Jelly

Barrelhouse music is the sort of piano music you hear coming softly through the flaking shutters of the questionable little frame houses on the streets down by the railroad station in Charleston, Memphis, Birmingham, Mobile. Still preserved here & there in the squalid social amber of the deep South, it is a fusion of ragtime and blues that flowered in the 20th Century's first decade. And it is important as a U. S. folk-music form because it almost died giving birth to jazz. It got its name from the place where it was (and occasionally still is) played.

Last week in Manhattan Charles Edward Smith, historian (Jazzmen) and friend of America's native rhythms, produced through new General Records Co. an album of barrelhouse tunes played by the greatest surviving barrel-houser--54-year-old Ferdinand ("Jelly Roll") Morton. The album's title is Jetty Roll Morton's New Orleans Memories, and both musically and otherwise Jelly has much of interest to remember.

Son of a New Orleans Negro liquor dealer, Jelly started playing guitar and singing spirituals at funerals, then switched to the piano when he heard a male pianist at the French Opera House. Until then he had assumed that the piano was a woman's instrument. He took some lessons at a Catholic school, but considers his real mentor an eight-fingered virtuoso named Mamie Desdume, "good-natured, a fine dresser, and extremely popular with the sporting crowd." Mamie played the first blues Jelly ever heard, and she is gratefully recalled in the album by Mamie's Blues.

When Jelly was 16 or thereabouts, his father, who had been under the impression that Jelly was working nights in a cooperage plant, learned that Jelly was in fact providing entertainment for various dives in the restricted Storyville part of town. There was no place else for Jelly to play his kind of music, so Jelly left home.

From then on Jelly rose steadily to fame in his chosen profession, performing at places like Aunt Lucy's, Gypsy Schaeffer's and the Frenchman's. Waxing prosperous, he adorned his massive smile with a set of gold teeth, studded one of them with a diamond. In such lurid surroundings, Jelly and other locally celebrated colored musicians like King Oliver and Louis Armstrong were unconsciously shaping a folk music whose syncopated four-four time would later make the whole world dance and sing differently. In rediscovering and re-recording Jelly's simple and persuasive music, Charles Smith has done for the jazz cult something pretty close to what Lord Elgin did for antiquarians.

Other popular albums-of-the-month:

Lee Wiley, favorite chanteuse-hot of the middle '30s, records a collection of musical-comedy tunes by George & Ira Gershwin, Rodgers & Hart. The Gershwin set is from Liberty Music Shops; the Rodgers & Hart from Rabsons Music Shop, No. 111 W. 52nd Street, Manhattan.

Pinocchio (Victor). Six sides of Walt Disney's words & music taken directly from the film's sound track.

Bix Beiderbecke (Hot Record Society). The late, greatest hot cornetist's last recordings with the Wolverines have been remade from surviving discs. Scratchy but of prime interest to hot collectors.

National Vocarium.* Five albums of famed voices from the grave. Items: President Wilson talking to the Indians, President Taft on Labor, T. R. on sportsmanship, "A Humorous Story" by Thomas Alva Edison, the Charge of the Light Brigade sounded by the original bugler.

* No. 9 Rockefeller Plaza, Manhattan.

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