I have no idea where or when I learned this song, and research provides no clues, because it’s been done by everyone from Mamie Smith to Willie Nelson–including Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Cliff Bruner, and a duet version by Johnny Mercer and Bobby Darin. So this post is all going to be background, starting with “jelly roll.” I cover the subject more thoroughly in my latest book, Jelly Roll Blues, which focuses on Jelly Roll Morton but ranges fairly widely, but for the moment…

Of course, the term  refers to a baked good made by spreading jelly on a sheet of sponge cake and rolling it up into a roll. The verse of this song (which I never learned and only recently heard) explains that it’s about a greedy little boy named Willie Green from New Orleans, who has received a nice jelly roll as a present from his mother and refuses to share it with the other kids, and the cover of the original sheet music, back in 1919, portrayed that scene.

Much as it pains me to suggest an alternate meaning, an early scholar of Black folk song named Guy Johnson wrote in 1927 that “jelly roll” was “by far the most common” sexual euphemism in blues lyrics, and “stands for the vagina, or for the female genitalia in general, and sometimes for sexual intercourse.” If, for a moment, we consider that interpretation, it suggests some ambiguity in little Willie’s gender identification… but the term was to some extent polymorphous and the lyric I sing includes the gender-balanced line (assuming I’m singing about a het [though not necessarily cis] couple), “your jelly sure is fine, but you ain’t getting none of mine…” which leads to a minor mystery, because I haven’t been able to find that line in any other version. (Steve Mann’s version is somewhat similar, and I love his guitar part, so maybe I adapted his lyric, but if someone knows a closer source, please let me know.)

As for the song itself, it was and is a very popular trad jazz number,  composed by Clarence and Spencer Williams, who both were Louisianans, but not related to each other.

Spencer was the elder, most likely born in 1886 in Alabama (likely Selma, though his parents also lived in Birmingham and Montgomery), though at times he claimed to have been born in New Orleans “as long ago as 1880.” He also claimed to have been a nephew of Lulu White, the most famous Black madame in the red light district remembered as Storyville, and to have lived as a teenager in her famous Mahogany Hall — which sounds like a colorful invention, but White  does seem to have been his aunt, or at least a near relation, and he does seem to have spent time with her in New Orleans. Be that as it may, he was in Chicago by 1908 and began publishing songs shortly thereafter — hundreds of them, eventually, with over a hundred different collaborators, including “Mahogany Hall Stomp,”  “Royal Garden Blues,” “Basin Street Blues,” “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” “I’ve Found a New Baby,” “Everybody Loves My Baby,”  this one, and the similarly-themed “Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine.” He also made some records, including naughty double-entendre duets with the guitarists Lonnie Johnson and Teddy Bunn, backed by James P. Johnson on piano — which may be more than you needed to know, but it’s a hell of a resume.

Clarence Williams was less prolific as a songwriter, but a good deal more prosperous, since he was also a successful publisher, made hundreds of records, managed a bunch of bands and produced a bunch of blues singers — one of his bands had Louis Armstrong on trumpet and one of the singers was Bessie Smith — and, all in all, was one of the most important figures on the New York jazz and blues scene. His compositional talents are a bit hard to judge, since he also put his name on a lot of tunes he bought or “borrowed” from other people, but he and Spencer seem to have been genuine collaborators and there’s no reason to doubt he had a hand in this one. He also made a nice recording of it — maybe my favorite — in 1934, with the versatile Roy Smeck on guitar.

To my eternal regret, I never met Smeck, though I easily could have; he was giving guitar lessons in New York when I was there studying with Dave Van Ronk. I do not regret a minute spent with Dave, but if I’d suggested taking some supplementary lessons from Smeck, Dave would have heartily encouraged me… ah, well. I did get to see him live once, and he was terrific: his finale was a version of “Paddlin’ Madeline Home,” chording on a harmonica held in his mouth without a rack and playing the melody and variations on a ukulele, while moving it like a canoe paddle. Ars longa, and all that…