
Jelly Roll Blues
Censored Songs and Hidden Histories
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Narrated by:
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Mela Lee
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By:
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Elijah Wald
About this listen
A bestselling music historian follows Jelly Roll Morton on a journey through the hidden worlds and forbidden songs of early blues and jazz.
In Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories, Elijah Wald takes listeners on a journey into the hidden and censored world of early blues and jazz, guided by the legendary New Orleans pianist Jelly Roll Morton. Morton became nationally famous as a composer and bandleader in the 1920s, but got his start twenty years earlier, entertaining customers in the city’s famous bordellos and singing rough blues in Gulf Coast honky-tonks. He recorded an oral history of that time in 1938, but the most distinctive songs were hidden away for over fifty years, because the language and themes were as wild and raunchy as anything in gangsta rap.
Those songs inspired Wald to explore how much other history had been locked away and censored, and this book is the result of that quest. Full of previously unpublished lyrics and stories, it paints a new and surprising picture of the dawn of American popular music, when jazz and blues were still the private, after-hours music of the Black "sporting world." It gives new insight into familiar figures like Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong, and introduces forgotten characters like Ready Money, the New Orleans sex worker and pickpocket who ended up owning one of the largest Black hotels on the West Coast.
Revelatory and fascinating, these songs and 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 and art that transformed popular culture around the world—the birth of a joyous, angry, desperate, loving, and ferociously funny tradition that resurfaced in hip-hop and continues to inspire young artists in a new millennium.
©2024 Elijah Wald (P)2024 Hachette BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“I grew up on the old blues: heard it, felt it, danced to it, but a lot of people didn’t hear the real stuff, because somebody else was controlling the narrative. This book is searching out those voices, keeping them from being lost, and helping to transfer that ancestral information to a new generation.”—Taj Mahal
“Elijah Wald has done it again. Both a compelling study of blues pioneer and musical genius Jelly Roll Morton's roots and song craft as well as a meticulously researched history of early twentieth-century, ostensibly ‘taboo’ popular music culture, Jelly Roll Blues offers a clear-eyed exploration of Black modernist era vernacular music that pushed the boundaries of social propriety. This is a book that takes seriously graphic forms of cultural expression as articulations of human desire and as complex manifestations of social and economic lifeworlds shaped by racial and gender pressures and inequalities. A deft archival historian, Wald continues to challenge and expand what we know as well as what we think we know about the early blues.”—Daphne Brooks, professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music at Yale University and author of Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound
"This book is riveting. Elijah Wald brings the world of the New Orleans demi-monde to raucous life through his excavation of the censored lyrics of early jazz and blues. Moreover, in showing how women participated in this musical culture—as musicians in their own right, audience participants, and prostitutes enjoying some leisure time after hours—he reveals a world scarcely glimpsed before and all but erased from history. What Wald recovers here borders on the miraculous."—Emily Landau, author of Spectacular Wickedness: Sex, Race, and Memory in Storyville, New Orleans
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Story
Betty Pack was charming, beautiful, and intelligent - and she knew it. As an agent for Britain's MI6 and then America's OSS during World War II, these qualities proved crucial to her success. This is the remarkable story of this "Mata Hari from Minnesota" ( Time) and the passions that ruled her tempestuous life - a life filled with dangerous liaisons and death-defying missions vital to the Allied victory.
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Fascinating
- By Salui on 11-30-16
By: Howard Blum
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Vertigo
- The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany
- By: Harald Jähner
- Narrated by: Sam Peter Jackson
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Out of the ashes of the First World War, Germany launched an unprecedented political project: its first democratic government. The Weimar Republic, named for the city where it was established, endured for only fifteen years before it was toppled by the insurgent Nazi Party in 1933. In Vertigo, prizewinning historian Harald Jähner tells the Republic’s full story, capturing a nation caught in a whirlwind of uncertainty and struggling toward a better future.
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How. Did It Happen?
- By Bettyb on 10-19-24
By: Harald Jähner
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This Isn't Happening
- Radiohead's "Kid A" and the Beginning of the 21st Century
- By: Steven Hyden
- Narrated by: Angelo Di Loreto
- Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1999, as the end of an old century loomed, five musicians entered a recording studio in Paris without a deadline. Their band was widely recognized as the best and most forward-thinking in rock, a rarefied status granting them the time, money, and space to make a masterpiece. But Radiohead didn't want to make another rock record. Instead, they set out to create the future.
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Amazing read but…
- By Alexis Feldman on 06-01-21
By: Steven Hyden
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The Library
- A Fragile History
- By: Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen
- Narrated by: Sean Barrett
- Length: 15 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Famed across the known world, jealously guarded by private collectors, built up over centuries, destroyed in a single day, ornamented with gold leaf and frescoes, or filled with bean bags and children’s drawings - the history of the library is rich, varied, and stuffed full of incident.
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Stays on point
- By Alex on 04-29-23
By: Andrew Pettegree, and others
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Impossible City
- Paris in the Twenty-First Century
- By: Simon Kuper
- Narrated by: Tim Frances
- Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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When Simon Kuper left London for Paris in his early thirties, he wasn't planning to make a permanent move. Paris, however, had other plans. Kuper has grown middle-aged there, eaten the croissants, seen his American wife through life-threatening cancer, taken his children to countless football matches on freezing Saturday mornings in the city's notorious banlieues, and in 2015 lived through two terrorist attacks on their neighborhood. Over two decades of becoming something of a cantankerous Parisian himself, Kuper has watched the city change.
