Mister Jelly Roll

On the stage of the Chamber Music Auditorium of the Library of Congress the oldtime pianist sat at the keyboard, facing an open microphone. "Mister Morton," said Alan Lomax, assistant curator of the Library's American Folk Song Archive, "how about the beginning? Tell about where you were born and how you got started . . . and maybe keep playing piano while you talk."

Famed Creole Pianist-Composer Ferdinand ("Jelly Roll") Morton (King Porter Stomp, Jelly Roll Blues, Alabama Bound), "the father of hot piano," talked and played almost every day for a month. Folklorist Lomax, co-author with his late father, John A. Lomax, of Folk Song U.S.A., etc., listened and recorded. What he heard (and later checked up on) adds up to more than mere reminiscent fodder for jazz fans. Mister Jelly Roll (Duell, Sloan & Pearce; $3.50), published last week, is also the full-flavored story of a raucous, diamond-studded era of U.S. history, as seen and told by a mulatto genius who lived it from top to bottom.

The beginning for Ferdinand La Menthe (he changed his name to Morton because "I didn't want to be called 'Frenchy' ") was much like the end. He was born hard by the cribs of New Orleans' tough and fabled Storyville. When Author Lomax met him in 1938, he was pounding the piano in a dingy Washington nightspot. That same year, Jelly Roll was stabbed in a brawl there, and he died broke in Los Angeles in 1941.

"All in Diamonds." He first hit the skids when he was six months old. As Jelly tells it: "My godmother loaned me to one of her acquaintances, some type of sporting-woman. This lady displayed me in saloons, setting me on the bar and so forth . . . making mirations. Then, through some kind of fracas or riot, she was arrested. The officers decided not to put the baby in jail with her and her associates, but she raised so much hell that the young Ferdinand, named after the useless King of Spain, was thrown right in jail at the age of six months."

In brief, that was Jelly Roll's story. Bordello pianist ("professor"), pool-playing shark and pimp, he was in & out of trouble all his life. In his most glorious days, in the '20s, when such youngsters as Benny Goodman and Bix Beiderbecke gathered around to hear Jelly's style ("Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm"), he was "all in diamonds." As his wife Mabel Bertrand recalls: "His watch was circled in diamonds. His belt buckle was in gold and studded with diamonds. He even had sock-supporters of solid gold set with diamonds. Then you could see that big half-carat diamond sparkling in his teeth . . ." When he was riding high, he toured the country in a big Lincoln limousine, picking up $1,500 in an evening with his band, the Red Hot Peppers. When he was down & out, which was just as often, he rode the rods.