>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. >> Anne McLean: Good evening. I'm Anne McLean from the Library's Music Division. Welcome to Jelly Roll Morton in Washington, a conversation with John Szwed, a Library of Congress jazz scholar, and Steve Winick from our American Folk Life Center. John Szwed's residency at the library as a jazz scholar has been made possible through the generous support of the Reeva and David Logan Foundation. And let me say that I hope you will check out some of the other great jazz offerings we have this year in our programs that have been underwritten by the Foundation. Professor Szwed is adjunct senior research scholar at Columbia University and formally professor of music and director of the Center for Jazz Studies there. He's also an emeritus professor at Yale. Among his critically-acclaimed books, as you can see in the little program handed out, his last year's Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, and others that include a notable book on Jelly Roll Morton, Dr. Jazz, which won a Grammy award. Steve Winick is a writer and editor at the Library's American Folk Life Center and holds MA and PhD degrees in folklore and folk life from the University of Pennsylvania. He's very kindly standing in this evening for the Music Division's jazz curator, Larry Applebaum. Steve is a most appropriate speaker tonight not only in terms of his knowledge and background, but because the Music Division shares with the American Folk Life Center a proud connection to Jelly Roll Morton's historic 1938 Library of Congress recording session here with Alan Lomax. That history is part of the lore of the library and it's a glimpse of the seminal figure in our nation's cultural history. As you'll hear tonight, Lomax recorded Morton in long, fascinating conversations at the piano on our stage, a marathon nearly month-long session where you can sometimes hear his foot gently tapping the floor of the Coolidge Stage. So on display tonight we have the box set of the elegant and comprehensive Rounder Records reissue of that recording session. The Folk Life has leant to us a crate, and I'll let Steve tell you a little bit about that. It has a history. And with these artifacts, we have several manuscripts in Morton's hand out in our table. So afterwards you can take a look. These are manuscripts drawn from the Music Division's Jelly Roll Morton collection. We have 127 copyright deposits of his music, including nine holograph manuscripts and several printed scores. So you can see a couple of his penciled notes and their copyright authentications for a glimpse of Morton the businessman, as well as the musician. So now let me turn this over to our two speakers. Please welcome John Szwed and Steve Winick. [ Applause ] >> Stephen Winick: Well, thank you. Oh yeah. >> John Szwed: Thank you. >> Stephen Winick: My clip is bending a little. There we go. Welcome everyone. Thanks. Thanks for coming. So I will say that starting out and introducing me as coming from the Folk Life Center, and John as a jazz scholar, is a wonderful and both true things to say. But it obscures a little bit of the connection that we have. Because John is also a folklorist and we're very proud to claim him within the discipline. And when I trained at the University of Pennsylvania, it was in a department that was largely built on John's reputation among a few others, because he had been a professor there. But he had moved on from that department by the time I got there. But he came back and taught as a visiting professor, and that's how I first met John about 25 years ago. I was a graduate student and he was a professor there at the University of Pennsylvania in the department of folklore and folk life. So John is, in addition to being one of the great jazz scholars and jazz biographers really, if you read the books that he's written about Sun Ra and Miles Davis and Billie Holiday -- just amazing work that John does in digging up these facts about people and also just their stories, the way in which they connect with us today and with the music. Because he's a musician and musically literate too, and that just informs everything that he does. So you know, John has now dug up some interesting new stuff about Jelly Roll Morton in Washington, and it is kind of interesting that he was here for about five years, and very little is known about what he did here, except for the Library of Congress sessions which everybody knows about. But apart from that, nobody hears much about Jelly Roll's time. So set the scene for us, John. Who was Jelly Roll Morton in 1935? What would people have known about him? Who would be looking for him? >> John Szwed: Well, I was going to say I suppose it's not surprising that you fade from fame, but it was 25 years -- sorry, 10 years after he had recordings that were turning up everywhere, including the soundtracks and things. Maybe, I don't know, do people disappear that fast? Maybe they do. Maybe they disappear instantly after one recording, one appearance on television. But Morton -- I was thinking all the people I've written about had something in common. Either the facts of their lives were wrong, or they were so well-hidden. I mean, you can't be even more hidden than Sun Ra who said he wasn't human. [Laughs] >> Stephen Winick: Right. Right. >> John Szwed: And he would give me reasons, like quoting heavily from the Bible of all things. "Man born of woman," you know -- we don't need to get into that. Or my favorite, "You see, if you're born from the reproductive system, you're going to die. But if you're born in the creative system," whatever that is, it's up to you. So I found that fascinating and also found it fascinating -- what shall I say? A kind of laziness of writers who don't use libraries. And when I was working on Billie Holiday -- this is off the subject but it's not, I think. Billie Holiday's original draft to her autobiography was just sitting there. And better than that -- not better than that, but equally good was the first woman to write about her, the first person to write about here. And by the way, she committed suicide in downtown DC, but that's another story. The entire text, 800 pages, was sitting in the library and no one ever looked at it. There was no -- >> Stephen Winick: Wow. >> John Szwed: I get the feeling every time I'm in this library, I mean, sometimes I just wander around and copyright. I'm looking at [inaudible]. It's not surprising to see that she had written -- written? Everybody had written John Henry. I think there were 190 copyrights for it. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: But she had written some minor hit songs, one called Jelly, Look What You Done Done To Me, which was a good seller in its time. I said, "Wow, you know, if you stay in the copyright offices, keep flipping those cards over." >> Stephen Winick: Right. Was she referring to Jelly Roll in that song, you think? >> John Szwed: I think she's referring to syphilis. >> Stephen Winick: There you go. [ Laughter ] >> John Szwed: Sorry to put it bluntly. [Laughs] But I understand that most of us have things about our lives that are not known by other people. And even if we had to have our families represent us after our passing, we would say, "Wow, you're asking the wrong people. You need somebody else." I understand that. But there are some kind of famous or almost famous people that you wonder why the distortions are so great and why they repeat themselves over and over again. I mean, what I first heard about Jelly Roll Morton as a young person was that he was an out-of-day, tired figure that nobody would take seriously. And let's see, it was within ten years of his death I was thinking, something like that. And that he was a braggart, boaster, liar. So that was in the story. Duke Ellington who had nothing bad to say about anybody picked on Morton. But Morton had an answer for that, and he said that if you paid to have people say those things for you, it was okay. So it was more than okay. The more money you had to buy someone to say that you're wonderful, that was better yet. But if you say it, you're in trouble. Now times have changed and maybe it's okay now to say how wonderful you are and lie about yourself, you know. >> Stephen Winick: I mean, it is true that most musicians now have somebody whose job is to say how great they are. And you know, if you're a reviewer or you're writing about it or you work in a library that puts on concerts, you'll get these blurbs from people that are outrageously inflated and perhaps that was the kind of language that he was using. But you know, it was par for the course in a sense. >> John Szwed: Then when you see the interviews with these musicians much later, like Danny Willaker from New Orleans who played with him, he said -- I mean, those heart shifter remarks close those shoes -- I forget what kind of shoes they were. That Cadillac, that Rolls-Royce, those diamond rings, those dogs, [inaudible] they were real. And he was what he said he was. He was a gentleman who happened to have a name that was slightly obscene, but you know, that's show biz. