‘Honor the source’: Race, representation and intellectual property in Jelly’s Last Jam

Abstract

The story of the development of Jelly’s Last Jam (1992) stands uniquely at the intersection of racial politics, intellectual property, the power of storytelling and the authority of those who tell stories and present them on the stage. By the time the show opened on Broadway, Alan Lomax had been trying for nearly three decades to get his book Mister Jelly Roll (1950) adapted for the stage or screen. Now the story of Ferdinand ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton had become a musical, with a book by George C. Wolfe and music and lyrics by Luther Henderson and Susan Birkenhead, and Wolfe’s script ensured that Morton’s story linked up firmly with the history of jazz and race in America. But Lomax’s name and book title were nowhere to be found in the show’s credits, nor in interviews and other commentary about the show. Although musicologist Lawrence Gushee referred to Mister Jelly Roll as ‘the point of departure for all subsequent biographical writing on Morton’, George C. Wolfe stated only that ‘the stories of black people’ are ‘not stored in the history books […] they’re stored in the music’. In this study, I offer new evidence that explains the curious misdirection in Wolfe’s public utterances based on a close study of archival sources in the Library of Congress’s Alan Lomax Collection, of the complete and unedited recordings of Lomax’s interview with Morton released for the first time in 2005 and of press coverage of the producers’ efforts to bring Morton’s story to the musical stage. This article synthesizes the public and private legacy of the show’s development to provide perspectives on a larger racial reckoning that resonates offstage as well as onstage.