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Jelly Roll Blues
- Censored Songs and Hidden Histories
- Narrated by: Mela Lee
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
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Publisher's summary
A bestselling music historian follows Jelly Roll Morton on a journey through the hidden worlds and forbidden songs of early blues and jazz.
In Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories, Elijah Wald takes listeners on a journey into the hidden and censored world of early blues and jazz, guided by the legendary New Orleans pianist Jelly Roll Morton. Morton became nationally famous as a composer and bandleader in the 1920s, but got his start twenty years earlier, entertaining customers in the city’s famous bordellos and singing rough blues in Gulf Coast honky-tonks. He recorded an oral history of that time in 1938, but the most distinctive songs were hidden away for over fifty years, because the language and themes were as wild and raunchy as anything in gangsta rap.
Those songs inspired Wald to explore how much other history had been locked away and censored, and this book is the result of that quest. Full of previously unpublished lyrics and stories, it paints a new and surprising picture of the dawn of American popular music, when jazz and blues were still the private, after-hours music of the Black "sporting world." It gives new insight into familiar figures like Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong, and introduces forgotten characters like Ready Money, the New Orleans sex worker and pickpocket who ended up owning one of the largest Black hotels on the West Coast.
Revelatory and fascinating, these songs and stories provide an alternate view of Black culture at the turn of the twentieth century, when a new generation was shaping lives their parents could not have imagined and art that transformed popular culture around the world—the birth of a joyous, angry, desperate, loving, and ferociously funny tradition that resurfaced in hip-hop and continues to inspire young artists in a new millennium.
Critic reviews
“I grew up on the old blues: heard it, felt it, danced to it, but a lot of people didn’t hear the real stuff, because somebody else was controlling the narrative. This book is searching out those voices, keeping them from being lost, and helping to transfer that ancestral information to a new generation.”—Taj Mahal
“Elijah Wald has done it again. Both a compelling study of blues pioneer and musical genius Jelly Roll Morton's roots and song craft as well as a meticulously researched history of early twentieth-century, ostensibly ‘taboo’ popular music culture, Jelly Roll Blues offers a clear-eyed exploration of Black modernist era vernacular music that pushed the boundaries of social propriety. This is a book that takes seriously graphic forms of cultural expression as articulations of human desire and as complex manifestations of social and economic lifeworlds shaped by racial and gender pressures and inequalities. A deft archival historian, Wald continues to challenge and expand what we know as well as what we think we know about the early blues.”—Daphne Brooks, professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music at Yale University and author of Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound
"This book is riveting. Elijah Wald brings the world of the New Orleans demi-monde to raucous life through his excavation of the censored lyrics of early jazz and blues. Moreover, in showing how women participated in this musical culture—as musicians in their own right, audience participants, and prostitutes enjoying some leisure time after hours—he reveals a world scarcely glimpsed before and all but erased from history. What Wald recovers here borders on the miraculous."—Emily Landau, author of Spectacular Wickedness: Sex, Race, and Memory in Storyville, New Orleans
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The Jazzmen
- How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America
- By: Larry Tye
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 16 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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From the New York Times bestselling author of Satchel and Bobby Kennedy, a sweeping and spellbinding portrait of the longtime kings of jazz—Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie—who, born within a few years of one another, overcame racist exclusion and violence to become the most popular entertainers on the planet.
By: Larry Tye
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Hell Put to Shame
- The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre and the Horror of America's Second Slavery
- By: Earl Swift
- Narrated by: Mark Deakins
- Length: 12 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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From the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Chesapeake Requiem comes a gripping new work of narrative nonfiction telling the forgotten story of the mass killing of eleven Black farmhands on a Georgia plantation in the spring of 1921—a crime which exposed for the nation the existence of the “peonage system,” a form of legal enslavement established after the Civil War across the American South.
By: Earl Swift
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A Really Strange and Wonderful Time
- The Chapel Hill Music Scene: 1989-1999
- By: Tom Maxwell
- Narrated by: Tom Maxwell
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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A Really Strange and Wonderful Time features a representative cross-section of what was being created in and around Chapel Hill between 1989 and 1999. In addition to the aforementioned indie bands, it documents―through firsthand accounts―other local notables like Ben Folds Five, Dillon Fence, Flat Duo Jets, Small, Southern Culture on the Skids, Squirrel Nut Zippers, The Veldt, and Whiskeytown. At the same time, it describes the nurturing infrastructure which engendered and encouraged this marvelous diversity. In essence, A Really Strange and Wonderful Time is proof of the genius of community.