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: And I'm a very serious guy. So what struck me is I got past the idea that this music sounded like it was something from a cartoon from the '30's or '40's or whatever, that there was something really complicated going on with it. And I thought this guy's got to be more interesting than I thought. And I wondered how many times other people went through that same thing. Well, in DC, that's exactly who went. They showed up and I brought along things I picked up recently. Sorry that they're not in [inaudible] form. But this one for example. Before Lomax had ever heard of him, and I found only one person anywhere who seems to have mentioned him being here before this. But the Washington Daily News on the 23rd of June 1936, which he would have just been coming to town -- the headline actually reads "Networks will air Senator Barkley's speech tonight at 9:00." And then it goes on with the rest. Then it was the Republican convention was the only thing. >> Stephen Winick: Was Barkley a Republican? >> John Szwed: No. So soon we forget. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: Anyway, down below here, let's see. A footnote, 1870. So the vice president of the United States during the Harry S. Truman administration. Anyway, the weird headline, and then there's a subhead. "Ferdinand Jelly Roll Morton, one of the original bandsmen, invades Washington to start history of jazz program with WOL next week." And that has a nice write-up, a modern write-up about his background and the state of music at this time and what people in Washington would be listening to at this point. One of the old [inaudible] in Washington in the '50's, one time kind of the realm, really hot music, you might remember, he's Ferdinand Jelly Roll Morton, one of the first to play solo, the first man ever to make a hot recording for Victor. One of the first of a lot of things when popular music is spoken of. And he's moved down from New York to live. And Friday afternoon he walked into WOL and asked for an audition, but he didn't give his name. He just asked for a piano. A few bars in, [inaudible] said he was somebody. His name was asked and given and now he has a show. So now if you want to know where your president swing came from, you can hear Jelly Roll regularly. He goes on tonight at 8:30 and will be heard every night this week at times governed by Convention Broadcast. Next week he starts a series, this history of jazz, and it should make for good listening." So this is extraordinary. I mean, first of all, he walks in from out of nowhere and he's a has-been. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: They give him his own show and nightly. And frankly, how many black stars or non-stars have their own show? It's extraordinary. >> Stephen Winick: Well, and it's also somewhat extraordinary that you've found that now, given that a lot of research has been done on Jelly Roll and no one's come across this fact before. You don't find this in writings about Jelly Roll, that he had this radio show. So now one of the things you're interested in, you were just asking Matt Barton, the curator of recorded sound, if recordings of this show might exist. So it's another thing to look for in the library. >> John Szwed: That's true. I doubt it, because radio stations are notorious for throwing stuff out, especially discs that have been recorded on what, transcription discs? >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: The big ones. But who knows? The other thing is that he was doing the history of jazz. Now I was going to say no one knew what jazz was. They don't know now, because it's an undefinable phenomenon. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: There's chamber jazz, there's folk jazz and so on. It's like everything else. But he was going to talk with -- this is exactly the way he approached Lomax, he walked in and if I recall, the words were, "I'm Jelly Roll Morton. I'm the inventor of jazz and they're stealing my music." It was so absolutely true. I had a teacher who said, "What if you found a person who was a genius but 25% of what they said about themselves was lies? Would you still consider them a genius?" I said, "Yeah, for 75%, yeah." In his case, he could probably make that claim. For example, he copyrighted the first piece of music that's called jazz. That's getting close to being the first thing. He was old enough to be back there, and he was better than -- why not? But he also looked the part in some way. That was the interesting thing. When he arrived and parked in front of the library, which you could do in those days, and walked in, he was wearing a suit that from a distance looked really chic. But when you got close, it was raggedy. But he still had diamond rings on his hands. So there was some kind of security. >> Stephen Winick: Some kind of genteel poverty or -- yeah. I don't know how you'd describe it. >> John Szwed: When he had more money in New Orleans, in Chicago, when he was rather famous, he would make sure that when he arrived the week he was going to play, he would come and change suits. He would walk around town and then go change his clothes so he would come back out in another suit. Well, if people don't notice you after five or six times you go by in a couple hours and you have new clothes on all the time, they start to notice you. "Wasn't that the guy that came by with the blue suit on?" >> Stephen Winick: Right, right. >> John Szwed: And then he had these three dogs. And no musicians were traveling with dogs. He said, "Gentlemen always have dogs." I mean, why not, you know? >> Stephen Winick: But I mean, it all gets to something that we were talking about. You know, weirdly we were talking about Irving Goffman. But it all gets to the presentation of self. I mean, he's making a character and presenting that character sometimes differently to different audiences. So you mentioned for example that you know, in the interviews when he talks about his background, particularly in front of mostly white people, he tends to say, "My ancestors were French." But he also said to African American friends, "White people are stealing our music," right? >> John Szwed: Well actually his ancestors spoke French. It was Haitian French, but who's counting? >> Stephen Winick: Right. Well, some of them were French, undoubtedly. Yeah. >> Stephen Winick: He certainly was saying that he was a free person born from free people of color. And they were people who took a terrible beating in Reconstruction. And it was a lot to be dealt with. You know, they were sort of displaced in a way in America and historically displaced. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: So he's trying to pull in. But it's true. You can still see people saying, "Well, he was" -- I hate to get into it. But a show that won six Tony's, Jelly's Last Jam, is predicated on the idea that he hated himself and that he hated people of color. There's no evidence for that. I mean, it's just the opposite. Like I said, he called the band one night and said, "White people are stealing our music and we've got to organize." And so forth. I mean, I don't get it. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. Well, I mean I think -- so correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Alan's perspective, Alan Lomax's perspective, was not so much that he hated himself, but that he had kind of an inferiority complex and that's why he said things that sounded like they were exaggerated. Whereas other people said that he was a terrible egotist, which are kind of opposite. >> John Szwed: One sentence though, it was sentence that he said that, "Because I couldn't play certain things as a young man, I played new things to get around it." That can also be a statement about ingenuity and necessity is the mother of invention, so I've got it backwards, right? >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, right. Necessity is the mother. Right. But yeah, I mean that is true, that I would take it more as you've suggested that he was talking about his own ingenuity and how to get around certain technical things that he particularly wasn't good at. >> John Szwed: Who would walk into the Library of Congress -- >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: I want to tell my story. >> Stephen Winick: Right, if they had an inferiority complex. >> John Szwed: And he didn't know they were going to record him. Lomax didn't know. He had to go ask for special dispensation to compile a record. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> John Szwed: And set aside time. That doesn't sound like an insecure person. Sounds to me like a person who's feeling like his stuff is being stolen. And what's critical here is that -- how can I say this briefly? His best music was done in the time when popular music was more complicated than it was 12-15 years later. That sounds odd. It's like counter-evolutionary, but it's true. The songs were longer and they were multi-parted and they had scene setting verses that set up a refrain. And the scenes were shrunk and were shrinking in the late-'20's and particularly into the '30's. By the early '40's they were completely gone. You didn't have to say why this song, why this particular setting. It was just not necessary. So you could hear older New Orleans musicians saying of Louis Armstrong who became a world-class figure, say, "With all due respect, I don't think he could have played our music." I don't know if that's true or not. They're trying to say, "We had standards that they're not meeting anymore. They're doing something else." That was part of it. But he held onto those standards and he kept trying to do that stuff, these multi-parted pieces, these complex rhythm patterns that no one else was doing. And it was too old to be said to be creative. It was said to be strange at best and so on. And that was part of what was going on with that. >> John Szwed: I mean, we had talked about playing a clip that shows him doing some stuff that you know, most