 Roy Carew’s house
818 Quintana Place, N.W. Washington D.C. Roy J. Carew, as he liked to style himself, lived in this modest house from about 1935 to 1967, and ran the Tempo-Music Publishing Co. from it. Tempo-Music was set up in 1939 to publish Jelly Roll Morton’s later songs and some previously unpublished rags, blues and stomps.
818 Quintana Place became a mecca for devotees of ragtime and New Orleans music in the 1940s and 1950s. Famous writers and musicians in the field of jazz walked up the five short steps to the porch and waited to be admitted to the home of this most generous and gracious of gentlemen. Alan Lomax, Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis, Bill Russell, George W. Kay, J. Lawrence Cook, Bob Greene, Jim Dapogny and the great one himself, Ferd Morton, all visited there.
Once inside the visitors were transported into a world of nostalgic reminiscences about the old days in New Orleans, and the temples of ragtime in Sedalia and St. Louis, when Scott Joplin was “King of Ragtime” and Tony Jackson was the unrivalled prince of piano playing entertainers.
The Carew home was just four miles from 1211 U Street, N.W. Washington D.C., where Jelly Roll ran an unsuccessful nightclub while planning his final way along the road to jazz immortality. [PH 2]
Photograph taken in May 2005
courtesy of Mark J. Plotkin Ph.D.
© 2005 Monrovia Sound Studio
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