Jelly's Blues: The Life, Music and Redemption of Jelly Roll Morton by William Reich and Howard Gaines (2004). Holy cow, what a horror story. I know all of the jazz pioneers were screwed by the music industry, but what was done to Jelly Roll Morton must be the worst-case scenario. And it continues to this very day! This is a new biography of Morton, carefully and deeply researched, digging beyond the booze-fueled tall tales painting him as a crackpot voodoo pimp (and Lomax never did come across with the promised payments for those Library of Congess interviews and recordings). Morton did do a lot of wild living over the years, but he was also an innovative player and composer -- one of the first (THE first? perhaps) to truly notate jazz on paper. His compositions and arrangements played a major factor in the spread of jazz, while his own art continued to progress throughout his life, though most people tried to lock him in an old-time Dixieland box. Meanwhile, seemingly every deal he ever made, from publishers to record companies to ASCAP, turned out bad -- not just average bad, but deceitful and thieving bad. The proper payment for his compositions only began to flow in 1960, when Congress forced ASCAP to straighten out its act (a couple of decades after his death), and it still doesn't go to his actual family. And publishers who piggybacked their name onto his in composer credits (for that extra slice of pie) still get that shameless co-author credit. You don't need any voodoo for this horror story. The book is well-written, sometimes a bit more like a flat police procedural than a music biography, but in this case that may be the way to go.