people could never do. Do you want to play that first selection? >> John Szwed: Yeah. One of these, it's a pre-electric recording. It was before they had the acoustics that they would have a couple years later, as you'll hear in a second. And it's a piece called New Orleans Joy, which is sometimes titled New Orleans Blues, which gets into confusion because he also had a tune called that. And it's a 1923 recording to be exact. He said that -- first of all he said jazz was not the thing, it was not a style of music per se. It was a methodology. That's not the word. He said, "It's what you do with it. It's what you bring to it." Which is a pretty sophisticated point of view I think. It gets you into the questions, is that really something really? He had his own standards for that and they were standards that were already dating in part. One of them was Breaks. Breaks is where the [inaudible] section drops out for a bit and the music keeps going. And that was a tune to dancers who at those moments would do special things. You know, they'd spin off of each other. It was like a free moment. That still occurs in jazz, but not that much. Another thing was what he called the Spanish tinge. The Spanish tinge is the only place I'll disagree with him. I think it should be called the African tinge. It's an additive rhythm. How can I say this quickly and mot make a fool of myself? Okay, most western music is even in a sense. It's one, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Or waltz, one, two, three, two, two, three. Or maybe you could do it one, two, three, one, two, three. But it's like they repeat. In additive rhythm you have something like three, three, two. Now that would be like this. Excuse me, my clapping chops are not up to standard here. Let's see. [ Clapping ] Slow it down. [ Clapping ] So it's three, three, hitting the first beat of the three, and then the first beat of two. So it has this kind of irregular feel, right? [ Clapping ] I used to play hand drums. [ Clapping ] Forget it. [ Laughter ] Now this is akin in some way to tango, to the clave in Latin music, and lots of other things. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: But it's also basic to early rock and roll. And you can hear it in very strange places. People say, well, it's New Orleans. It's coming from Mexico or something. But you can hear -- Jimmy Yancy was a blues player who was also a groundskeeper for the Chicago Cubs, or it could have been the White Sox. And he has this left hand that's playing this kind of tango thing, very slowly and languidly all the way with it. You can hear it in Bo Diddly's song Bo Diddly. You can hear it in Chuck what's-his-name's CC Rider. You can hear it everywhere. It's basic to -- oh, There Goes My Baby by The Drifters. And I try in every period -- There Goes My Baby. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, and the Bo Diddly beat is another version of the three, three, three, two. Yeah. >> John Szwed: Right. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> John Szwed: So the Spanish tinge he thought was basic. I thought it was a way of breaking with ragtime. And ragtime had been the first music craze in America. And everyone was rag crazy, literally. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: Massive hits. People were changing the clothing they were wearing to be able to dance and so and so. So he was trying to break with that and he's calling those people corny which he gets back in his face later on, right? He says, frankly, with the exception of Scott Joplin, who he considered was a superior composer, he thought the rest were hacks. He would even record their tunes to show that they weren't good. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. And of course, you're right. When scholars have studied that kind of rhythm, they find that it's associated with Latin music in the US through Cuban music a lot of the time. But of course it would have come through Haitian music as well and it is probably African in origin rather than Spanish. But he probably just thought it was Spanish because that was one of the communities that was playing it. >> John Szwed: It's found in the Caribbean in virtually every area. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: And what he's doing is historicizing popular music. And that's still not been done well. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: I mean, he's sort of saying, this isn't just popping up out of the air. These aren't pop-up stores. This is coming from a matrix of some sort, you know. They may be held by church people who had the same thing. You could hear that beat in some church groups and so on. >> Stephen Winick: Right. Yeah. So do we want to hear New Orleans Joys and let them -- >> John Szwed: Yeah. What I want you to hear is the Latin thing with the left hand which you'll recognize immediately. But about two-thirds of the way through, his right hand appears to go out of phase with this left. And critics for years have commented on this and said he got lost. Well, the problem with that is his left hand is perfectly right all the way. How he could be lost at only one hand? And the fact is when he reaches the end of his eight bars, he's back on the beat perfectly. This is so difficult to do. He didn't do it the next time he recorded it. And people who do it kind of fake it now, or they don't do it at all. But you'll hear very clearly that he's laying one rhythm on top of another, two-tiered rhythm which if I dare to say this without know it's true, Charles Ives about the same time was doing the same thing, one of his colleagues. >> Stephen Winick: So it's like being a drummer but also playing the melody at the same time in a way, because drummers have hand independence in their rhythm sometimes. >> John Szwed: So thinking about that -- how many play three against four? I don't know, I guess he can do it, yeah. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> John Szwed: Notice by the way that rap music is very primitive in its rhythm structure. Louis Armstrong was doing much more complicated things in 1924. I say that to rappers and they say, "That's corny." I say, "Do it. Sing three over four." >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: And don't mess up. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, right. Yeah, we're going to hear it. [ Music ] >> John Szwed: Even today in New Orleans you can hear that kind of loping piano. Here comes the passage I'm talking about. [ Music ] This is only two minutes and something long. [ Music ] >> Stephen Winick: Let along play it. You know, but the other thing is, it kind of shows why he would have this frustration about the level of skill and the perception of him. Because here he's a guy who recorded something that's so difficult to do that the natural assumption of people hearing it was he didn't know what he was doing; it was a mistake. You know? And that's got to be frustrating. >> John Szwed: Let's try one more, Black Bottom Stone from 1926 which is often brought up as an example of his orchestral stuff. He had a very orchestral approach to piano. You could hear a little flute thing going da-da-da-da-da-da-da, and your tubas and so on. This is less than three minutes long. It has two parts and it has three or four variations of the first part and two -- there are four total I supposed. The last was a much longer one. And you'll hear the Spanish tinge again. And by the way, there are other names for the Spanish tinge and its variations. One is the Charleston. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> John Szwed: You have to have a fixed beat to hear it again. You'll hear it in the -- let's see, what else? The tango base. And at the time, I think it was slow drag, the best I can tell from historical things. You can see the hip movement in that last one, right? The discordant repeat, it's almost a hip going to the left. So you'll hear that, but it will be coming very fast. The first part's in B flat and there's really something cool about this because it's 90-some bars and you don't hear a B flat chord anywhere in it until right at the end. And that produces a floating, cloudy quality. And then suddenly he comes crashing into the next part which is E flat, if I've got my memories right on this. It introduces new material. And the first time you hear them play together, the material is written out for them. And most of the rest is isn't, except they're throwing hints that the trumpet player's improvisation was written which is a completely believable point. What else should I say? There's a modulating interlude that changes keys. There's some collective improvisation which is classic New Orleans stuff. You know, they're all improvising at the same time and yet they're not making mistakes in this. And then what's really interesting to me is that there are six re-combinations of instruments in this, that is six things that are totally different. Banjo and drums, trumpet and something, and so on. And there are only seven musicians. So he's used six of the seven but always in a different way. What else? At the point near the end where you would expect it to -- what they used to call taking it home or taking it out -- they get loud, very heavily rhythmic and just steaming out. Instead, he drops the volume and everyone gets soft, which I'm going to guess he got from Latin type stuff where there was a lot of that going on. And then he goes to the out part where the drummer goes to a backbeat, like rock and roll, the two and the four which he hasn't been doing. The other interesting thing is the bass player is sometimes playing in two-beat and four-beat. That is the one-two, one-two, and he'll switch to one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. This is an RCA recording which is particularly good. And Danny Borker said it's because Jelly did what no white person would do: he went behind the glass which was the sacred shield. He said, "The bass sounds awful." And it did. So his bass parts sound way better than other people's. They sound almost modern. You know, its non-modern sensibility is going to sound old, but the complexity of this thing is just dazzling. So listen through this piece. It's got two themes, six different instrument combinations. What else should I say? Four varieties of rhythm, two-beat, four-beat, Charleston or Spanish and break. And the bass player is alternating. That's all out for two and some minutes. