Jelly

Among those who love the traditional blues, a century-old New Orleans number has been called the most beautiful ever recorded. Jazz great Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton., who put it on wax in 1939, said at the time, “This is the first blues I no doubt heard in my life.” And he did it up proud, just right, with his own voice and keyboard.
Jelly Roll was a proud man himself, and gifted too, of course, though he was not what most would consider a gentleman.
Precocious Ferd Morton, at age 14, had forsaken a comfortable Creole family life in early 20th century New Orleans to play the piano in a brothel. And afterward, in maturity, he was very much at home in various urban tenderloins.
His very nickname and his signature blues – “I’m the winin’ boy” -- reeked of raunch,
He was vain, vulgar and dissolute. His music grew out of the rowdy school of “shake-that-thing,” yet at the same time it demonstrated a God-given talent for making hot, swinging, foot-tapping, disciplined hits that still live.
He called this particular tune “Mamie’s Blues,” for Mamie Desdumes, a bawdyhouse pianist in New Orleans at the turn of the century. “She hardly could play anything else.” he said, “but she could really play this number.”
It is actually quite simple, spare in notes and in lyrics:
“2:19 done took my baby away. . . .
2:19 took my babe away. . . .
2:17 bring her back some day. . . .
Stood on the corner with her feets just soakin’ wet (her feets was wet}. . . .
Stood on the corner with her feet . . . soakin’ wet. . . ..
Beggin’. . . .each and ev’ry man she met. . . . .
If you can’t give a dollar, give me a lousy dime. . . .
Iif you can’t give a dollar, give me a lousy dime. . . .
I want to feed that hungry man of mine.”
So what’s so great about that? Well, of course you need to hear Jelly Roll Morton’s rich, delicate notes weaving in and out, around and behind the words. You need also to relish his pregnant pauses.
Beyond that I can’t really explain, except to say this: To this day, after 70 years of collecting jazz music, now and then the lyrics and chords of “Mamie’s Blues” will still somehow pop up again, for no particular reason, in my old gray head.
They’re most welcome.
I hope, by the way, that you recognized a special theme in the lyrics. “Mamie’s Blues” is one of many old “railroad songs” of jazz and country music.
Eighty to a hundred years ago, before airlines and before cars-in-every-garage, trips of any distance were by rail And trains came to have a special meaning for certain folks yearning for a more free and prosperous life -- African-Americans generally and jazz musicians specifically in the delta South.
While the South may have given birth to jazz and the blues, it wasn’t celebrated for enriching its musicians. The great Louis Armstrong for a time worked coal carts. Buddy Bolden had a barber shop. Bunk Johnson drove trucks. King Oliver was a butcher, Johnny St. Cyr a plasterer.
A prominent archivist of jazz music, Alan Lomax. a biographer and confidant of Morton, has written of how word went out to people of color in those days of opportunities to be found elsewhere. A prime attraction was Chicago:
“Man, Chicago is the money town,” the word was, “and listen, you can be a man in Chicago.”
So Jelly Roll Morton joined a mass migration to money and freedom – well, relative freedom. “In five years,” Lomax wrote, “a half-million Negroes moved north, one-tenth of them settling in Chicago’s south side.”
And Morton, though he always insisted that he was “Creole” -- never “Negro” or “black” -- nevertheless used a few lines of the blues to make a racial dictinction between Chicago and New Orleans:
“Michigan water taste like sherry wine,” he sang, “Mississippi water taste like turpentine.”
Altogether this flawed, remarkable man had a notable career in New Orleans, Chicago, New York and elsewhere, including Los Angeles, where he died July 10, 1941.
By then he was basically broke and alone. Nobody knew for sure how old he was, for his birth date had never been verified.
Didn’t matter. He’d made his mark.