[MUSIC] [MUSIC] Welcome back everyone. For the next couple of weeks, we will take a journey along the blues highway, Highway 61, and we will visit three cities that really laid the foundation for rock and roll, especially in the early 1950s. Now, this is before the true rock and roll era, but it is important for us to understand what came before. What set the stage for the music, the development of the music that became rock and roll. The three cities are New Orleans, Chicago and Memphis. So let's call this a tale of three cities. New Orleans is the city of jazz. The city of Mardi Gras. Here's a map of the entertainment district and all the great historic places spread out throughout. Bourbon Street is the main tourist street, if you haven't been there yet. I don't know what more to say about New Orleans. It has such a rich tradition when it comes to music, and food, and culture, but especially music. Then of course, we also need to remember it was hit by one of the deadliest weather disasters in US history in 2005, Hurricane Katrina, of course. One thing is for certain, New Orleans has made tremendous idiosyncratic contributions to rock and roll. Now I say idiosyncratic because New Orleans is a unique and peculiar place. A great melting pot of culture. Its musical contributions have been mainly with jazz and rhythm and blues music. Jazz as early as 1902 and R&B in the 1950s. It was and continues to be a great melting pot of music from all sorts of traditions. Now it's hard to decide where to begin when discussing the things that influenced rock and roll, especially when it comes to jazz. In this class though, we're going to begin with a guy named Jelly Roll Morton. His real name was Ferdinand LaMothe. He claimed to have invented jazz. Now is that confidence or arrogance? In my view, it's not just one person who invented jazz. There are plenty of people who deserve some of the credit. Morton, however, may have made jazz more popular. He may have made it sound different from what had existed before. But as the inventor, I don't know. He claimed that at least and there is some substantiation. One fact his Jelly Roll Blues was the first published jazz composition coming out as sheet music in 1915. Now Morton was an interesting musician. He often played the melody of a tune with his right thumb, while sounding harmony above these notes with other fingers of the right hand. This added a rustic or out of tune sort of sound. His style eventually was developed into what is known as stride piano. And we'll hear more of that later. In the Big Band era, this song we're going to hear, the King Porter Stomp, was a big hit for Fletcher Henderson's band, and it ended up becoming a standard tune played by virtually all of the major big bands. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC]. Black Bottom Stomp features many of Jelly Roll Morton's signature composition styles all in one tune. It has built in breaks, stop time phrases, rhythmically lively themes, frequent contrasts of phrases and patterns and a stomping trio section. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] From the age of 12, Jelly Roll Morton made his primary living by playing piano and singing baudy songs in houses of prostitution. Yes! In the so called sporting houses of New Orleans. Now here's the song, Jelly Roll Blues and something to think about while you listen to it. It's about his nick name, there are two stories about that. The first one is that he really liked cakes stuffed with jam, the pastries called jelly rolls. The second is that as a piano player at houses of prostitution, he sang songs with smutty, no, let's be honest about it, filthy lyrics. And he got the nickname because jelly roll was a slang term for female genitalia. I'll let you choose which one to believe. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] In later years, Jelly Roll Morton lived in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. He was recorded by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress. When we come back, we'll talk about probably the most popular musician ever from New Orleans. Louis Armstrong. [BLANK_AUDIO]