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. [ Music ] >> John Szwed: Maybe we should get back to DC. >> Stephen Winick: Right, yeah, exactly. Yeah, so what were the circumstances? I mean, how did he end up here, in your understanding? >> John Szwed: He said he got into boxing promoting, and that sounded strange to me, except recently someone found a Pennsylvania -- no, it was the Pittsburgh Courier had an article on him staging an automobile race in Washington, Pennsylvania, a 100-mile race. And the promoters were Jack Johnson, the heavyweight champion of the world, and that made perfect sense to me because Johnson was also a bass player and had his own band. And after he quit boxing, he toured like that. A lot of boxers did in that way. They were tap dancers or something or other. They did musical careers. So he had this promotion background already and he said he was going to do boxing here. That didn't work out. He tried several other things. One was what he called the Interracial Theater Company. And he had in mind getting more people of color in films. But he thought the way to do it was to show how both races as it were -- as they talked in his day -- could be in the same film. Unfortunately -- he was one of the better theaters. Isn't there Lincoln Theater? Yeah. He used the Lincoln Theater for auditions and almost nobody came to it. So that fell apart. So he kept trying various things. But meanwhile, he had come to town not exactly to, but shortly after being here he became the co-owner or the co-something or other of a restaurant at 1211 U street, upstairs over Hamburger State which is now Ben's. >> Stephen Winick: Ben's Chili Bowl. >> John Szwed: So I don't know if he's selling jelly roll or not. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: Probably not. One of the people who met him was a worker -- no, this is Roy Caru, a name I should mention. Roy Caru was I believe from Michigan. And he had gone to New Orleans to take a job and had run across ragtime. And so he was a good pianist. He got to know Morton a bit and actually wrote some songs with Morton. He was working in the treasury department here and he heard about him and we went to see him after he heard he was there. And I just found this recently. He handed him a piece of music that was talking about him coming to the district. "Got a letter from a friend Carl Young. From his letter I got terribly stung. He said, come to Washington DC to manage a club for a woman, Do Ra Me." I've got to read the lines right. "To manage a club for a woman, Do Ra Me, and said take the next train and leave. It was cold as hell and then I freeze. He met me in the train and snow and ice and rain. He said to me, I know she'll be pleased. We went to the place and the oil stove hit me in the face." Well, they only had one oil stove in the middle and you get chill [inaudible] or something from it. So people were always sitting around that. So to make a long story short about this, he wasn't exactly drawing big crowds. There were people who came in for one reason or another that were not necessarily interested in the music. And they would rent it out to other groups and so on. And he would be surly about the fact that these were young whippersnappers and the like. But let me give you an example of some of the people that came in there. Mr. Charles Edward Smith who wrote the first real book about jazz -- although he doesn't mention Jelly which is really odd. >> Stephen Winick: That's weird, yeah. >> John Szwed: He goes to see him but doesn't mention him. He said without being conscious of it that small group of Washington jazz fans who encouraged Jelly helped him immeasurably to resume his title and place. "I don't know what I'd do if a few friends didn't drop in," he said. "People don't know the old jazz anymore." So it was good to talk anytime and say flatteringly, "Your friend really knows." They listened to him talk about Buddy Boldin and Jelly would go back to the piano again. I recall evenings with mixed groups that were permissible in some places in Washington. A bunch of us gathered about the standup piano and Jelly tossing out blues verses and goading Sterling Brown of Howard University into singing a few. Now I knew Sterling and some of you may have known him. He was fired from Howard for doing this kind of thing, and teaching in class, using Bessie Smith in his example of poetry. And I asked him one day, I said, "I keep hearing these stories that you were fired. It sounds like you were fired again and again." "I was fired and rehired and then fired and rehired, and then fired and rehired, and then retires." [Laughs] So he got fired three times. [Laughs] And if you hear people like the late Mary Baraka and -- who else was it? A. D. Stoneman will tell you about going to his house, this huge recording collection. And Baraka said to me, "When I saw those records and the way they were grouped by styles, I realized that this was like literature. You know, you could be a scholar of that stuff." You just didn't listen to it that way. So I remember Jelly telling a crowded, fidgety union benefit, most of whom wanted to dance, that he would enlighten them with a resume of jazz history, beginning with Buddy Boldin. Many members of the exclusive Jelly Roll club such as [inaudible name], I knew them only by hearsay. Jelly was increasingly proud of his fans, and one day at the Howard Theater I corralled Sydney Bashay and we went up the creaky stairs. Sydney Bashay was the second most important New Orleans musician after Armstrong. And Jelly's wife happened to be in the place and effusive greetings in Creole put New Orleans on the map all over again. The Erdogan brothers were -- you probably know better than me -- were sons of the Turkish ambassador. And they put on concerts. They had money to do it. But they were there and both of them became very big in the recording industry, built Atlantic Records where Ray Charles was signed and all that stuff. So that was that. And Charles Smith mentioned -- let's see. Yeah, Allister Cook -- >> Stephen Winick: I wanted to talk about him. >> John Szwed: He was a piano player. Some of you may remember he used to be on PBS a lot. He passed away a while back. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, he used to be the host of Masterpiece Theater. So he'd be sitting in the chair like us, you know? >> John Szwed: Yeah. >> Stephen Winick: He'd introduce the shows. >> John Szwed: He looked the part. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. I mean, the funny thing is that he was known here in the US as an interpreter of British culture for Americans. But he was known in Britain as an interpreter of American culture for English people. Because he had a radio show called Letter From America which was one of the longest-running radio shows in the world. And so there are innumerable hours of his voice talking about American culture in Britain. And he had a connection to the Library of Congress. He has two interesting connections to the library, one of which is that we happen to have through almost a coincidence the first recording of his voice that was ever made. Because he came here as a graduate student, and one of his professors, Miles Handley, was doing a survey of dialects. And he was a linguist. And he was part of the American Dialect Society, and he recorded all kinds of people. But one of the people he recorded was Allister Cook just talking about his interest in drama and that kind of thing. So that's an interesting connection. That was in maybe '33, '34. And then in 1938, this was sort of in the same era when he met Jelly and when he met Alan Lomax. He became really interested in American folk music and he decided he wanted to do a program on the BBC of American folk music. And he put together this proposal and wrote this very eloquent letter to Herbert Putnam, the librarian of Congress at that time, who allowed him to duplicate records from the Library of Congress. And so he's one of the first people actually to use Library of Congress field recordings that were made by Lomax and others on the radio. And this was a very extensive show. And the deal was spelled out in the correspondence that the show would only be played once live. So it wouldn't be recorded so that you know, there wouldn't be any rights issues with the music becoming part of the BBC archives or anything. So as far as we know, it never was recorded and it's lost to history. But we know that it happened, and it was called I Hear America Singing. And it was one of the first times that traditional American folk music including African American folk music was heard on the airwaves in Europe. So Cook was this kind of figure and he had a sort of role in mediating Jelly's relationship with Alan Lomax as well. >> John Szwed: Then Lomax was trying to escape the purge of folk music by the MacArthur people. