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It Like to Broke My Heart 233
could have been the hottest place in town if she'd listened. The people on the city board liked Jelly and had give him permission to operate the only black-and-tan place in the city. People who knew Jelly's records would hear about him, white people from Texas and all over, and come listen to him play piano all evening. The band would just have to sit around— they couldn't play nothing anyhow—and those guests would apologize and explain that they onlv wanted to hear Jelly Roll. ...
Devoted Mabel gently screens out the curses of the young Washington swingsters shushed by the white folks while old man Morton played Ms "com/* Mister Jelly Lord openly expressed his contempt for these "ignorant young rowdies/* while they repaid his scorn by hating him even more than they hated the brutal Washington police. When this corny old handkerchief-head would assert that Count Basie did not know piano, the atmosphere of The Jungle Inn would be ripe for murder.
Mister Jelly Roll never bothered his head with these hep-cats, until his empty bank account at last convinced him that "swing" might not be so bad as he knew it was. Never one to do things by halves, he began to preach about saxophone sections and all the other apparatus of musical display which makes hot jazz impossible for a big band. He even set about writing swing tunes. A sample from Sweet Substitute (which he probably hummed to the fair Cordelia), will be quite enough:
Sweet substitute, sweet substitute,
\^el tells me that \flfsl mine all mine— [He} (hes )
Does anything I te^\^^^om fe blind-
\fj e>Slsot mc^ ^mng ways, |
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