Michigan Water Blues (Jelly Roll Morton)

Muhammad Ali once said “if you can do what you say you can do, it ain’t bragging”. There may be no individual (other than Muhammad himself) that this would apply to more than Jelly Roll Morton. Jelly’s ego was the size of all outdoors, but it was more than equaled by the enormity of his talent. Morton had the audacity to claim that he “invented” jazz in 1902, much to the consternation of many of his musical contemporaries. Jazz historian and composer Gunther Schuller, however, later maintained that “there was no proof to the contrary” of Morton’s claim.

Jelly Roll Morton was born in New Orleans in 1890 and began his musical career there while in his teens. He started out playing piano at a New Orleans brothel, but soon traveled throughout the south playing minstrel shows. He migrated to Chicago in 1910 and played in New York throughout the 1920’s. Morton moved to Washington D.C. in 1935 where he suffered stab wounds to the head and chest during an altercation three years later. These wounds would ultimately prove to be fatal.

Despite his untimely death, Jelly Roll Morton's musical legacy was vast and influential, and his better known compositions such as “The Pearls”, “Sweet Substitute”, and “Winin’ Boy” have endured quite well to this day.

I play an arrangement of “Michigan Water Blues” that I lifted from Dave Van Ronk. It’s in standard tuning, and consists of a series of descending thirds in the key of E.

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