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: Went and got a job at the BBC and was playing the same records. >> Stephen Winick: Exactly. >> John Szwed: Presumably he left them there. I don't know. He got them back one way or another. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. So how did Cook hear of Jelly's story? >> John Szwed: Well, he said he wanted to go in and find out how to play better blues piano. And the quote I've got is he said, "If you want to play the blues more, take it easier. Just chords and cut up that picture show right hand," which I take it was too elaborate. Cook said it was like meeting the president in a shoe shine stand. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: Well, I called Cook when I was working on the boxed set of the Morton stuff, and left a message. And then the message came back when I wasn't there and said, "I'll talk to you rather happily, but you better call. I'm dying." So would he be joking? He died that day. Yeah. The idea is he was going to call me back. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> John Szwed: Yeah, man about town or whatever, you know? >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. When I was researching his recordings in the library, I talked to his son John Burn Cook who was a bluegrass musician among other things but also a scholar. And he's since passed away. So that's you know, another said coda to the Allister Cook story. So he helped mediate between Jelly and Lomax in a way? >> John Szwed: Yeah. Well, another person who was more obscure but important, Bill Russel, William Russel, who recorded interviews and massive amounts of recordings in New Orleans in the last days of its founders, that kind of music. And he was in DC as a percussionist with the Red Gate Shadow Players which I don't know much about except it was Chinese theaters. Anyone ever heard of them? It was kind of an experimental Chinese theater and he was a drummer, a percussionist. >> Stephen Winick: We have a Chinese theater expert that we will introduce you to at some time so you can talk about that. >> John Szwed: Well, his book is very hard to find, The Jelly Roll Morton Scrapbook which is about this big, a big thick thing, and putting all the pieces together. So we talked about the Erdogans. Murray Kempton. Murray Kempton was a top journalist, one of the top journalists we've ever produced in America, was editor of the Johns Hopkins student newspaper at that point. And he was there. And William Gottlieb who was working for the Washington Post as a reporter but was beginning to take pictures. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: And his pictures, I can use the word iconic with a straight face. His pictures that are here in the library, some of the greatest pictures ever taken of anybody. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> John Szwed: You've all seen them, even if you don't know that. >> Stephen Winick: And if you don't, go onto LOC.gov and look for Gottlieb photographs and you'll see them there. >> John Szwed: I always thought he was like the Ansell Adams of nightclubs. Smoke would go up [inaudible]. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> John Szwed: And it would be white on white and black on black. And I asked him about it and he said it meant you had to sit for hours and keep coming back, unless you sit near the musicians. Then maybe you could get these pictures. So those people were all in there. They all had some kind of way in which they were trying to promote -- I'll give you one more person who you may have heard of this quote, but I'll give you a little more of the background. Billy Taylor who had a long relationship with the district because he -- I shouldn't say the district. That's what they used to call the prostitution area of New Orleans, the district. Taylor said this. He said -- he was part of what he felt was the best young piano players in Washington. And they weren't just playing the obvious things. He said, they were studying Bautoch and Schinberg and Weber and Hindawitz. And by the way, the bee-boppers were too. So in New York, I found in my own researches upstairs, where Charlie Parker sees Hindawitz at a concert and says, "He's using the same harmonies we are and they say we're playing out of tune." [ Laughter ] And then he says, "We've got to meet him. He's out ally." >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: By the way, Parker was going to see Fantasia day and night, over and over again. There's a weird connection here. So anyway, Taylor considered himself one of the anointed of the young musicians in Washington. And [inaudible] heard about this, that the guy was claiming to be great. So one Saturday night they all decided to go see him. And he said, "We were some young hipsters who had stopped in to have some fun with him. And then he came in and he looked shockingly sick and feeble, old and a little mad. But he wore his old southern gentleman's suit with dignity and when he smiled, the diamond in his tooth still glittered. He played a new piece called Sweet Substitute. And then since the grapevine grows quick in little places like this, he looked straight at us. His eyes had a very personal kind of pride which I had not seen before. His look had the strangely arrogant wisdom of those who know, those who have been there and seen it and at the end realized that nothing very shattering has happened after all. Because dying is a slow and shabby business." Who could believe that Billy Taylor could be this good a writer? >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> John Szwed: "Then Jelly spoke to us. "You punks can't play this."" [ Laughter ] "I forget the tune. What I do remember is a big, full, two-handed piano player, a ragtime remodified and relaxed by New Orleans and very swinging. I suppose the tune was corny, now that I look back on it, but it had its own charm. There was something extremely personal about it, which defied description. As I listened, suddenly I knew. He's right. I can't play it. Just purely technically, I can't play two hands together and separately the way he does. I looked over at the other confident young men who had come in with me and I saw they knew that they couldn't either and ours was a very quiet booth for the next three hours." >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. And what's interesting there is it confirms exactly what you were talking about in New Orleans Joys too, that you know, people who really play can tell what's going on there, and it's you know, listeners who maybe aren't quite so familiar with the mechanics of the hands, that it sounds like he got lost there for them. Yeah. >> John Szwed: Something I just picked up, I don't know much more about it other than what I'm going to tell you -- of course I can't tell you what I don't know. There was a band in town in 1937 at least that went under several names, and the only one I recall is -- did I make a note of it? Oh, Andy Howard's Collegians. And they played for big dances. Was there a Coconut Grove here, dance hall? It's either Coconut something -- anyway, they would rehearse after -- this is not uncommon, rehears at 3:00-5:00 in the morning after playing the other stuff. So they noticed this guy sitting in the back after people had left. And somebody wanted to ask him what he was there for, and he said he liked their music. And they chatted and he told them who he was, and he said, "I brought something I wrote for you." He said, "The long and short of it was we couldn't play it." He said it was simultaneously very old and very progressive and while. He may have been trying to make a jump into the swing era. I should have said earlier that why he was so bitter was his songs were being turned into hits and he wasn't getting any payment for them. Partly because being black he couldn't get into ASCAP and BMI didn't exist at that time. And W. C. Handley managed to get in which is a wonder. There's a story. Jelly set out to destroy W. C. Handy's -- >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, let's talk about the Handy spat. >> John Szwed: Handy was on a program called Ripley's Believe It Or Not, the man who invented jazz. And I thought for a long time that he was there and interrupted the broadcast, but that was just wishful thinking. He started writing letters to newspapers, Baltimore, whatever it was at the time, and Washington paper, and said the man's a liar and he wouldn't recognize music, he can't even play it and so on. I mean, Handy was something of a god. One of the first paperback books that was distributed to soldiers in Europe was his book. And so here comes this guy saying this thing and Handy said, "I wouldn't play that music if I could." You know, it's not proper music. They went back and forth and they started getting into trade papers and big papers and what have you. This is leading up to him -- >> Stephen Winick: And that itself is a kind of admission though, isn't it? "I wouldn't play it if I could." [ Laughter ] >> John Szwed: So he's drawing this stuff and lest I forget it, he came up with a plan which he sent to Roosevelt. He was going to create his own NEA or his own WPA or something. And the project was pretty straightforward. I know these guys in Baltimore and I'll organize them into a band and we'll teach them this stuff, we'll write a book of music for it. Then we'll split the band in two and they'll get more people. And then they'll split. It sounds like a Ponzi scheme or something. