I don’t know where or when I first heard this song, but I didn’t start playing it till I heard Paul Geremia’s version. Paul is generally known for playing and singing blues in the tradition of people like Willie McTell and Lemon Jefferson, but he liked to fool around with other stuff (he’s where I picked up the Bahamian “Jones, Oh Jones“), including some early jazz songs, and he often did this one and “Nobody’s Sweetheart.” I don’t know if that’s also where I got the idea that this was by Jelly Roll Morton, but I certainly thought it was, and started playing it again recently at events celebrating the publication of Jelly Roll Blues. Then I went to do some background research for this post, and learned it was by King Oliver, with lyrics by Walter Melrose (or at least credited to Melrose).

Walter and Lester Melrose were Morton’s publishers, and I assume that connection influenced him to record this in 1926 with his Red Hot Peppers; in any case, that was by far the most influential recording of the song, and Morton’s only major vocal recording of the 1920s, an exuberant record that presumably inspired Paul.

As for my version, I’ve been fooling around with this for years in Bb, and it was ok but I never figured out anything interesting to do with it. Then I was doing the book tour and started playing it more often, and eventually came up with the idea of playing it in A, more like a blues, for the first chorus, before going into the upbeat ragtime style.

The lyric is one of many telephone-centric songs of the ragtime/jazz era: the most famous is probably “Hello, My Baby,” but there was also, “Hello Central, Give Me Heaven (for my mama’s there),” a bathetic Tin Pan Alley weeper recorded by the Carter Family, and “Hello Central, Give Me No Man’s Land” (from World War I), and the perky “Hello, Hawaii, How Are You?” (pronounced “Hah-wah-yah, hah-wah-yah”), and, later on, Lightnin’ Hopkins’s “Hello Central (Please get me 209),” which inspired Chris Strachwitz to become a blues fan, collector, record producer, one of the most influential figures in the rise of what we now call “roots music,” and eventually a dear friend.

For folks who don’t know, that “Hello, Central” business is how people used to make telephone calls: you didn’t dial a number; you picked up the ear part, then jiggled the receiver, an operator answered, and you asked to be connected to a number, person, or place. There are still a few telephone systems that function that way, though cell phones are killing off the last of them. When I was doing the research for Narcocorrido and wanted to get in touch with Angel González, who composed the first huge drug corrido hit, “Contrabando y Traición,” I called the operator in Juarez and she connected me with the telephone office in Basuchil, Chihuaha; and the operator in Basuchil told me to call back in a half hour and sent a boy to get Angel and bring him there to get the call.

So, that’s the background to this lyric, and I just listened to Morton’s version and found that I’ve messed up one line — I sing, “I think of Doctor Jazz in my dreams,” and it should be “I’m paging Doctor Jazz…,” which is much better. I also changed the next line, but that was conscious: the original has “When I’m trouble bound and mixed, he’s the cat [or guy] that gets me fixed,” and I used to sing it that way, but prefer “mixed up” and “fixed up.”

Anyway, it’s a fun song, and right now I need a fun song and some musical physicianing. (And yes, there’s another layer of history in the sheet music cover, all too resonant in this moment: selling a song composed by one of the great Black bandleaders of the early twentieth century and popularized by the greatest Black jazz arranger of the 1920s, with a cover image of a white band and white dancers — because some people make great music, and other people tend to have more money.)