Scholar Elijah Wald investigates Jelly Roll Morton, rap, and the tinted lens of history at Tulane lecture

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Author and musician Elijah Wald discusses Jelly Roll Morton and how pop culture history is written March 20, at Tulane University. (Sandrine Sheon)
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on March 11, 2014 at 7:33 PM, updated March 11, 2014 at 8:14 PM

How many steps does it take to connect Jelly Roll Morton to rap? What would the history of African-American popular music look like if we imagined its culmination not in the development of jazz or rock 'n' roll, but hip-hop? What attitudes, trends and even technology shape the way we decide what gets top billing in our cultural history?

These are among the questions that scholar Elijah Wald plans to bring up Thursday, March 20, when he gives the third annual Sylvia Frey lecture at Tulane University's Freeman Auditorium, a talk titled "Singers of Tail: Jelly Roll Morton, the Blues, and the Silences of History." Wald will use the iconic Storyville jazz architect's extensive Library of Congress sessions -- nine hours of interviews and performance, recorded in 1938 -- as a jumping-off point, to explore the way black music has been documented in America, and what less-told stories an alternate way of looking at that may reveal.

A musician, former Boston Globe music reporter and 2002 Grammy winner for his liner notes to a box set celebrating the pioneering folk and blues label Arhoolie Records, Wald has written more than 10 books on North American music, as well as (according to his website) more than a thousand articles. At first glance, his bibliography is an eclectic list. He's written a history of the dozens, the snappy black American insult-trading tradition; "Escaping the Delta," an examination of blues music through the lens of Robert Johnson; "Narcocorrido," a study of the contemporary Mexican balladry that chronicles the drug trade; "How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll," an alternate history of American pop music; and most recently of note the autobiography "The Mayor of MacDougal Street," co-written with its subject Dave van Ronk, which provided the core source material for the Coen Brothers' 2013 film "Inside Llewyn Davis."

The choice of topics seems extraordinarily diverse, within the bounds of popular music. But there is a discernible through line, and it seems to be a fascination with the subjectivity of the historical record: who tells the story, in what context and for what reason.

"Essentially, what my talk is about is how little we know about the realities of history back then, but how bad a mistake we're making if we think that what survives on record is what was really there. Because what was really there was alive, and what survives on record is what middle-class white people recorded," Wald said.  

Other affecting factors, he said, are distinct even within that. Some of those doing the recording were folklorists, hoping to capture the essence of a vernacular culture. Some were from record companies, aiming to wax a hit.

"Everything goes through the filter," he said. 

"And if we want to understand what black culture used to be like, part of that is undoing that filter. The fact that we have 2,000 records that tell us one thing doesn't mean that what those 2,000 records represent is what black culture was. It wouldn't matter if there were 5 million: They would have gone through the filter."

There's a moment during the Library of Congress sessions, Wald noted, where you can hear the filter in action. Up until that point, Morton's language has been clean.

"There's one song where he starts to sing a dirty verse and then cuts it off, and Lomax says no, no you can go ahead, but he doesn't. And then there's clearly a click moment, a moment that we don't hear in between record changes, where Alan Lomax sits him down and says, Look, I want to hear the real whorehouse music, with all the dirty words. And from then on, he never again sings a blues that doesn't have dirty words."

Listen to Jelly Roll Morton's "Winin' Boy Blues," which has a lot of dirty words.

In the song Wald's referring to, Morton sings a verse replacing a slang term for a woman's anatomy with the word "cabbage." After that "click moment," he goes ahead and uses the R-rated word. Has Jelly Roll Morton been convinced to let his hair down and play Lomax the real stuff? Or has he picked up on what Lomax thinks is the "real stuff," and modified his performance to accommodate?

"My first reaction to that is, OK, that's the real verse and he was cleaning it up before, because you're at the Library of Congress and you're not going to say (expletive). My second reaction is, I don't know, maybe 'cabbage' was funnier and that's how he would do it in a black club, but here were these white people and they liked to hear black people talk dirty, so for them, he would do (expletive)."

It's impossible to be sure of the exact tone of Morton and Lomax's interaction during those sessions, and how it informed what got on tape in the end. One key thing, though, was that it was a lot. With the Library of Congress's extensive resources, Morton and Lomax could go on and on, filling discs with chatter and music that ultimately offers a much more thorough document. In contrast, early field recorders could travel with only a limited number of discs; they had to self-edit, and the editing choices they made probably had a great deal to do with what kind of music they wanted to hear, or what kind of music was considered important at the time.

And, to revisit the role of rap, it was only due to the trends of the day that those particular performers were recorded in the field at all. A slightly different agenda might have created an alternate narrative -- which, looking back from the right angle, can be pieced together. The rhythmic, unaccompanied patter of the dozens, considered part of the roots of hip-hop, for example (his own book on the dozens, Wald said, was inspired by elements of the Library of Congress sessions) weren't cataloged in real time as highly significant.

"When we thought of African-American culture as jazz, or as blues, the people who were just reciting stuff that didn't have any music to it might be kind of fun, but wasn't 'important,'" Wald said.

"If you go back over everything you had before and say, 'Where did this come from?' perhaps considering rap as an endpoint," he said, "the past looks very different than when we were looking for the roots of blues, or the roots of jazz."

"History is what is important to us from the past," he said. "It's not necessarily what was in the past."