Review by Booklist Review
In 1938, musicologist Alan Lomax recorded hours of music and conversation with composer and bandleader Jelly Roll Morton for the Library of Congress. To Lomax, Morton was a "swashbuckling figure" who learned his trade in the colorful world of southern brothels and honky-tonks. Music historian Wald (Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, 2004; Dylan Goes Electric!, 2015) turns to Morton's Library recordings as a framework for exploring censored and suppressed aspects of early blues and jazz. The blues and jazz we are most familiar with, he writes, has been filtered "through layers of nostalgia and prudery." Lomax urged a sometimes-reluctant Morton to sing in the uninhibited style of his wilder days, and several songs from those sessions contain lyrics so explicit they were not released until the 1990s, including "Make Me a Pallet on the Floor." The song's filthy, rollicking, and hilarious story of illicit delight suggests that an entire history has been "obscured, ignored, and forgotten." In his thoughtful and exceedingly fun-to-read study, Wald brings this neglected history to light.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A cache of songs recorded by jazz great Jelly Roll Morton at the Library of Congress in 1938--which were shelved for more than 60 years due to their "coarse language"--provides a revealing window into the history of American popular music in the riveting latest from Wald (How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll). In close readings of the songs, which were released in the early 1990s, Wald examines how the "graphic" language in "Pallet on the Floor" reflected the lack of squeamishness about sex in early blues and jazz lyrics; how "Mamie's Blues," which borrowed from a song Morton heard from jazz pianist Mamie Desdunes, reveals the often-invisible influence of women on the genres; and how the extended narrative in Morton's 59-verse "Murder Ballad"--which pulled from Southern murder ballads but was mostly Morton's invention--highlights the improvisatory nature of jazz storytelling and its value in recording the histories of communities whose "ancestors were ignored or disparaged in written records." The author stitches together a dizzying amount of detail on Morton and other blues and jazz musicians, though he's careful to acknowledge the missing "voices that have been censored and suppressed" due to preservation issues, discrimination, and omission. It's a riveting deep dive into two great American art forms. (Apr.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Inspired by the central story of Jelly Roll Morton, Grammy Award-winning folk blues guitarist Wald (Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues) uncovers lyrics and backstories of the blues world that were redacted in their time. He joins the effort to analyze what was left out of mainstream historical blues accounts, foregrounding accounts of racism, forbidden songs, and misogynistic language. For example, there were multiple meanings for the common-in-blues terms "sporting," "crib," "booty," and "parlor," especially in the parlance of sex workers and those singing about them. Wald notes that the existence of the recording machine led to the substitution of refined lyrics for the middle-class mass market while different live versions remained. From alternative recordings to unexpurgated papers by folklorists at the Library of Congress and other repositories, this book exposes what some white song collectors misunderstood or misinterpreted rather than directly deleted. Wald also shows the significance of luminaries such as cornetist Buddy Bolden, Delta blues guitarist Sam Chatmon, W.C. Handy, and Louis Armstrong in preserving the oral culture and history of Black Americans and blues. VERDICT An insightful explication of how some blues songs were hidden and censored, with a revelatory oral history.--Frederick J. Augustyn Jr.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A pleasing--and often pleasingly salacious--stroll through the annals of American popular music. "If you don't leave my fucking man alone…I'll cut your throat and drink your fucking blood like wine." So runs a tune by Jelly Roll Morton (1890-1941), whose name contains a slang term for female genitalia. As music historian Wald, author of Dylan Goes Electric! and Escaping the Delta, notes, sexual terms abound in many distinctly American forms of music--even the word jazz itself, as Sidney Bechet, a ragtime musician, explained: "It used to be spelled Jass, which was screwing." Taking Greil Marcus' "old, weird America" several levels weirder, Wald evokes a world of barrelhouse piano and honky-tonks that would make the denizens of a Weimar cabaret blush, one in which musicians hesitated to make public the true names of the songs they played and where even the ballad "The Old Chisholm Trail" contained "1042 verses…of which 1040 weren't fit to print." Wald prints even the most unfit passages and traces popular ballads far beyond the points of origin delineated by scholars and song-chasers such as Alan Lomax. One case in point is a song that would eventually become known as "Winding Ball," its prurient lyrics circulated in near-samizdat format until the 1960s, even as a scholarly publication noted of those words that "most collectors know but do not print [them]." Along the way, Wald astutely analyzes the intermingling of ethnicity, gender, and social class that shaped popular music, pointing out that much scholarship ignores the fact that Black audiences "danced square dances and waltzes and sang 'She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain' and 'Danny Boy,'" even as white audiences gladly adopted music born of "the raw speech of saloons, work gangs, and prison." An illuminating, deeply researched study of roots music, decidedly not suitable for work. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
