Jelly Roll Morton Stamp

**This Jelly Roll Morton stamp is a part of the jazz music set from the Legends of American Music series. Make sure to check out my hub page for this project. Also check out my post on jazz stamps.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of Black musicians to American and world music. One reason why the Legends of American Music series by the USPS is so important is because it features so many Black American musicians across genres. For example, this blog has articles about such Black music legends on stamps including W.C. Handy, Louis Armstrong, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and many others. Of course, perhaps the greatest musical contribution of Black musicians was the creation of jazz music. This article is about one of the earliest and most important figures in the history of jazz music, Jelly Roll Morton.

Jelly Roll Morton

Born Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe in New Orleans, Morton was a Creole whose ancestors date back to eighteenth-century Louisiana. His father was Edward Joseph Lamothe, a bricklayer, and his mother was a domestic worker. At the age of three, his father left the family, and his mother married William Mouton. Morton is the anglicized version of his stepfather’s surname.

Morton began learning the piano as a child and at the age of fourteen, began playing music in a brothel. At the brothel, he was engaged to play and sing songs with dirty lyrics, and became known as “Jelly Roll,” a slang term for female genitalia. Musicians playing in the brothels and clubs of the New Orleans neighborhood of Storyville were already playing forms of early jazz, and Morton picked up the style from them. Later, he would cause controversy by claiming he invented jazz.

In 1904, Morton began touring through the American south playing with a variety of minstrel show troupes. In addition to New Orleans style jazz, Morton was also an accomplished ragtime player. Morton began composing original songs and in 1915 his “Jelly Roll Blues” became one of the first jazz pieces to be published. The success of his compositions made him in demand as a performer and he traveled to California and to Vancouver, Canada, in the 1910s, taking New Orleans jazz with him.

Later Career

In the 1920s, to take advantage of the growing popularity of his compositions, Morton began making recordings. First, he made piano rolls of many of his most popular songs. Then, in 1926 he began making records with the Victor Talking Machine Company. To record, he led a group called the Red Hot Peppers.

However, with the onset of the Great Depression, the company did not renew his contract. In 1935, Morton moved to Washington D.C. to manage a club, and though ultimately unsuccessful in that endeavor, it was then that he met Alan Lomax. The folklorist eventually recorded more than eight hours of Morton talking about the early days of jazz music and playing. It was in these interviews that Morton made the claim to inventing jazz music himself.

In 1938, Morton was the victim of a stabbing. While he survived the attack, he suffered health problems after that and eventually died in July of 1941. Many of his compositions became stands of jazz and have been hits for generations of musicians, though he did not get royalties from most of these songs.

The Stamp

The Jelly Roll Morton stamp features a portrait of the musician facing forward with his eyes looking off to the left. In addition, behind and above Morton is a decorative piano keyboard, an element that unites all of the stamps in the Legends jazz set. The stamp was the design of Thomas Blackshear II.

The first stamp of the set was the Louis Armstrong stamp, which was issued on September 1, 1995 in New Orleans. The remaining stamps in the series became available two weeks later on September 16, at the Monterrey jazz Festival.

Make sure to check out some of Jelly Roll Morton’s music. This recording of his “Original Jelly Roll Blues” with the Red Hot Peppers is a really great piece of American music.