- Founded the jazz band The Red Hot Peppers.
- Legendary jazz composer and pianist.
- Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998 (under the category Early Influence).
- Inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame in 1982.
- Pianist, composer and arranger, who started as a house pianist in New Orleans bordellos in 1904.
- A master at self-promotion, he regarded himself -- rather than W.C. Handy -- as the creator of jazz (in 1902), billing himself as the Originator of Jazz, Stomps and Blues.
- Composed numerous songs, which have become jazz standards, such as "Wolverine Blues", "King Porter Stomp" and "The Pearls".
- His composition "Jelly Roll Blues", published in 1915, was one of the first published jazz compositions. He also claimed to have invented the genre.
- Morton was jazz's first arranger, proving that a genre rooted in improvisation could retain its essential characteristics when notated.
- Morton also wrote "King Porter Stomp", "Wolverine Blues", "Black Bottom Stomp", and "I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say", the last being a tribute to New Orleans musicians from the turn of the 20th century.
- In 1938, Morton was stabbed by a friend of the Music Box's owner and suffered wounds to the head and chest. A nearby whites-only hospital refused to treat him, as the city had racially segregated facilities. He was transported to a black hospital farther away. When he was in the hospital, doctors left ice on his wounds for several hours before attending to the injury. His recovery from his wounds was incomplete, and thereafter he was often ill and became short of breath easily.
- Inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2008.
- He was an American ragtime and jazz pianist, bandleader, and composer.
- At the age of fourteen, Morton began as a piano player in a brothel. He often sang smutty lyrics and used the nickname "Jelly Roll", which was African-American slang for female genitalia.
- Morton's playing was also close to barrelhouse, which produced boogie-woogie.
- Gained a certain notoriety early in his career for supplementing his income in the seedier districts of New Orleans with pimping, pool hustling and illegal card games.
- His father, a bricklayer and occasional trombonist, left his mother when Morton was three (they were never married). When his mother married William Mouton in 1894, Ferdinand adopted his stepfather's surname, anglicizing it to Morton.
- From the age of 18, he embarked on theatrical tours (including as comedian-pianist with minstrel shows) of the Gulf states and Texas, followed by Kansas City, Chicago and Los Angeles. He was based in Chicago (1922-27) and New York (1927-29), after which the Great Depression and a change in the direction of dance music precipitated a decline in Morton's career.
- Around 1904, Morton started touring in the US South, working in minstrel shows such as Will Benbow's Chocolate Drops, gambling, and composing. His songs "Jelly Roll Blues", "New Orleans Blues", "Frog-I-More Rag", "Animule Dance", and "King Porter Stomp" were composed during this period.
- By 1914, he was putting his compositions on paper. In 1915 "Jelly Roll Blues" was one of the first jazz compositions to be published.
- Formed short-lived music publishing companies in New York (1938) and California (1940).
- In 1912-14, Morton toured with his girlfriend Rosa Brown as a vaudeville act before living in Chicago for three years.
- The cornetist Rex Stewart recalled that Morton had chosen "the nom de plume 'Morton' to protect his family from disgrace if he was identified as a whorehouse 'professor'.
- While working as a pianist in a brothel, he was living with his churchgoing great-grandmother. He convinced her that he worked as a night watchman in a barrel factory. After Morton's grandmother found out he was playing jazz in a brothel, she disowned him for disgracing the Lamothe name. "When my grandmother found out that I was playing jazz in one of the sporting houses in the District, she told me that I had disgraced the family and forbade me to live at the house...She told me that devil music would surely bring about my downfall....".
- Morton's claim to have invented jazz in 1902 was criticized. Music critic Scott Yanow wrote, "Jelly Roll Morton did himself a lot of harm posthumously by exaggerating his worth...Morton's accomplishments as an early innovator are so vast that he did not really need to stretch the truth." Gunther Schuller says of Morton's "hyperbolic assertions" that there is "no proof to the contrary" and that Morton's "considerable accomplishments in themselves provide reasonable substantiation".
- Both parents traced their Creole ancestry four generations to the 18th century. Morton's birth date and year of birth are uncertain, given that no birth certificate was ever issued for him. The law requiring birth certificates for citizens was not enforced until 1914.
