He was born Ferdinand Le Menthe, a middle-class Creole in New Orleans, but to the world of jazz he would always be Jelly Roll Morton, Mr. Jelly Lord, or the Winin’ Boy. He shocked his father by refusing to follow in his footsteps as a contractor and played piano in the honky-tonks and whorehouses of the Vieux Carré. Storyville was his turf before Josephus Daniels shut it down to protect the morals and the gonads of World War I sailors. When jazz pianists engaged in battles of music, he cut Tony Jackson, until then the greatest of them all.
That was Jelly Roll, the most colorful figure jazz has produced. Diamonds set in his front teeth and wearing $200 suits when $200 was more than a spit in the ocean, he ranged the country playing his music and taking side-trips into dubious business ventures that might have cost him his life. Vainglorious, boastful, certain of his place in jazz history, and gathering together some of the best New Orleans-style sidemen, he made his great records. And then he was forgotten. When Hugues Panassie wrote his pioneering Le jazz hot in the Thirties, he gave Jelly Roll part of a sentence, and that was all.
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