One man’s lifetime of burrowing through antique stores, junk shops and musicians’ trunks is now yielding a wealth of revelations about the birth of jazz and the legendary Jelly Roll Morton’s role in helping create it.
Sorting through the hundreds of shirt boxes and shopping bags they acquired from an intrepid New Orleans collector named William Russell, historians at a French Quarter museum are beginning to understand the origins and heretofore unknown personalities of jazz in the kind of depth and detail scholars long had considered beyond reach.
The collection provides an unprecedented map of how music in 19th Century New Orleans–from black folk songs to French operatic arias–led to jazz. Its uncounted hours of interviews with early jazz musicians who had played in dance halls and funeral parades in the late 1800s, its holdings of complete instrumental parts from turn-of-the-century bands and its trove of previously undocumented sheet music explain how jazz music first took root in New Orleans and later blossomed in cities like Chicago.
New Orleans’ uncommonly rich array of musical idioms provided the ingredients for jazz, and the collection serves up those ingredients in unimagined detail. What did French opera programs of 19th Century New Orleans reveal about the roots of jazz? What did Louis Armstrong’s earliest test pressings (recordings never released) show about the rise of the first major jazz soloist? What tunes did Tony Jackson, the brilliant composer of “Pretty Baby,” write and how did they influence and nurture the development of the 20th Century American pop song?
The Russell archive overflows with 19th Century concert memorabilia, recordings long assumed vanished and scores that scholars never knew existed. In the months to come, this archive, housed at the Historic New Orleans Collection museum, is expected to provide the answers. The discoveries do not concern New Orleans alone, for the collection includes interviews and ephemera of Crescent City players who migrated to Chicago early in the century. This information traces how a rough-hewn, Louisiana music turned into a cosmopolitan Chicago sound that could be sold around the world.
The inventory is so immense that it will take years more to finish cataloging and studying. So far, though, museum scholars know that they now hold a trove of material documenting the life, times and music of the first jazz giant, New Orleans-born Ferdinand La Menthe “Jelly Roll” Morton. The windfall includes 46 apparently lost or forgotten scores (in Morton’s hand), seven rare piano rolls, approximately 100 photographs and possibly the only complete set of his commercial recordings. It also has literally hundreds of hours of interviews of pianist-bandleader Morton and those closest to him (including his sister, his old vaudeville partners and one of his piano students).
Though the Morton holdings are the heart of the collection, the Russell archive spills into related genres. The list includes the complete scores of Scott Joplin, including the composer’s privately published copy of his opera “Treemonisha”; the complete “Stark High Class Rags” (also known as the “Red Back Book of Rags”), a 1914 collection that was the bible of ragtime bands in America; lost songs by musical legend Tony Jackson, the “Pretty Baby” composer who was probably the only pianist Morton considered his superior; rare tapes of Chicago gospel singer Mahalia Jackson rehearsing and interviews with Jackson and pre-eminent gospel songwriter Thomas A. Dorsey (acquired when Russell lived in Chicago, from 1950-56). It continues with recordings and interviews with seminal New Orleans cornetist Bunk Johnson, whom trumpeter Armstrong considered a chief inspiration, and hundreds of pieces of turn-of-the-century sheet music by composers famous and forgotten.
“You’ll find practically every ragtime composition published, and in mint condition,” said Mike Hazeldine, a British scholar of New Orleans music who recently sifted through Russell’s sheet music collection.
John Whitehorn, a music researcher who also had traveled from Britain to study the Russell archive, said, “These must be considered the only known copies of much of this music (from the ragtime era).”
Unlike the other parts of the archive, the prized Morton material has been seen only by a small circle of museum officials who only recently realized the collection’s full magnitude.
Those who have analyzed Morton’s artifacts say they speak volumes about the genius of the man who proclaimed himself the “inventor of jazz.”
Though no individual can be considered author of a music as free-ranging and unruly as jazz, the Russell archive bolsters Morton’s assertion.
The obvious meticulousness, precision and clarity of his writing–in an era when many jazz musicians could not read music and those who did often improvised from bare-bones scores– enhance Morton’s position as a founding father of the music.
The Morton scores, however, tell only part of the story. Among scores of handwritten letters, Morton writes of being swindled by music publishers of royalties he rightly concludes would have been worth millions.
Russell’s files also include information on at least 86 New Orleans musicians unmentioned in major jazz reference works. Russell’s histories–complete with information on tunes they played, instrumentation they used and the styles in which they played–can fill in the blanks in basic knowledge about the precursors of jazz.
“Russell’s interviews with these musicians are tremendously important, because the people he talked to are virtually ignored by history,” said Nancy Ruck, who has been cataloging the material at the museum. “These were (African-American) people who were not considered important enough to interview, musicians who played music supposedly not worth inquiring about.”
Why did Russell–a frustrated violinist-composer who scraped out a living repairing violins and selling and (briefly) producing records–realize the significance of early jazz when so few others did? And how did he come to acquire so much of it?
The answers apparently owe to the peculiar personality and intellectual prowess of the man, who was born in Canton, Mo., in 1905, and eventually studied violin with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Ludwig Becker and composition with Arnold Schoenberg in California.
By 1929 Russell became smitten with music of Morton and proceeded to collect virtually all the recordings and published sheet music available, before meeting the great composer in the late 1930s.
From this point forth, Russell started accumulating things related to American music, including drum sticks once owned by legendary time-keeper Baby Dodds, a mirror from New Orleans’ Mahogany Hall (the most plush sporting house in the city’s Storyville vice district), a clarinet owned by first-generation jazz musician Alphonse Picou, thousands of photographs of dance halls and other crucial but long-vanished jazz sites, and even a maple leaf from Sedalia, Mo., the town where Joplin wrote his “Maple Leaf Rag.”
In part, Russell had been able to acquire this treasure through sheer determination. He “would tramp from door to door, usually in poorer black neighborhoods, asking if there might be any old jazz records there he might buy,” writes former New York Public Library curator Richard Jackson, who also has been cataloging the collection, in an article to be published next year.
Russell also succeeded because of his ability to convince musicians, their widows and business partners of the importance and nobility of his cause.
“He could get what an institution could not, because these people trusted him,” says Alfred E. Lemmon, Historic New Orleans Collection curator of manuscripts.
In part, Russell won their trust by insisting on paying them for every possession and every interview and also by promising (in writing) royalties from books that he planned to write but, alas, never found time to start. Thus he was able to acquire the crown jewel of the collection, the Morton manuscripts and letters owned by Morton’s business partner of the 1930s, Roy Carew, whose widow sold the lot to Russell.
“If an unknowing individual were to survey his collection, (he) would most probably assume it was the work of a well-funded institution, not a frugal eccentric,” writes Lemmon in a scholarly article to be published next year. “When his life-work was transferred to an institution, the legacy left the (museum) staff in awe of the energy required of a single individual to acquire and maintain it.”
When Russell died in 1992 at age 87, his brother, who was heir to the holdings, decided that the Historic New Orleans Collection ought to get the archive, in part because of the institution’s determination to keep it whole. Though museum officials decline to specify how much they paid, “It was really wholesale, much less than it’s worth,” said Lemmon.
In spring 1998, the museum will unveil portions of the archives and will present the world premiere of Morton’s newly-discovered scores.
“A collection like this comes along once in a lifetime,” said Lemmon, “and we’re lucky this one came along in ours.”