Jelly Roll Morton & his Red Hot Peppers Ringer T-Shirt

This is a Bluescentric Brand Jelly Roll Morton ringer tee, available in comfortable sizes up to 2XL. The material is 4.3 oz 100% combed ringspun cotton fine jersey. It features side seams and contrasting 1x1 baby rib binded collar and sleeves. 

To hear him tell it, Fred LaMothe, better known as Jelly Roll Morton, invented Jazz music. And while the larger-than-life claim seems grandiose, it’s also touched with an air of truth.

He grew up in the perfect place & time for the birth of Jazz. His 1915 Jelly Roll Blues composition was among Jazz’s first. Born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1890, Morton was sneaking off to Storyville, the town’s red light district, where he developed a distinct idiosyncratic sound in the piano parlors of the area’s barrooms & brothels.

It was about 1926 that Morton put together Jelly Roll Morton and his Red Hot Peppers -- a loose eight-piece collective that, at times, included some New Orleans greats like Kid Ory on the trombone & George Mitchell on coronet.

A small handful of Red Hot Peppers songs have survived, from a September, 1926 recording session at the Webster Hotel in Chicago, for Victor Records. Morton’s piano playing is legendary.

One of Jelly Roll’s original compositions, “I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say”, has remained a popular musical standard for over 100 years. Morton wrote it about his friend & fellow New Orleans musicianer, Buddy Bolden, the ghostlike grandfather of Jazz whose tragic, creative spark ignited the great American music — even though not a single note of Bolden’s playing survived.