[5] Morton was jazz's first arranger, proving that a genre rooted in improvisation could retain its essential characteristics when notated.

After his mother married William Mouton in 1894, Ferdinand adopted his stepfather's surname, anglicizing it to Morton, adapting "Ferd" as an unofficial forename.

She told me that devil music would surely bring about my downfall..."[17] The cornetist Rex Stewart recalled that Morton had chosen "the nom de plume 'Morton' to protect his family from disgrace if he was identified as a whorehouse 'professor'.

"[15] Around 1904, Morton started touring in the US South, working in minstrel shows such as Will Benbow's Chocolate Drops,[18] gambling, and composing.

Stride pianists James P. Johnson and Willie "The Lion" Smith saw him perform in Chicago in 1910 and New York City in 1911.

Author Mark Miller described his arrival as "an extended period of itinerancy as a pianist, vaudeville performer, gambler, hustler, and, as legend would have it, pimp".

[24] Although he had trouble finding musicians who wanted to play his style of jazz, he recorded with Omer Simeon, George Baquet, Albert Nicholas, Barney Bigard, Russell Procope, Lorenzo Tio and Artie Shaw, the trumpeters Ward Pinkett, Bubber Miley, Johnny Dunn and Henry "Red" Allen, Sidney Bechet, Paul Barnes, Bud Freeman, Pops Foster, Paul Barbarin, Cozy Cole, and Zutty Singleton.

In 1935, his 30-year-old composition "King Porter Stomp", arranged by Fletcher Henderson, became Benny Goodman's first hit and a swing standard, but Morton received no royalties from the recordings.

The club owner allowed her friends free admission and drinks, which prevented Morton from making the business a success.

In 1938, Morton was stabbed by a friend of the Music Box's owner and suffered wounds to the head and chest.

According to the jazz historian David Gelly in 2000, Morton's arrogance and "bumptious" persona alienated so many musicians that few of them attended his funeral.

[29] An article about the funeral in the August 1, 1941, issue of DownBeat reported that his pallbearers were Kid Ory, Mutt Carey, Fred Washington, and Ed Garland.

In the big-band era, his "King Porter Stomp", which Morton had written decades earlier, was a big hit for Fletcher Henderson and Benny Goodman; it became a standard covered by most other swing bands of that time.

Morton claimed to have written some tunes that were copyrighted by others, including "Alabama Bound"[33] and "Tiger Rag".

"Sweet Peter", which Morton recorded in 1926, appears to be the source of the melody of the hit song "All of Me", which was credited to Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons in 1931.

In 2013, Katy Martin published an article arguing that Alan Lomax's book of interviews put Morton in a negative light.

[36] Martin disagreed that Morton was an egotist.In being called a supreme egotist, Jelly Roll was often a victim of loose and lurid reporting.

If we read the words that he himself wrote, however, we learn that he almost had an inferiority complex and said that he created his own style of jazz piano because 'All my fellow musicians were much faster in manipulations, I thought than I, and I did not feel as though I was in their class.'

So he used a slower tempo to permit flexibility through the use of more notes, a pinch of Spanish to give a number of right seasoning, the avoidance of playing triple forte continuously, and many other points.