Tuesday Apr 30, 2024
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY
11201
Get Tickets Here!
About the Book.
In Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories, Elijah Wald takes readers on a journey into the hidden and censored world of early blues and jazz, guided by the legendary New Orleans pianist Jelly Roll Morton. Morton became nationally famous as a composer and bandleader in the 1920s, but got his start twenty years earlier, entertaining customers in the city’s famous bordellos and singing rough blues in Gulf Coast honky-tonks. He recorded an oral history of that time in 1938, but the most distinctive songs were hidden away for over fifty years, because the language and themes were as wild and raunchy as anything in gangsta rap.
Those songs inspired Wald to explore how much other history had been locked away and censored, and this book is the result of that quest. Full of previously unpublished lyrics and stories, it paints a new and surprising picture of the dawn of American popular music, when jazz and blues were still the private, after-hours music of the Black “sporting world.” It gives new insight into familiar figures like Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong, and introduces forgotten characters like Ready Money, the New Orleans sex worker and pickpocket who ended up owning one of the largest Black hotels on the West Coast.Revelatory and fascinating, these songs and stories provide an alternate view of Black culture at the turn of the twentieth century, when a new generation was shaping lives their parents could not have imagined and art that transformed popular culture around the world—the birth of a joyous, angry, desperate, loving, and ferociously funny tradition that resurfaced in hip-hop and continues to inspire young artists in a new millennium.
About the Author.
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.
About the Moderator.
Jay Smooth is a Hip-Hop DJ and cultural critic, who in 1991 founded New York’s longest-running rap radio show, WBAI’s Underground Railroad. Jay also helped usher in Hip-Hop’s “Blog Era” with his early writing at hiphopmusic.com, and is perhaps best known for the wide-ranging commentary on music and politics at the “Ill Doctrine” Youtube channel. Most recently Jay co-hosted the “Think Twice: Michael Jackson” podcast series, cited by the New Yorker as best podcast of 2023.
