiographies of folk performers, bringing the singer or tale teller up to the level of importance of the song or the tale.
It was the richness and flow of Morton’s story, the nuance of his speech, and the integrity of his narrative that really engaged Lomax:
As I listened to it, I realized that this man spoke the English language in a more beautiful way than anybody I’d ever heard. He had a totally original style.... This man who had been associated with gun thugs, living in this very cruel environment ... proceeded to speak the most fantastically elegant and sensitive English about culture, and character, and so on.... A gravel voice melting at the edges, not talking, each sentence bowling along like a line from the blues, like an eddy of a big sleepy southern river, weaving a legend, and as the legend grew, the back seat of the hall filled with [ghosts of] ladies in crinolines, listening.... Basically, he realized that he had been given an opportunity to make his statement in full. There was nothing in front of him but free time. I was at his disposal. The Library of Congress was backing him. Suddenly, he felt that he had the kind of recognition that he, in truth, knew that he deserved. I think that it made a vast difference to him then. He felt in good courage to start writing again, and start running recording sessions.
What ensued was a performance that lasted for over a month, a recitation of Homeric proportions, with Morton accompanying himself on a piano instead of a lyre. It was the longest recording session anyone had ever tried, with Lomax seated on the floor at Morton’s feet, a pair of battery-powered Presto disc recording machines behind him so that he could reach back to change the discs—minimizing the breaks and sometimes overlapping what was said on one recording onto the next—but still maintaining eye contact with Morton (“the best position with somebody who’s feeling a little bit insecure”). Despite the grand piano and the concert hall, it was still a field recording session in the Library of Congress.
Once they started, Jelly Roll paced his speech with chords on the piano, vamping his way through history, changing keys and shifting into minor as the subject demanded. When he sang he kept time by stomping on the hard floor, every sound overamplified by a cheap crystal microphone on a metal stand. Alan adapted to the epic unfolding before him, and the usual direct field interview questions—“When was this?” “What was his name?”—slowly faded as Morton found his rhythm and Lomax became his audience.
For Alan these recordings were a breakthrough in method:
I later came to call this process “the cultural system,” where people talk their images into a recording instrument or into a film, and suddenly begin to find that they have importance, what they have to say is significant. All that came out of the Jelly Roll interview.... This was the first oral history, and that’s how it all began on the stage. Jelly Roll invented oral history, you might say.
Alan called these sessions the “Autobiography of Jelly Roll Morton,” and later made a series of other recorded interviews he also called “autobiographies.” When he first read John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath it struck him that he had been working with people who talked like Steinbeck’s characters. Recorded interviews such as Morton’s were “almost like an analytic interview (only there is no couch). What I had decided on was a twelve-foot shelf of unknown America recording its life in prose. The convict, cowboy, steel worker, and so on.” It was also a way of reconstructing the lives of whole communities of people. We may never know precisely why Athens was the great city it was, since its origins are lost in time, but New Orleans—the Athens of the New World, as Lomax often referred to it—was still there, with its deep history and its great talkers, and it might yet be possible to grasp its unique efflorescence. For Morton, it meant putting his story on record, creating history, something he had begun to do on paper. Now he would write in sound the first history of American jazz, and would raise the level of discussion about the music through what turned out to be the first musicological discourse on the music and its originators.
On the evening of March 26, 1938, Robert Ripley had W. C. Handy as his guest on his popular radio program Believe It or Not. Handy, a composer and bandleader, was at the time perhaps the most widely respected African American in the United States. He was a partially blind, elderly gentleman who, without possessing any remarkable musical creativity, nonetheless had published “St. Louis Blues,” one of the most popular songs in the world, as well as a number of other blues, and had built a successful music business in the face of every conceivable opposition. In 1941 he would publish Father of the Blues, an inspirational autobiography that testified to Handy’s belief in his country and his willingness to persevere in spite of all odds. The book was enormously successful, driving Richard Wright’s Nat
ive Son off the sales charts, and ultimately was chosen to be distributed to soldiers overseas by the Council on Books in War Time.