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: But it wasn't a bad employment idea, you know. You educate people and they're going to get money out of it because they'll be playing. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> John Szwed: He never heard back from FDR. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, and in eight generations every musician in the world will be in your group, right? >> John Szwed: That's right. [Laughs] So Lomax's description -- I also have Lomax's sister's description since she met him. He drove up in this -- I guess he was in the Cadillac at that point, a big long one. And she said he was beyond graceful. He was -- what's the word she used? Not gentlemanly. Courtly, yeah. Courtly. He was courtly. He did everything but you know, swirl his hand and bow. He said, "Jelly Roll Morton at your service," just as she's holding the door for him. And then he goes down and says, "I'm here to set the story straight. Everybody is stealing my stuff," and so forth. Here was Alan from the BBC. This is something you won't find anywhere else. The Art of the Negro, Mr. Jelly Roll from New Orleans, 1951. He says, "As a collector of ballads and folk songs, I had always felt certain natural hostility towards jazz." And then one day in the spring of '38, the composer of the tune we just played, which was in this case Black Bottom Stone Pew. "He walked into the Library of Congress offices, introduced himself as Jelly Roll Morton, originator of jazz and king of stumps and swing, and that's what his business card said. This handsome New Orleans man wore his $100 suit." Lomax was making at that time $650 a year, which was half a day laborer's pay. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> John Szwed: So much for a good job at LOC, right? >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: And he was in the basement too. So this suit would have been one-sixth of Lomax's -- >> Stephen Winick: Yearly income, yeah. >> John Szwed: "This southern gentleman managed his diamonds as if he had never heard of the Depression. Ten years before, Jelly Roll had been king of the hot musicians, prosperous enough to put diamonds in his own sock supporters." He's being figurative here. "And to wear one on his front tooth. And there it flashed in the middle of the band leader's smile. Now he was playing for coffee and cakes in Washington where the shows seem to come to die." Here's a mean line. "It decided to carve a niche of history by telling a story to the library. For my part, I wanted to see how much folk song there was in the mind of an old-time jazz guy. And I set my recording machine near the piano in the austere chamber music auditorium." This is the Hoover, I guess. "I set the needle spinning on the acid tape and soon began a new way of writing history. You'll hear it now just beginning," and he used a sample in the program of that. And says, "This may be the first life history of a musician done in the United States." He's probably right about that. "He was an American negro as proud of his ancestry. He was a New Orleans Creole, a people who long before 1880 had their own newspapers, literary societies, who after the Civil War took over the government of Louisiana and passed the universal suffrage bill. Who named their son Ferdinand after the useless king of Spain. It was really Queen Isabella who did something." They're putting this on BBC? [Laughs] "When I was six months old, my godmother" -- this is him talking -- "took me around the saloons, setting me on the bar for everybody to admire. Then through some kind of frackus, she got arrested and sent to jail and so was I." And he said, "The inmates were singing and making a lot of noise and it was there that I got my first musical inspiration." And he goes on about this. But that's nowhere else quoted. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, that's great stuff. And yeah, Lomax is always embellishing with sort of literary flourishes. So that's some fun writing there. So yeah, so those sessions took place in the Coolidge auditorium across the street in the Jefferson building. And you know, in certain ways, they changed the face of music history, and in certain ways they changed the face of ethnography, if you know what I mean. Because you just mentioned that they are probably the first life history/oral history of a musician, certainly in America. >> John Szwed: Certainly. >> Stephen Winick: So what was Lomax's influence there? >> John Szwed: Well, I haven't looked for this, but I don't know of any kind of recorded ethnography by anybody at that point. Kings, princes, you know. >> Stephen Winick: Right, yeah. You know, we think it's the first extended oral history, but it's certainly the first extended oral history of a musician. >> John Szwed: He got the model he said from the Russians who were recording their bards. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: And if I can believe Chelcikovic, then the [inaudible] started killing the bards because the history they maintained was one they wanted to get rid of. So those efforts were amazing if he was right. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: So Morton is very aware that, "I'll just keep talking," you know? And if you listen to the recordings, he's -- what do I want to say? He's changing the mood as the story changes. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> John Szwed: So there's a lynching that occurs and I think it involved Italians and African Americans in New Orleans. And he suddenly goes into a minor key, and then stays there a while and pulls slowly out of it into a change of subject. The subject was a guy -- I can't think of his name -- who shot 12 cops because one of him knocked his snow white Stetson hat into a mud puddle. >> Stephen Winick: Sounds like [inaudible], right? >> John Szwed: Yeah. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> John Szwed: All we needed was a blue steel .45, whatever it was. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> John Szwed: So he thought, yeah, I'm worthy of this stuff. This is what's strange to me. I found this little note that said that -- this was from Washington Daily News again. "Jelly Roll Charts Jazz, Dean of Gates." That was a hip term at the time, "Hey, Gate." "Runs U street nightclub now in the years encroached, but his fingers know the ivories of yore." Wow, this is a line. "I'm going to dance off both my shoes when they play those Jelly Roll blues." So he's talking to Jelly Roll. And Jelly Roll says, "I'm going to be recording at the Library of Congress." And you know, you wonder if people said, "Come on, man. They don't make records, and why you?" >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: And so they ask him what's he going to record. And he says Flee As a Bird to the Mountains, a funeral march which inclined south. Two drumbeat effects, one going to the cemetery, the other returning. The tempo of the drums in the latter instance is faster but not speedy. The composer quickened the beat to hasten the bereave. He goes on and on about that. And the other will be the Black Diamond Express to Hell. This is a preacher's thing. There's a moral lesson. Did he really sit there and say, "I'm going to do it?" Because he didn't do it. >> Stephen Winick: Right. Those recordings are not -- right. Was that a joke? >> John Szwed: I don't know? Do you want to listen to this? >> Stephen Winick: So that line was great. His fingers know the ivories of yore. And it makes me think of looking at an old piano and thinking, you know, those ivories know the fingers of yore, is the way I would think of it. But yeah, it's just amazing writing. And also just revealing about what he was planning on doing versus what he actually did or what he claimed he was planning on doing. But again, it's all this presentation of self question. What is genuine and what is kind of put on or made up? And it's a little bit hard to tell with Jelly Roll. Another thing that you've talked about is how, you know, he was seen as kind of corny at that time. And one of the things that's interesting to me, played particularly in New Orleans Joys -- not that long ago we had Billy Bragg here at the library and he was talking about the history of skiffle. And you know, skiffle emerged out of the trad jazz scene which were young British people in the 1950's emulating New Orleans African Americans of the 1920's and playing this New Orleans jazz type of music. And skiffle emerged out of that scene. So all the early skiffle players like Lonnie Donagan who essentially created the spark that created British rock and roll, played in a band that played that stuff. So skiffle was part of that scene, but also a reaction against it. It was what happened when guys who played that music started to think of it as corny. >> John Szwed: Lomax also had a skiffle band. