Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

Ferdinand Joseph “Jelly Roll Morton” LaMenthe was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on October 20, 1890. As a child he began to learn how to play the piano at age 10 years old. He was taught by Tony Jackson, composer of songs like “Pretty Boy” and other hits. Tony Jackson is among the few musicians whom Morton admired and respected. He called Jackson “ the greatest single-handed entertainers in the world.” After the death of his mother, Morton began playing in whorehouses and in the bordellos of the Storyville district of New Orleans. There he became active as a gambler, pool shark, and a lot of things that caused his grandmother to throw him out of the house as a bum and a scalawag. She did not want him around his two little sisters. As a wanderer, and during the fair of 1904, he began traveling such cities as Chicago, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and Denver playing with various musical organizations as an in demand musician but he could never stay long with one band. “He couldn’t stay long in one band too long because he was too eccentric and too temperamental, and he was a one-man band himself“, said by bandleader George Morrison whom Morton played for in Denver. Morton really wanted to be the e