From 2019 to early 2020, I prepared an article for a volume in honor of my mentor Michael Budds. A number of us were invited to contribute something, including my dear friend Morgan Owen in her revealing The Merry Widow: Freedom and Feminism in the Widowhood of Mrs. H.H.A. Beach. Between the period of writing and publication, Dr. Budds died unexpectedly 19.11.2020 at the age of 73. It was a difficult time. Our pieces appear in Legacies of Power in American Music: Essays In Honor of Michael J. Budds. I thank my friend and mentor Judith Mabary for her dedicated work on the entire volume.

Jelly Roll played a special role in my Mizzou career. When I visited Columbia in 2015 to interview with Judith Mabary, Maya Gibson, and Michael Budds about pursuing an MA, I arrived an hour early to the Fine Arts Annex (RIP) and sat listening Morton’s Library of Congress recordings. Solo renditions of “Jungle Blues,” “King Porter Stomp,” and “New Orleans Blues” settled my nerves. When Dr. Mabary asked me to participate in the Festschrift two years later, it was natural to close the circle by turning back to Jelly.

The following version of Jelly’s “Jungle Music” dates to Jan-Mar 2020. It has musical examples and is longer (and less edited) than what appeared in the Michael Budds Festschrift. A few caveats:

—I could not acquire print permissions for James Dapogny’s transcriptions of Jelly’s piano solos; nor for what I transcribed from “Jungle Blues.” The published essay lacks the intended examples…but I can see how it may have been better if conceived without them. As printed, it lacks explanatory detail.

—I admit my naïveté in conceiving this paper as I would have any other musicological endeavor at the time. In Spring 2020, I began to think differently after conversations with Dr. Louis Chude-Sokei—in addition to reading his Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora and David Garcia’s Listening for Africa. While writers have long accepted the roles of brass band music, blues, and ragtime in Nola jazz, other popular elements may be excluded in constructing jazz as art music. I only begin to look at vaudevillian connections here; Prof Chude-Sokei meanwhile dates the jungle idea back further to minstrelsy. Today I would model my approach on his—with a sensitivity to performativity—to locate so-called jungle music more broadly in cultural discourse.

Additional thanks to Jason Armstrong and Holly Mockovak for their assistance on this project