"When my grandmother found out that I was playing jazz in one of the sporting houses in the District, she told me that I had disgraced the family and forbade me to live at the house... She told me that devil music would surely bring about my downfall, but I just couldn't put it behind me."
Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe was born September 20, 1895 in New Orleans accordings to statements by himself and his siblings, although other accounts give a date of October 20, 1890. He took the last name of Morton from his stepfather; it may have been an Anglicized version of Mouton.
Morton played the harmonica, guitar and trombone as young child and by age 14 was playing piano in the brothels of Storyville. He was mentored there by ragtime pianist and composer Tony Jackson, and claimed that their after-hours jam sessions were the beginnings of jazz. It was at this time that he began using the nickname "Jelly Roll". By 1904 he was touring the South playing in minstrel shows and honky-tonks.
Settling in Chicago in 1914, Morton began writing down his compositions with Jelly Roll Blues being the first published jazz sheet music. After living in Los Angeles and Vancouver he returned to Chicago in 1923 and began recording on the Victor label with his band, The Red Hot Peppers, becoming the most widely-known jazz musician of the day. The depression and the rise of swing music put an end to his recording career and he started touring with burlesque shows until 1935 when he was hired as the manager and piano player for a bar in the Shaw area of Washington DC.
Morton was asked by folklorist and musicologist Alan Lomax to record music and interviews for the Library of Congress in 1938, producing over eight hours of tapes. These were released as a CD boxed set in 2005, winning two Grammy Awards, as well as a lifetime achievement award for Morton.
During the time of Lomax's interviews, Morton was stabbed in a bar fight, worsening previous lung problems. He moved to California to live in a more moderate climate, and died in Los Angeles on July 10, 1941.
"The fact that white people readily and proudly call themselves "white", glorify all that is white, and whitewash all that is glorified, become unnatural and bigoted in its intent only when these same whites deny persons of African heritage who are black the natural and inalienable right to readily -- proudly -- call themselves "black", glorify all that is black and blackwash all that is glorified." ~ Abbey Lincoln
Abbey Lincoln was born Anna Marie Wooldridge on August 6, 1930 in Chicago. She took the name Abbey Lincoln -- a combination of Westminster Abbey and Abraham Lincoln -- as she began her recording career in Los Angeles in the mid 1950's.
Lincoln released her first album, A Story of a Girl in Love, in 1956. The same year she appeared in The Girl Can't Help It with Jayne Mansfield, becoming known for wearing a dress Marilyn Monroe wore in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
The next year she recorded the album That's Him with drummer Max Roach and Sonny Rollins on tenor sax. Influenced by Roach's activism she became an outspoken civil rights activist, abandoning the glamorous persona of what Joanne Moore called the "Lena Horne track". Lincoln and Roach collaborated on the early protest album We Insist! Freedom Now Suite in 1960. They married in 1962, divorcing eight years later.
Lincoln starred in the film Nothing But a Manwith Ivan Dixon in 1964, and in the romantic comedy For Love of Ivywith Sidney Poitier in 1968 for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe award.
Lincoln did not record again until 1990, spending the time teaching acting, writing songs, and visiting Africa. She released nine more albums, many featuring her own composition. She was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Award in 2003. She died on August 14, 2010 in New York City at the age of 80.