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. And Lomax had a skiffle band. So it's like the corniness propels a certain amount of innovation that creates the next thing. But without this love of New Orleans jazz, I think skiffle wouldn't have happened and British rock might not have happened. And the reason I thought os that is just that you know, the Ken Colyer skiffle group out of which Lonnie Donagan came, one of their albums was called New Orleans Joys, just based on that Jelly Roll recording. So, yeah. >> John Szwed: It's interesting that before Lonnie Donagan's recordings, about '54, something like that -- >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, '54. >> John Szwed: The first British record to get on the hit list I believe was -- what am I going to say about this? I want to be sure I'm right. They were stealing stuff from Lomax's collection and putting it out themselves. It gets into a complicated story. The important thing to remember here is that folk songs were worthless before this. I mean, worth something to people, but not anyone else. You just couldn't sell it. >> Stephen Winick: Economically worthless, right. >> John Szwed: There were full folks songs, you know, like cowboy movies and the like. >> Stephen Winick: But they hadn't been monetized as we say now. >> John Szwed: Right. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: So you couldn't sell the stuff. I mean, they were of course the things sold in the neighborhoods, but there was no money in that. This was actually beginning to make money in a big sort of way, and the Weavers made a lot of money off of Good Night Irene, but also out of things like Israeli army songs. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: It was incredible. I want to say one more thing that I didn't know about until fairly recently. I wondered why in Britain late in the game the skiffle bands -- and then after the skiffle bands -- sort of more elaborate ones, like New Orleans replica bands -- why were they so big in the anti-nuclear movement? >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> John Szwed: They were always there. You would always see them in the newsreels. And I found out it's because they thought this was people's music. This is the music of people who haven't been filtered through the system and so on. Well, I think the same thing was going on with people talking about going to the club. This was music that was new to them. It was alien. It was like coming from Mars. And it was done by real people. It wasn't done by people who were having hits and the like. So it was this kind of -- you didn't have to be a leftist. You just had to be someone who respected originality coming from -- it's like one of the New Yorker writers, Whitney Belia, said of Arnett Coleman once, he said, "He came into New York disguised as a country boy. He was a complete genius who came to New York disguised as a country boy." Well, he was what he was. He never changed that. But it's the way they viewed him. They said, "No, his dress, his hair is too long and his shoes are -- " >> Stephen Winick: Right. Well, there's the assumption that the genius can't be a country boy. If he's a genius, then the country boy thing must be a disguise. But of course, that's not necessarily the case. >> John Szwed: We would now say he was an organic intellectual. >> Stephen Winick: Right. [Laughs] There's a lot of ways to describe it, yeah. >> John Szwed: Well the ending is not good. He got into an argument over music in the kitchen and someone stabbed him in the back of the neck. It was misdiagnosed as asthma and so when he died, he was still functioning, but in a weak sort of way. And Lomax hooked him up with some people who made actually some of his best records [inaudible]. They are now available under some other name. It was originally called -- >> Stephen Winick: Commodore, right? >> John Szwed: Yeah. I can't remember what the title was. They're really good. They have songs that are in books or even in films. People often don't quite understand. One of them was Winding Boy, wanted to be in [inaudible]. That's hip winding. And you find out that West Indians will refer to winding and so forth. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: So they treat it as dear. In one film, Crossroads, it's called The Winning Boy. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: And the other one I think is a person who's winding all the time. [Inaudible] Graduate students was not enough. [ Laughter ] >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: They weren't up to Hollywood. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: So it's a sad ending. He tried various things. He went to California and his wife actually did very well. She started a chicken place in Malibu. Not the Malibu we know, but the area. And it made the Duncan Hines I think -- yeah, it made the Duncan Hines list as one of the best restaurants in America. My little comment on that is one night I was driving down from -- oh God, what is that creepy place up in the hills above there? You know, David Lynch loves it. >> Mohullin's Rod. >> John Szwed: Yeah, Mohullin's Rod, right. And a storm hit, a really bad storm. I was coming down the mountain, and I didn't realize this was a dirt road and it had a curve every car length so you could barely get through and the roads were getting slippery. And I was panicked. I couldn't see and the lights weren't good and they were [inaudible]. I get to the bottom, I had driven to the back of Jelly Roll's wife's restaurant. >> Stephen Winick: Amazing. >> John Szwed: [Inaudible] being taken. So it's not a good ending. And we don't have time to show a film. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> John Szwed: Really, the kind of travesty that one expects with this. The Legend of 1900, an Italian Cult film which is very big in Italy and bombed out here, talks about a guy who did cinema paratiso. And it's done in English with Italian actors. They had to dub in things, except for Tim Roth who plays a piano player who has never left this huge tourist boat, this Titanic-type boat. Because his parents abandoned him there and the people down the hole protected and kept him away from the authorities. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: And he grew up there and he never left the boat. >> Stephen Winick: So he was raised on a cruise ship, yeah. >> John Szwed: And so he plays the piano. And Jelly Roll Morton shows up one day. It's Clarence Williams III. And he's the exact opposite. You know, he's like a scary mafia guy. And he plays and embarrasses Tim Roth. And then keeps getting more embarrassing as he plays, and Roth can't keep up with it. But the magic of Italian Hollywood [inaudible] -- >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: He beats him by growing two extra arms. [Laughs] So he plays four-handed. Now you can find this in many versions of things like the film Crossroads where they didn't have the nerve to have a white guy play against the black guy. This had to do with New Orleans and the Crossroads and Robert Johnson and selling your soul to the devil. So in that film, Ralph Macchio -- >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, Ralph Macchio. >> John Szwed: Ralph Macchio wins over Steve Vai. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: A very unlikely win. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: By playing a Villa-Lobos piece instead of a blues. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: Now if this isn't saying the white man is always on top, I don't know what is. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, that's crazy. >> John Szwed: But the same story is in all the films that have ever dealt with jazz, except for one, Always Have A Story Like That. The birth of the blues song is born. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: Oh, the best of all, The King of Jazz with Paul Whiteman, an early sound film. You have a giant melting pot and everyone in the world gets into this pot to make jazz, including Aleuts, alpine horn-blowers, Fiji people. Everybody but African Americans get into the pot, and out comes jazz. The one film that doesn't do this -- [laughs]. I don't urge you to see it, but it's nice. It's the Young Indiana Jones. And he's -- that used to be an afternoon show, right? It's not bad. You should see him meet Christian Murtio. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: Or Andy Bezant, or Einstein. He punches out John Ford, punches out Hemingway. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: Anyway, in this one he's in prep school in New England, Boston. And the young Sydney Bashay, about 19 years old, has brought his band up from New Orleans to play for the prep school dance. So young Indiana's friends taunt him, "You've got to go play." He played the [inaudible] actually. So he plays with him. He's really awful. And the band starts playing in a set of New Orleans, sort of what you've been hearing. It goes into the tune of one and two, and one and two. And they're rolling their eyes. And he's into it, you know, and so are all the kids. But he senses something wrong midway through, then really gets really depressed and quits. And then Bashay comes up to him and puts his arm around him and says, "It's not your fault, kid." He says, "You just grew up in the wrong place with the wrong people." >> Stephen Winick: Right. [ Laughter ] You know, a funny corollary to that is you know, we're talking about films with the black and white musicians. Back to the Future, where you know, Chuck Berry gets the idea for rock and roll from this kid from the future who's white but who only has the idea for rock and roll because of Chuck Berry in the future. [Laughs] So they turn it into a racial paradox there, which is kind of interesting. >> John Szwed: I thought you were going to bring up Ida Red, the western song that's the basis. >> Stephen Winick: Right, right. >> John Szwed: And it was a shocker to find out that Chuck Berry used to play western swing. >> Stephen Winick: That's right, yeah. >> John Szwed: But a totally different feel to it. And by the way, I found on the web the other day a picture of Howard students square dancing in 1949. >> Stephen Winick: Interesting. Interesting. >> John Szwed: This country is more complicated than -- >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, it's complicated. I think we might have to leave it at that, how complicated the country is. But thank you so much for -- >> John Szwed: Thank you for coming. >> Stephen Winick: For your new material. And we'll look forward to seeing what you find out during your stay at the library. >> John Szwed: Thank the library. The library is my big monument, my big statue that nobody's going to tear down I hope. And thank the Logan Foundation for creating the possibility to be here. And thank you for coming. I don't take it lightly. [ Applause ] >> Anne McLean: We can take maybe one or two questions. And then as people do leave, they can look at the manuscripts. Steve, if you want to just field a couple here. