Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton (1880s – July 10, 1941) was an American ragtime and early jazz pianist, bandleader and composer.

Widely recognized as a pivotal figure in early jazz, Morton claimed, in self-promotional hyperbole, to have invented jazz outright in 1902. Morton was the first serious composer of jazz, naming and popularizing the "Spanish tinge" of exotic rhythms and penning such standards as "Wolverine Blues", "Black Bottom Stomp", and "Buddy Bolden's Blues".