The concept of the “jelly roll” appears repeatedly in song titles, lyrics, names, and imagery of African-American music from the 1920s and 30s. Songs like Bessie Smith’s “Nobody in town can bake a jelly roll like my man,” Lonnie Johnson’s “Jelly roll baker” and “I got the best jelly roll in town” (parts 1 and 2), Alberta Hunter’s “Your jelly roll is good,” Peg Leg Howell’s “New jelly roll blues,” and Furry Lewis’s “Jelly Roll”, not to mention the name Jelly Roll Morton, have made these references a familiar echo from the past for most listeners of early jazz and blues. For many of us, however, the meaning behind these references, even the actual food being referred to is somewhat shrouded in mystery. I, for one, spent most of my life under the false impression that a jelly roll was an open-faced peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or possibly just jelly, rolled up for ease of transport and consumption, something that I enjoyed frequently in childhood. My guess is that many other people are living under similar misapprehensions, if they have ever stopped to think about it at all.
Actually, a jelly roll, which falls into the larger confectionary category of swiss roll, is a large, thin sheet cake spread with a layer of jelly (in case of confusion, we’re talking about jelly in the American sense, i.e. jam made from strained juice rather than crushed fruit) and rolled up to be served in circular, spiraling slices. It is now a quaint rarity, simply because an ever-expanding plurality of more appealing confections have arrived to take its place, but it was once, especially for poorer Americans, one of the most familiar and beloved deserts.
While the jelly roll may seem quaint today, at the time when many of these records were being made, it was a decidedly modern food. More than that, in the 1920s, the era when jazz and blues music were propelled into the (semi)mainstream by the arrival of so-called “race” records, the jelly roll was something new and exciting. Of course, fruit preserves of all sorts have a long history in America as elsewhere, but they were relatively expensive to make because of the sugar involved, and they were primarily accessible to rural Americans who had ready access to fruit and berries. The story of jelly as a modern urban phenomenon, like that of jazz, really began with the first World War. In 1918, when American soldiers arrived on the western front, they found in their ration packs a product called Grapelade, which had been introduced by the Welch’s grape juice company that same year and sold exclusively to the United States Army. They enjoyed Grapelade on bread and, presumably, on the Salvation Army doughnuts that gave them their nickname, doughboys, and when returned home they were eager for the opportunity to buy more. Welch’s released its more familiar Concord Grape Jelly five years later, ushering in the era of jelly as a mass-market consumer product.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, millions of Americans, and black Americans in particular, migrated from rural areas into growing cities. Many of these people had enjoyed fruit preserves such as berry jams and apple butter in their former homes, but largely as a treat for special occasions. The new prepackaged jelly was affordable enough to be a daily staple for someone with a factory job, and not unlike jazz and blues music, it combined aspects of the familiar with a slick, smooth modernity that was well suited to the fast-paced excitement of urban life. It's difficult to imagine today what it must have felt like for a former sharecropper to be able to pick up a slice of jellyroll, the kind of thing that he might previously have tasted a few times a year at church picnics, for a few cents on his lunch break, so it's easy to understand how such a symbol of the promise and relative prosperity of the new century could have been picked up as a go-to signifier and versatile sexual innuendo in the music that spoke to this experience.
Thus, the jelly roll was a symbol of modernity, urbanity and possibility for Americans in the early twentieth century, but this alone is not enough to explain it’s ubiquity in music. Of course, it goes without saying that there is something more going on in all these songs than meditations on dessert. The period following the abolition of slavery was so riddled with poverty, oppression, and violence against black Americans that for many of them there was little legitimate and meaningful freedom to be found. A notable exception was the freedom to travel and, potentially, to make money, preoccupations that can be traced in black music from Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Ramblin’ Blues” and Robert Johnson’s “Sweet Home Chicago” to Ludacris’s “Area Codes,” but this freedom, especially early on, was mostly accessible to men. The only freedom that was available to the entire post-slavery African American community was that of sexuality, the right to choose sexual partners and activities for oneself. At least in part for this reason, early African-American recorded secular music is positively dripping with often barely veiled sexual innuendo of a sort that was completely alien to the mainstream white popular music of the time. But with so many jelly rolls in so many songs by both male and female singers, exactly what the innuendo was meant to stand for can be difficult to pin down.
There is no definitive history of the jelly roll as a sexual metaphor, but it almost certainly has connections that go back much further in the African-American linguistic tradition. The word “Jelly”, which derives from a Mandingo word for a traveling minstrel, has been in use since the early seventeenth century as a term for a virile or seductive man. For this reason, the early uses of jelly roll also had a male slant and may have referred to sexual prowess, sexual activity or the penis itself. The musician Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, who later stated that he worried playing piano, an instrument with feminine associations, would lead people to think he was gay, likely chose the name Jelly Roll Morton precisely because of these associations with masculine sexual energy.
The connection between the jelly roll and music goes back nearly to the beginning of Jazz and blues. The song, “Jelly Roll Blues,” which may be the earliest traceable example, was written by Morton in 1915 and is widely believed to be the first published jazz composition. Also in 1915, a white singing duo called Collins and Harlan, whose recording of Memphis Blues the same year was only the second vocal blues record ever made, released their version of a song called “Dancing the Jelly Roll,” a comedic minstrel number about a couple who create a new dance craze (think “Mickey’s Monkey” fifty years earlier), which may have been directly inspired by the “Jelly Roll Blues.” Neither of these first two instances seem to use “jelly roll” as anything other than a name. However, Collins and Harlan’s recording contains a brief, racially offensive skit, in which Harlan asks Collins, “I say Henry, what am the reason they call it the jelly roll, huh?” Collins‘ hesitant response, “ah..., you see, ah..., oh yes, ah..., well, you know, ah..., now mmh..., I really don’t know, ah, that’s the reason,” may be a winking acknowledgement of the sexual innuendo behind the term.
The next major jelly roll tune, “I Ain’t Gonna Give Nobody None of this Jelly Roll,” written in 1919 by the black songwriting team of Clarence Williams and Spencer Williams and recorded several times over the next few years, most notably by Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds in 1922, gets a bit more playful with double meanings. The song sticks pretty close to it’s pastry conceit, but its famous hook line, “my jellyroll is sweet, and it sure is hard to beat, Oh, I know you want it, but you ain't gonna get it, I ain't gonna give you none,” leaves little ambiguity. Interestingly, although the song was originally written from a man’s point of view and has been predominantly recorded by male singers, Mamie Smith’s version may have played an important role in shifting the jelly roll metaphor into the realm of female sexuality.
A later Williams and Williams composition, “Nobody in town can bake a sweet jelly roll like mine,” which was recorded by both Sara Martin and Bessie Smith in 1923, is expressly female and considerably more explicit in its double entendre. From the 1920s on, jelly roll was an all purpose euphemism, which could be used to refer to male or female genitalia, sexual energy or prowess, the act of sexual intercourse, or to specific movements involved in sex acts. There may even be some extreme cases when it has been used to refer to a dessert.
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