JELLY ROLL BLUES

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.