Wolverine Blues (Jelly Roll Morton)

The Complete Library of Congress Recordings
Box set by Jelly Roll Morton
Released	September 27, 2005
Recorded	May–December 1938; April 1949
Genre	Jazz
Length	539:03 (8 hours, 59 minutes and 3 seconds)
Label	Rounder Records
Producer	Jeffrey Greenberg and Anna Lomax Wood

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The Complete Library of Congress Recordings is a 2005 box set of recordings from jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton. The set spans 128 tracks over eight CDs. It won two Grammy Awards in 2006, Best Historical Album and Best Album Notes.

In 1938, noted musicologist and Morton biographer Alan Lomax conducted a series of interviews with Morton at the Library of Congress.Richard Cook and Brian Morton describe these recordings as Jelly Roll Morton's "virtual history of the birth pangs of jazz as it happened in the New Orleans of the turn of the century. His memory was unimpaired, although he chose to tell things as he preferred to remember them, perhaps; and his hands were still in complete command of the keyboard."

Excerpts from the sessions first appeared on a 1948 album.Riverside Records issued the recordings as LP records in 1955.Ron Wynn and Bruce Boyd Raeburn note that "though the albums came out posthumously, the interviews generated tremendous new interest in Morton's life and music." During the 1990s, Rounder Records released a series of compact discs including the musical content, but not the dialogue, from the 1938 sessions. Both the Riverside and earlier Rounder releases were heavily expurgated, and as recently as 2008, when selections from the complete Rounder collection were featured in a BBC Radio 4 documentary on Morton, presenter Marybeth Hamilton noted that, even then, some of the recordings were still considered unsuitable for broadcast, due to the obscene nature of some of the lyrics and Morton's narration.

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