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. And actually you had said I should mention a little bit about the crate. That crate, the wooden crate on the end is just there because during the war, they switched from using aluminum for the bases of acetate discs to using glass, because aluminum was being used in the war effort. And so glass discs were very fragile. And because of that, they had a work around to transport any of them. They would make these wooden crates. So now the Jelly Roll recordings of course were made before the war, but these were duplicates. And it says clearly on the box, Jelly Roll Morton duplicates. So that's the reason for the crate. But yeah, any questions? Yeah. >> I had a question. Hello. >> The mic. >> Can you hear me? >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> I heard that at the end of his life when Jelly Roll Morton was dying, no one came to visit him in the hospital except one musician from New Orleans, that he was shunned. And I wonder if you have heard anything. You know, if you know anything about that or if this is an indication that he was really unpopular and considered obnoxious or whatever it is. >> John Szwed: I should say I'm getting old, but I lost my hearing being a musician much earlier. So now I'm an old musician who lost his hearing earlier. >> Stephen Winick: So yeah, so the question was whether you had heard anything about Jelly Roll's last days in the hospital. Apparently he was only visited by one older musician from New Orleans and everybody else shunned him. >> John Szwed: Well, it was also said he couldn't get into a white hospital. I didn't find the material I'd need. It's not the easiest stuff to find. One thing is true, because somebody visited him: that somebody had put a fan on him. This led people to say he had asthma and died of asthma. But a Washington doctor published a little piece about this and said that it was likely because they had no air conditioning in the hospital. He knew the hospital and this was actually an act of mercy and he didn't die of asthma. He died of heart failure and so forth. So Billie Holiday had almost no visitors, which I'm amazed to see that a guy who sells more books than I'll ever sell, who's written about Frank Sinatra, makes up a whole scenario where Frank Sinatra not only visits her every day, but feels guilty for not doing this or that. And you know, that's a bitter ending as if nobody came. But is it surprising that nobody shows up for a great person's dying? They don't want to be on that scene. >> Stephen Winick: I guess that's right, yeah. Other questions? Yeah. >> Thanks. You mentioned that there was a collection of dialects with Allister Cook's first recording as part of it. >> Stephen Winick: Yes. >> Can you tell me more about where that is and how I can get ahold of it? >> Stephen Winick: Well, there are a couple of different such collections. One of them is online at the library's website. So you can go and search for those recordings. The American Dialect Society Collection itself is not entirely online, but you can access it in the folk life reading room which is across the street in the Jefferson building. So if you just search on the library's website for dialect recordings, you'll find a lot of the collection that is online. But the stuff that's not, you can come and visit us and we can pay it for you in the reading room. And Allister Cook is in the portion that's not online, unfortunately. Other questions? Uh-huh, one more. >> Could you tell us a little bit more about exactly how Lomax got permission to make these special recordings? >> John Szwed: Used his words. Well, I can paraphrase him. He was -- Harold Spivak? Yeah. He said -- >> Stephen Winick: So Harold Spivak was the head of the Music Division of the library at the time. >> John Szwed: Spivak actually did recordings in prisons at one point to see what it was like. Yeah, the first thing you said, the recordings, the discs were expensive. And he needed about 100 he said to do this. Because they never had heard of him. And he said he got very excited -- what I'm looking for but can't find quickly. He said it was his voice and the way he spoke. He said it was a different kind of English. It was a kind of classical style of his own. It was rhetorically interesting, exciting. And I think that's what really got him to think, "Maybe I should record this guy." Because he really didn't think this guy knew that much, and that's why he starts by asking him about a folk song, which he proceeds to do. And you'll see pieces of music over there from [inaudible] and so on. He knew classical music, he knew all kinds of church music and the rest of it. So he said, "I ran upstairs and said, "Quick, I've got to have 100 records. There's a guy downstairs."" Why he did that, I have no idea. He was a guy who's only been there a short time and he's what, 21 or 22? >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: And he's making $650 a year. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah, he's like, yeah, 22 or 23 in 1938. >> John Szwed: He looks like a bum. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> John Szwed: I mean, that's what the FBI file says. They said the man is disreputable and he hangs out with negros. Listen, they followed him his whole life. >> Stephen Winick: They did. I mean, his whole life he was harassed. >> John Szwed: They kept repeating that over and over again. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> John Szwed: Hangs out with negros, likes folk music. Oh well. So I don't know why they did it. They trusted him on this and then he said, "I grabbed a bottle of liquor and they started drinking." But Lomax sat down, got him to the piano -- a really fine piano -- and used his field recording stuff. And he sat at his feet and said he managed to sit so he could change the stuff without looking -- you know, he was still holding his eyes. So he treated himself as an audience. That was apparently one of the strategies. "If I can get him to be talking to me, I can make this work." And it just went on and on and on. It moved into places that no one could imagine they'd move into. And the topics you know, everything from poverty to hurricanes, to the invention of this and that. >> Stephen Winick: Yeah. >> John Szwed: Would anybody even today say to somebody, "Give me 100 records"? What would it be today? The equivalent would be digital. They'd still want to know more than this guy just wandered in and said, "I want to record." >> Stephen Winick: Right. Yeah. And amazing stuff about -- I mean, if you're interested in New Orleans at all, amazing stuff about the history of New Orleans is in there. Amazing stuff about other jazz musicians, Buddy Boldin who was mentioned before, is talked about a lot by Jelly Roll. So yeah, a lot of what we know about that New Orleans scene is in those recordings. So you have homework. You have to watch The Legend of 1900, you have to listen to the Jelly Roll box set if you can, and you have to watch Young Indiana Jones. >> John Szwed: I have one last thing to say. One last thing. We were talking about how he talked. He had real grace and care about what he said, despite people saying he was a braggart and what have you. So at one point he -- cautiously approaching the fact that it's still not known by almost anybody. But most of the piano players in jazz were women. And in Handy's book on southern orchestras, none of them were men, up to a certain point. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> John Szwed: In Birmingham, an area I know well, there were only two men piano players before 1945. Women in New York union sued over the fact that they were being pushed out by men at one point, and then became actors. They joined the actors' union because it was better pay. They were still playing piano. At any rate, at one point Jelly's trying to say why he is spirited by going to the opera and seeing the opera musicians, because they have long hair. And he said, "I had heard about long-hair music, but these guys really had long hair." And he somehow talks with Tony Jackson, the one player he thought was better than he and he greatly admired. And Tony Jackson was known to be gay. Not because Morton said so. He just was known. And Lomax knew this. So Lomax says to him, "Tony, was he a fairy?" And there's a pause and he says, "I don't know. He may have been a tugboat." [ Laughter ] >> Stephen Winick: There you go. >> John Szwed: There you go. >> Stephen Winick: On that note -- [ Laughter ] Thank you all for coming. >> John Szwed: Thank you. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at LOC.gov.