New Orleans Joys

By 1923, Morton had been away from New Orleans for nearly a decade. He'd crisscrossed the country — Los Angeles, Vancouver, St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago — playing piano, hustling pool, promoting boxing matches, and accumulating the kind of life experience that turns a talented musician into an artist. New Orleans Joys is what homesickness sounds like when the person doing the missing has a diamond in his tooth and won't admit to sentimentality under oath.

The piece is structured as a series of musical vignettes — little snapshots of the city Morton remembered. You can hear the parade in the second strain, the church in the bridge, the after-hours jam session in the final chorus. It's not a documentary; it's a dream. And like all dreams of home, it's probably more beautiful than the real thing ever was, which is exactly what makes it honest.

Morton recorded it as a piano solo for Gennett Records in Richmond, Indiana — a factory town about as far from New Orleans as you could get in spirit, if not in miles. The Gennett studio was literally next to a railroad track, and engineers had to stop recording when trains passed. Picture Morton sitting in this drafty room in Indiana, trains rattling the walls, playing music about a city eight hundred miles south where the air smells like jasmine and river water and someone is always cooking something with too much garlic.

That's the thing about New Orleans — it turns everyone who leaves into a poet. Morton was already a poet when he arrived. By the time he left, he was something more dangerous: a poet with impeccable technique and an ego the size of Lake Pontchartrain. New Orleans Joys is him being vulnerable anyway, which takes more courage than all the bragging combined.