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Excellent inside view
- By TMD on 11-24-24
By: Simon Kuper
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Hell's Princess
- The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men
- By: Harold Schechter
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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In the pantheon of serial killers, Belle Gunness stands alone. She was the rarest of female psychopaths, a woman who engaged in wholesale slaughter, partly out of greed but mostly for the sheer joy of it. Between 1902 and 1908, she lured a succession of unsuspecting victims to her Indiana “murder farm". Some were hired hands. Others were well-to-do bachelors. All of them vanished without a trace.
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Can a book about a serial killer be entertaining?
- By Lori Hanson on 05-08-18
By: Harold Schechter
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Who's Your Founding Father?
- One Man’s Epic Quest to Uncover the First, True Declaration of Independence
- By: David Fleming
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1819 John Adams came across a stunning story in his hometown Essex Register that he breathlessly described to his political frenemy Thomas Jefferson as “one of the greatest curiosities and one of the deepest mysteries that ever occurred to me…entitled the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. The genuine sense of America at that moment was never so well expressed before, nor since.”
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I listened TWICE
- By DavidF on 01-05-25
By: David Fleming
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Texas Rising
- The Epic History of the Lone Star Republic and the Rise of the Texas Rangers, 1836-1846
- By: Stephen L. Moore
- Narrated by: P.J. Ochlan
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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The official nonfiction companion to the History Channel dramatic series Texas Rising (produced by the same team that made the record-breaking Hatfields and McCoys): a thrilling new narrative history of the Texas Revolution and the rise of the legendary Texas Rangers who patrolled the violent western frontier.
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Who chooses these bad narrators?
- By Amazon Customer on 02-07-18
By: Stephen L. Moore
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The Rest Is History
- From Ancient Rome to Ronald Reagan—History's Most Curious Questions, Answered
- By: Goalhanger Podcasts Ltd
- Narrated by: Tom Holland, Dominic Sandbrook
- Length: 11 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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This entertaining companion to the massively popular history podcast tackles everything from Alexander the Great to Agatha Christie, the Wars of the Roses to Watergate—with a unique blend of wit, wisdom, and good old-fashioned banter. Featuring an introduction from podcast hosts Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, this book cleverly demonstrates that the past—from modern to ancient and every time in between—is both closer to us than we might realize and bafflingly strange, all at once.
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History is fun!
- By Brent Orrell on 03-10-24
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The Music Never Stops
- What Putting on 10,000 Shows Has Taught Me About Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Magic
- By: Peter Shapiro, Dean Budnick - contributor
- Narrated by: Andrew Eiden, Peter Shapiro
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Peter Shapiro is perhaps the most notable independent concert promoter since Bill Graham. He owned the legendary Wetlands in Tribeca and has gone onto much bigger things, including Brooklyn Bowl (NYC, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, and Nashville), the Capitol Theatre in Portchester, producing U2 3D, and promoting the Grateful Dead's 50th anniversary tour ("Fare Thee Well") featuring the Core Four and Trey Anastasio... and so much more. In The Music Never Stops, Shapiro shares the inside story of how he became a tremendous powerhouse in the music industry
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The music may stop but it always comes back
- By Robbie Boggs on 02-05-24
By: Peter Shapiro, and others
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Life with the Afterlife
- 13 Truths I Learned about Ghosts
- By: Amy Bruni, Julie Tremaine
- Narrated by: Amy Bruni, Christine Lakin
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Amy Bruni, co-star of Kindred Spirits and one of the world's leading paranormal investigators, has learned a lot about ghosts over her years of research and first-hand experience. Now, in Life with the Afterlife, she shares the insight she has gleaned and how it has shaped her unique approach to interacting with the spirits of the dead and those who encounter them.
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This is a great book!
- By R. Dess on 11-21-20
By: Amy Bruni, and others
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The Mayor of MacDougal Street
- A Memoir
- By: Dave Van Ronk, Elijah Wald
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 10 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Dave Van Ronk was one of the founding figures of the 1960s folk revival, but he was far more than that. A pioneer of modern acoustic blues, a fine songwriter and arranger, a powerful singer, and one of the most influential guitarists of the ’60s, he was also a marvelous storyteller, a peerless musical historian, and one of the most quotable figures on the Village scene. The Mayor of MacDougal Street is a firsthand account by a major player in the social and musical history of the ’50s and ’60s.
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This is what we missed out on!
- By Kazuhiko on 03-29-14
By: Dave Van Ronk, and others
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When You Wonder, You're Learning
- Mister Rogers' Enduring Lessons for Raising Creative, Curious, Caring Kids
- By: Gregg Behr, Ryan Rydzewski, Joanne Rogers - foreword
- Narrated by: Gary Tiedemann, Molly Parker Myers
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Playful and practical, When You Wonder, You're Learning introduces a new generation of families to the lessons of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. By exploring the science behind the iconic television program, the book reveals what Fred Rogers called the “tools for learning”: skills and mindsets that scientists now consider essential. These tools - curiosity, creativity, collaboration, and more - have been shown to boost everything from academic learning to children’s well-being, and they benefit kids of every background and age.
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Insights into learning for all ages
- By Chris Shipley on 05-15-23
By: Gregg Behr, and others
What listeners say about Jelly Roll Blues
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Jaded Buddha
- 08-24-24
Absolutely top tier!
Fascinating, gripping and built upon deep scholarship. I’d highly recommended this book. Wonderful performance too. I should note that there are a lot of adult themes/language, so caveat lector!!
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- Jason Balentine
- 05-20-24
Not just a Jelly Roll biography
A great telling of the era & oral traditions. And, kudos for the NON-censorship. I’m not sure how this story could have been properly conveyed otherwise.
Excellent narration on a difficult but necessary sharing of this history! As a huge music lover, I learned a lot.
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