Join Bird in Hand and The Ivy Bookshop for a concert-conversation, a performance taking us through the world described in Jelly Roll Blues, the new book from music historian Elijah Wald!
20 years in the making, Jelly Roll Blues follows Jelly Roll Morton on a journey through the hidden worlds and forbidden songs of early blues and jazz, inspired by an oral history that Jelly Roll recorded in 1938, which was censored for more than 60 years before it was finally released by the Library of Congress in the early aughts.
This music performance and dialogue will take us through the earliest years of blues and jazz, and the ways that music was different when it was an oral art in Black communities, before it was commodified for sale outside those communities on sheet music and recordings.
Elijah Wald is a musician and author of over a dozen books, including Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, The Dozens: A History of Rap’s Mama, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll: An Alternative History of Popular Music, and the bestselling Dylan Goes Electric! He has a PhD in ethnomusicology and sociolinguistics and a Grammy for production and liner notes. He lives in Philadelphia.