Elijah Wald: Jelly Roll Blues

I learned about Jelly Roll Morton in a jazz history class that I audited at Vassar College. I knew that he had excellent piano skills, particular his striking rendition off “Maple Leaf Rag.” I didn’t know, however, he was a blues singer with raunchy lyrics. In Jelly Roll Blues, Elijah Wald discovered Morton’s censored songs through recordings of interviews with John A. Lomax. These records are available in the Library of Congress. “The Dirty Dozen” is an example Morton had performed:

Oh, you dirty motherfucker,
You old cocksucker,
You dirty son of a bitch.
You’re a bastard, you’re everything,
And your mammy don’t wear no drawers.…

Said, look out bitch, you make me mad,
I’ll tell you ’bout the puppies that your sister had,
Oh, it was a fad.
She fucked a hog, she fucked a dog,
I know the dirty bitch would fuck a frog,
’Cause your mammy don’t wear no drawers.

Maybe I was not too familiar with the people at that time; therefore, I could not follow everything Wald had written. His writing was a bit hard to comprehend for me. Nevertheless, I learned that Morton was as hard as a gangster rapper almost a century before rap was founded.