A bestselling music historian follows Jelly Roll Morton on a journey through the hidden worlds & forbidden songs of early blues & jazz.InJelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs & Hidden Histories,Elijah Waldtakes readers on a journey into the hidden & censored world of early blues & jazz, guided by the legendary New Orleans pianistJelly Roll Morton. Morton became nationally famous as a composer & bandleader in the1920s, but got his start twenty years earlier, entertaining customers in the city’s famous bordellos & singing rough blues in Gulf Coast honky-tonks. He recorded an oral history of that time in1938, but the most distinctive songs were hidden away for over fifty years, because the language & themes were as wild & raunchy as anything in gangsta rap.Those songs inspiredWaldto explore how much other history had been locked away & censored, & this book is the result of that quest. Full of previously unpublished lyrics & stories, it paints a new & surprising picture of the dawn of American popular music, when jazz & blues were still the private, after-hours music of the Black “sporting world.” It gives new insight into familiar figures likeBuddy Bolden&Louis Armstrong, & introduces forgotten characters likeReady Money, the New Orleans sex worker & pickpocket who ended up owning one of the largest Black hotels on the West Coast.Revelatory & fascinating, these songs & stories provide an alternate view of Black culture at the turn of the twentieth century, when a new generation was shaping lives their parents could not have imagined & art that transformed popular culture around the world—the birth of a joyous, angry, desperate, loving, & ferociously funny tradition that resurfaced in hip-hop & continues to inspire young artists in a new millennium.