Ripley introduced Handy that night on the radio as “the originator of jazz, stomps, and blues.” This was all too much for Morton, for whom Handy was a fake, a second-rate, out-of-date musician, and little more than a shrewd businessman who knew how to capitalize on others’ music and present himself as a humble, hardworking Negro. Morton wrote to Ripley, Down Beat magazine, the Baltimore Afro-American, Melody Maker, the Washington Afro-American, and the New York Amsterdam News, protesting the mantle bestowed on Handy. In his letters Jelly Roll asserted that New Orleans was the birthplace of jazz, and that it was he, not Handy, who had first created jazz in 1902, written the first stomp (“King Porter Stomp”) in 1906, and used “swing” in a title (“Georgia Swing”) in 1907. (Morton was a bit more cautious about the blues, and merely pointed out that he had written “New Orleans Blues” in 1905, early enough, in any case, to precede W. C. Handy’s claims.) Further, Handy could not play jazz, Morton said, as he was unable to execute “plenty of figure work in the groove ability, great improvisations, accurate, exciting tempos with a kick.” What he played were folk songs, hymns, and anthems. Jelly Roll went on to accuse Handy of stealing other people’s music and of not understanding the rudiments and origins of the jazz drum set. He also demanded that Ripley provide proof for the claims made on his show. Morton concluded, ominously, “Lord protect us from more Hitlers and Mussolinis.”
None of this was of much help to Morton, even if he was more right than wrong in his claims. He was a leftover hero from another age, and almost no one was interested in his self-promotion and corrections of jazz history. But Lomax saw behind Morton’s self-possessed mask a great artist who had laid the groundwork for jazz as we now know it and was keenly aware that he was on the verge of disappearing from musical history. “Jelly Roll had been deeply hurt.... He occasionally let that slip through, but not very often.”
The dustup between these two elder black men piqued Alan’s curiosity, and on May 6, just a few days before his sessions with Morton were to begin, he had recorded an interview with Handy. In it he explored the origins of the blues, Handy’s inspirations and sources for songs like “Aunt Hager’s Children” “Loveless Love” “Memphis Blues,” Roll On Buddy,” and “Olius Brown.” It was a short session, lasting only six record sides, but it was something of a rehearsal for the Morton interview to come.
The Morton interviews continued through much of May and into mid-June, then were interrupted when Lomax went to record Jennie Devlin, and in August traveled alone on a field trip to Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin that would last until November. He first stopped in Detroit, spending some time recording in the Hungarian neighborhood, then he found Sampson Pittman and Calvin Frazier, two black singers from Memphis. There, in the promised land of southern workers who had headed north in the Depression diaspora, he was hearing rural blues and dance music like “Dirty Dozens,” “Welfare Blues,” and “Cotton Farmer Blues.” Then he crossed town to record Serbian diple players. All this he heard in a few days in a single city.
With the help of a professor at Michigan State Teachers College at Mount Pleasant, Alan was given introductions to several lumberjack singers. Another professor from the University of Michigan pointed him toward Beaver Island in Lake Michigan where there were some Irish sailors, one of whom sang for him more than one hundred songs. Although the community had a mixed population of Irish, Native American, Germans, and Poles, he found the island to be “the most purely Irish colony in the United States,” with deep and vivid memories of Ireland even though only a few of those alive were born there. Crossing to the northeastern side of the Lower Peninsula, he visited Posen, a town settled by Poles, where ballads were sung in Polish and fiddle tunes from the old country were still played. In fact, something of a revival of older dance forms was then under way in both Posen and Detroit. But at the same time there was a contrary trend, and local bands were all expected to play jazz and American square dance tunes, as well as Polish music.
In Champion and Baraga in the Upper Peninsula he found French ballad singers and attended singing fests that went late into the night. On he went, to Calumet, Charles, Grandville, Marinesco, Munising, Newberry, Greenland, Ontonagon, St. Ignace, and Traverse City, and in more than two and a half months he recorded over a thousand songs on 249 discs. It was a difficult trip, filled with various forms of anxiety ranging from exhaustion to loneliness. Among other things, he learned that he did not like traveling alone. Elizabeth was in Mexico working as a journalist, so he found local girls along the way to keep him company. He was plagued by equipment failure and shortages of money to live on. Buying food and drinks for the people he recorded, sometimes staging parties for them, turned out to be enormously expensive, and he had to beg Washington for more money and advances on his salary.
