Jelly Roll Morton and
the "Frog-I-More Rag"
Ferdinand Joseph "Jelly Roll"
Morton (1885-1941)
"Frog-i-More Rag"
Music manuscript, ca. 1908
Music Division
78 rpm Paramount recording
Hand-colored photograph
Recorded Sound Reference
Center
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Ferdinand Joseph "Jelly Roll" Morton is generally acknowledged
as the first jazz composer. The talents of this remarkable New Orleans
jazz pioneer--composer, arranger, pianist--were exceeded only by
his ego. He termed himself the inventor of jazz, claiming this honor
in his extraordinary nine hours of interviews with Alan Lomax for
the Library of Congress Music Division's Archive of American Folk
Song in 1938. In those interviews, which comprise perhaps the first
extended "oral history" ever created, Morton shows himself to be
a brilliant raconteur: over his own piano vamps, he recalls turn-of-the-century
life in New Orleans and illustrates the evolution of ragtime to
jazz.
Morton probably wrote the "Frog-i-More Rag" in 1908 to accompany
a fellow vaudevillian known as "Frog-i-More," a contortionist who
performed in a frog costume. But Morton did not deposit the music
for copyright until 1918, for fear that any form of public record
was an invitation to purloin his ideas.
The "Frog-i-More Rag" seen here, in Jelly Roll's own hand, is
thus the first of many copyright deposits the Library holds for
Morton. Morton recorded the rag twice in the spring of 1924 but
only one of the recordings survives; it was not released until the
1940s. This particular issue was published in 1949 by a group of
record collectors who revived the Paramount records imprint. Paramount
was a historically and musically significant record label of the
1920s and early 1930s. The disc and the tinted photograph of Morton
are from the Nesuhi Ertegun Collection of Jelly Roll Morton Recordings
at the Library of Congress. The Ertegun Collection contains every
commercial recording Morton ever made, all in their original 78-rpm
disc format.
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