- In the big-band era, his "King Porter Stomp", which Morton had written decades earlier, was a big hit for Fletcher Henderson and Benny Goodman; it became a standard covered by most other swing bands of that time.
- He was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2008.
- In late 1940, an ailing Morton decided to head out to Los Angeles but, when he died at the age of 50, he seemed like an old man. Ironically his music soon became popular again as the New Orleans jazz revivalist movement caught fire and, if he had lived just a few more years, the chances are good that he would have been restored to his former prominence (as was Kid Ory).
- An article about the funeral appeared in the August 1, 1941, issue of DownBeat and reported that his pallbearers were Kid Ory, Mutt Carey, Fred Washington, and Ed Garland. Duke Ellington and Jimmie Lunceford were absent, though both were appearing in Los Angeles at the time. Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington's son did attend the funeral.
- In the chorus of "And It Stoned Me," the opening track of his seminal 1970 album Moondance, Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison sings "And it stoned me to my soul, stoned me just like Jelly Roll, and it stoned me." The reference is thought to be to the childhood memory of listening to his father's Morton recordings.
- In 1935, his 30-year-old composition "King Porter Stomp", arranged by Fletcher Henderson, became Benny Goodman's first hit and a swing standard, but Morton received no royalties from the recordings.
- Jelly Roll Morton's Last Night at the Jungle Inn: An Imaginary Memoir (1984), by the ethnomusicologist and folklorist Samuel Charters, embellishing Morton's early stories about his life.
- Morton claimed to have written some tunes that were copyrighted by others, including "Alabama Bound" and "Tiger Rag". ".
- He briefly had a radio show in 1934, then toured in a burlesque band.
- He said Buddy Bolden played ragtime but not jazz, a view not accepted by some of Bolden's contemporaries in New Orleans. The contradictions may stem from different definitions of "ragtime" and "jazz".
- During Morton's brief residency at the Music Box, the folklorist Alan Lomax heard him play. In May 1938, Lomax invited Morton to record music and interviews for the Library of Congress. The sessions were intended to be a short interview with musical examples for researchers at the Library of Congress, but the sessions expanded to over eight hours, with Morton talking and playing piano. Lomax conducted longer interviews, taking notes but not recording. Lomax was interested in Morton's days in Storyville, New Orleans, and the ribald songs of the time. Although reluctant to record these, Morton obliged Lomax. Because of the suggestive nature of the songs, some of the Library of Congress recordings were not released until 2005.
- His Music Box interviews were released posthumously as boxed set and won two Grammy Awards. During the same year, Morton was honored with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
- Due in part to the Great Depression, RCA Victor did not renew Morton's recording contract for 1931. He continued playing in New York but struggled financially.
- Jelly's Last Jam is a musical with a book by George C. Wolfe, lyrics by Susan Birkenhead, and music by Jelly Roll Morton and Luther Henderson.
- Clarence Williams III portrays Jelly Roll Morton in The Legend of 1900.
- According to the jazz historian David Gelly in 2000, Morton's arrogance and "bumptious" persona alienated so many musicians that few of them attended his funeral.
- In 1935, Morton moved to Washington, D.C., to become the manager and piano player at a bar called, at various times, the Music Box, Blue Moon Inn, and Jungle Inn, at 1211 U Street NW in Shaw, an African-American neighborhood. Morton was master of ceremonies, bouncer, and bartender. The club owner allowed her friends free admission and drinks, which prevented Morton from making the business a success.
- In 2013, Katy Martin published an article arguing that Alan Lomax's book of interviews put Morton in a negative light. Martin disagreed that Morton was an egotist.
- Morton was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and was elected as a charter member of the Gennett Records Walk of Fame.
- In being called a supreme egotist, Jelly Roll was often a victim of loose and lurid reporting. If we read the words that he himself wrote, however, we learn that he almost had an inferiority complex and said that he created his own style of jazz piano because 'All my fellow musicians were much faster in manipulations, I thought than I, and I did not feel as though I was in their class.' So he used a slower tempo to permit flexibility through the use of more notes, a pinch of Spanish to give a number of right seasoning, the avoidance of playing triple forte continuously, and many other points.
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