ABSTRACT

It wasn’t a matter of folklore. It was the way I felt. —Alan Lomax

What a life adds up to is still a problem and an open question: an object of curiosity.

—Kathleen Stewart

In my early youth, I thought New Orleans was the whole world. —Jelly Roll Morton

Alan Lomax’s influential biography of Jelly Roll Morton opens with an evocative description of the first of the Library of Congress recordings he made with the ageing pianist and composer in 1938. ‘The amplifier was hot,’ he begins. ‘The needle was tracing a quiet spiral on the spinning acetate.’ ‘Mister Morton,’ I said, ‘How about the beginning? Tell us about where you were born and how you got started and why … and maybe keep playing piano while you talk.’1 The account of Morton’s life that unfolds across the pages of Lomax’s book highlights a number of important issues for jazz historians. He demonstrates that what we think of as ‘the story of jazz’ is inseparable from our method of telling it; that the different media through which we record the past do not simply reflect, but actually create, what we take that past to be about. He also wants to show us that in narrating someone’s life, it is more than just a case of getting the facts right. The way in which someone speaks is as significant as the things they go on to say; and that in their way of saying it – Lomax calls it the surge of speech – they may create stories or fictions as good as any we know of.2