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 performe ...