By: Tom Maxwell
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Delta Blues
- The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music
- By: Ted Gioia
- Narrated by: Chris Abernathy
- Length: 17 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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The blues grew out of the plantations and prisons, the swampy marshes and fertile cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta. With original research and keen insights, Ted Gioia - the author of a landmark study of West Coast jazz and the critically acclaimed The History of Jazz - brings to life the stirring music of the Delta, evoking the legendary figures who shaped its sound and ethos: Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, B. B. King, and others.
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A well-researched history of the blues
- By Joselo on 08-19-21
By: Ted Gioia
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The Six Pack
- On the Open Road in Search of Wrestlemania
- By: Brad Balukjian
- Narrated by: Brad Balukjian
- Length: 11 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2005, Brad Balukjian left his position as a magazine fact-checker to pursue a dream job: partner with his childhood hero, The Iron Sheik (whose real name was Khosrow Vaziri), to write his biography. Things quickly went south, culminating in the Sheik threatening Balukjian’s life. Now seventeen years later, Balukjian returns to the road in search of not only a reunion with the Sheik, but something much bigger: truth in a world built on illusion.
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A pro wrestling fan and a terrific writer
- By BFSWilmington on 04-29-24
By: Brad Balukjian
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Kingdom of Play
- What Ball-Bouncing Octopuses, Belly-Flopping Monkeys, and Mud-Sliding Elephants Reveal About Life Itself
- By: David Toomey
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 6 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Critically acclaimed science writer David Toomey takes us on a fast-paced and entertaining tour of playful animals and the scientists who study them. From octopuses on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to meerkats in the Kalahari Desert to brown bears on Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, we follow adventurous researchers as they design and conduct experiments seeking answers to new, intriguing questions: When did play first appear in animals? How does play develop the brain, and how did it evolve?
By: David Toomey
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Truckload of Art
- The Life and Work of Terry Allen—An Authorized Biography
- By: Brendan Greaves
- Narrated by: Jason Culp, Brendan Greaves
- Length: 21 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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The definitive, authorized, and first-ever biography of Terry Allen, the internationally acclaimed visual artist and iconoclastic songwriter who occupies an utterly unique position straddling the disparate, and usually distant, worlds of conceptual art and country music.
By: Brendan Greaves
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Life's Too Short
- A Memoir
- By: Darius Rucker
- Narrated by: Darius Rucker
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Nearly 40 years into his illustrious career, Darius tells the story of his life through the music that made him, including songs by everyone from Frank Sinatra and Stevie Wonder to R.E.M., KISS, Prince and, of course, his own music with Hootie and as a solo artist. He recounts the unlikely ascent of his band and wild tales of his road-hardened life—one filled with stumbles, missteps and battles with demons, but ultimately resulting in triumph. LIFE’S TOO SHORT is the story of a man, his music and his life; a pause-resisting memoir that is raw, real, hilarious and deeply emotional.
By: Darius Rucker
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3 Shades of Blue
- Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool
- By: James Kaplan
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 14 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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From the author of the definitive biography of Frank Sinatra, the story of how jazz arrived at the pinnacle of American culture in 1959, told through the journey of three towering artists—Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans—who came together to create the most iconic jazz album of all time, Kind of Blue.
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The history of 3 jazz greats
- By L. Sorogheye on 04-14-24
By: James Kaplan
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God's Ghostwriters
- Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible
- By: Candida Moss
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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For the past two thousand years, Christian tradition, scholarship, and pop culture have credited the authorship of the New Testament to a select group of men: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul. But hidden behind these named and sainted individuals are a cluster of enslaved coauthors and collaborators.
By: Candida Moss
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The Blues Brothers
- An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic
- By: Daniel De Visé
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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The saga behind The Blues Brothers, as Daniel de Visé reveals, is epic, encompassing the colorful childhoods of Belushi and Aykroyd; the comedic revolution sparked by Harvard’s Lampoon and Chicago’s Second City; the birth and anecdote-rich, drug-filled early years of Saturday Night Live, where the Blues Brothers were born as an act amidst turmoil and rivalry; and, of course, the indelible behind-the-scenes narrative of how the film was made, scene by memorable scene.
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Tragically Loosing John
- By Richard S. Bisbee on 03-26-24
By: Daniel De Visé
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Taylor Swift
- The Whole Story
- By: Chas Newkey-Burden
- Narrated by: Norma Butikofer
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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A small-town girl with incredible talent – and the strength and determination to realise her dream – Taylor Swift has gone from America’s sweetheart to global megastar. But how did she get there? And how has she coped with the realities of fame? Fully updated in fascinating detail, Taylor Swift: The Whole Story explores Taylor’s musical evolution and her status as a fearless businesswoman operating on her own terms. From early beginnings to the challenges on the road to success, from her relationships to her Eras tour, this is the unmissable account of Taylor’s journey to world domination.