Wolverine Blues

Jelly Roll Morton wrote Wolverine Blues in 1923 and immediately got into a fight about it. Not a metaphorical fight — an actual dispute with the Melrose Brothers, music publishers on the South Side of Chicago who slapped their names on the composition as co-writers despite having contributed exactly nothing. Morton signed the deal anyway because he needed the money and because, in 1923, a Black composer in America had roughly the same legal standing as a suggestion box in a hurricane.

The irony is exquisite. A tune called Wolverine Blues isn't actually a blues at all — it's a multi-strain composition closer to ragtime, with a melody so infectious that it became a standard almost overnight. The Wolverines, a white college band from Indiana, liked it so much they named their entire group after it. Their cornet player was a twenty-year-old kid named Bix Beiderbecke, who would go on to become one of the most celebrated musicians in jazz history. Morton created a song that created a band that created a legend. He got a fraction of the royalties.

Listen to the 1923 piano solo recording and you hear something almost impossible for the era: swing. Real swing, a decade before the word meant anything to the general public. Morton's left hand keeps a steady pulse while his right hand floats above it, slightly behind the beat, creating a tension that pulls you forward. Pianists today study this recording the way architecture students study Frank Lloyd Wright — not to copy it, but to understand how someone could see the future so clearly while everyone around them was still building boxes.

Morton later claimed he wrote it in 1902, which is almost certainly a lie — the man added two decades to everything, including his own legend. But the music doesn't need the mythology. Wolverine Blues is three minutes of proof that Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, born in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans to a Creole family that would have preferred he become anything other than a musician, was the real thing.