If Alan had thought that fieldwork would allow him to escape the pressures of Washington, he was disappointed. As a new employee, operating with media that were alien to librarians, he was being closely monitored by the library. He had to submit bills accounting for food, gas, housing, and other expenditures before he could be sent more expense money, and he had to project precisely how many blank discs he would need, and then justify either not using them all or needing more than he asked for. There was also the problem of paying for songs, as the library did not allow for that expense. In explaining why he hadn’t produced as many songs as he had projected, he wrote, “Not that this country isn’t fertile, but it is stubborn and the people simply can’t see why they should sing for me without pay. This is a question we shall have to take up at some length on my return. The proper answer, when you are asked, flatly—‘Well, do you get paid for this?’ Nothing I have thought of so far seems to be quite adequate.” While he was still traveling from town to town in the North, he was also being asked to complete his field notes from the Indiana trip and submit them to the Librarian, and there was pressure to turn in his final report on the Haitian trip. The bureaucracy in Washington was turning the gentlemanly art of collecting into industrialized labor, and at low pay at that.
When he returned from field trips there was a large volume of letter writing to do, as it was Lomax’s practice to write each person he had spent time with to thank them, exchange some news, and sometimes make plans for another visit. These correspondences often continued for years, a number of them throughout his lifetime. After catching up with the mail for this trip, he had vacation time coming, though the Jelly Roll Morton recording sessions were still preoccupying him. He and Nick Ray had also sketched out a play on “the growth of jazz,” and the two of them went off to Maryland for a week to work on it.
On December 14 the interviews with Jelly Roll Morton resumed and were completed, probably at a different location, since Jelly Roll played guitar on this session. Other interviews with Morton were taken down and recorded by a stenographer. There was also a chronology of Morton’s life, a list of New Orleans musicians and their characteristics, details on hoodoo, and thoughts on everyday life in New Orleans. On his own, Jelly Roll wrote out short accounts of his early travels, lists of pimps’ names from New Orleans, and the story of the club he managed in Chicago in 1926, the Elite No. 2.
There was a passion for detail in Morton’s entire narrative that suggests that he not only feared that his own contribution was not appreciated, but that the importance of New Orleans to American culture was being forgotten. Like James Joyce writing Ulysses, Morton set out to immortalize the Crescent City for those to whom it was lost or never known. New Orleans’s institutions and community rituals were described, its street life evoked with descriptions of the social clubs like the Broadway Swells and the High Arts; the many parades; the very public and communal funerals, with their wakes and feasts and singing, the processions they called the second line, and the fights that sometimes followed; and Mardi Gras, with its costumes and masked balls. Morton was among the
first to describe the rituals and performances of the Mardi Gras Indians.
When Morton laid out his theory of jazz, he noted that “jazz is based on strictly music” and said that it used ideas drawn from operas, symphonies, and overtures: “There is nothing finer than jazz music,” he said, “because it comes from everything of the finest class music.” When these interviews were first issued for sale on records in 1947, the notes by art critic Rudi Blesh that accompanied them went to some pains to explain that Jelly Roll was attempting to confront the prejudice against non-European-based music that was widespread in 1938 (and remains even today in many music departments and conservatories), as well as to mock the then-popular urge to make jazz more like classical music. Blesh went further and argued that by the 1940s classical music had itself become debased and commercial, and that the only truly serious music of the times was jazz:
Today, however, the divine right of “serious” music is growing a little thin. One famous conductor performs for animated motion picture cartoons; another plays fourth-rate imitations of syncopated boogie woogie in the films; while a Wagnerian tenor, the “greatest of our generation,” sings Tin Pan Alley trash on the radio. Today, questions that few dared ask ten short years ago are being asked. Where is the “art for art’s sake” of serious music, once so revered, now a saleable commodity of the music appreciation racket? Where in all contemporary “serious” music is to be found the hot, vital, revolutionary creativity of great jazz music? Where else is to be found the devotion that great jazz players, through decades of want and misunderstanding, have given us in their music?
