Imagine writing the foundational code for an entire industry, watching competitors profit from your blueprints, and then dying in obscurity with almost no one from that industry at your funeral. This episode separates the man from the myth in the life of Jelly Roll Morton, born Ferdinand Joseph Lamothe in the Creole community of New Orleans, and explains why his boastful claim to have created jazz was closer to the truth than his contemporaries admitted.

We begin with a birth date that floats between 1884 and 1890 because New Orleans did not enforce birth certificates until around 1914, a father who abandoned the family, and a strict great-grandmother who threw him out when she discovered his job as a 14-year-old brothel pianist in Storyville. The conversation follows his years roaming the South as a pool shark, gambler, vaudeville performer, and minstrel show musician, the 1915 publication of Jelly Roll Blues as one of the first written jazz compositions, and his Red Hot Peppers recordings for Victor in Chicago with Kid Ory and Barney Bigard. It then turns to his fall in New York, Benny Goodman’s 1935 hit with King Porter Stomp, the Music Box club in Washington, and the eight-hour Library of Congress sessions with Alan Lomax in 1938.

• What the nickname Jelly Roll actually meant in the slang of the era
• How he notated swing on paper when everyone assumed standard notation would kill it
• The left-hand sixths, right-thumb melodies, and diminished fifths that defined his piano technique
• The 1938 stabbing, a whites-only hospital that refused to treat him, and the chronic damage that led to his death in Los Angeles in July 1941
• Why Duke Ellington and Jimmie Lunceford skipped his funeral, and the posthumous Grammys that finally vindicated him