Really the Blues (Barnes & Noble Rediscovers Series)

Overview

First published in 1946, Really the Blues was a stunning departure from the frequently and understandably sanitized pop music and jazz autobiographies that had begun appearing in the previous decade. Its author, Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow, was the son of a Chicago drugstore owner, a Jew, and a journeyman clarinet and sax player. He was also a bootlegger and the peddler of the finest smoke in Harlem. Mezzrow had two passions: hot music and reefer. (“Mezz,” in fact, became a slang word for marijuana.)

Liberally sprinkling his prose with the jive lingo he was most accustomed to using, Mezz writes here of his upbringing—a white kid who fell in love with black culture, learning to blow clarinet in reform school (stolen car), brothels, and the honky-tonks of his youth. Drawn by the revelation of the blues, he followed the music: Chicago, New Orleans, New York. He spent two years in jail for possession of marijuana with intent to sell. During processing, he insisted on being classified as a “Negro” and spent his jail time in the segregated, black cellblock. Later, living in Harlem, he married a black woman, “Johnnie Mae,” with whom he had a son.

But Mezz was more than an outrageous social rebel. In New York in 1930, he attempted to organize the first integrated jazz band—years before John Hammond succeeded. He also financed and produced some of the most important Sidney Bechet recordings of the 1930s and ’40s. Among his many friends and fellow musicians who populate these pages are Louis Armstrong (whom Mezz briefly managed), Bechet, Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Carter, Eddie Condon, GeneKrupa, King Oliver, and Fats Waller.

It may justifiably be said that Really the Blues is a relic of another time, celebrating aspects of American cultural and social life that owed their existence partly to entrenched racism—hardly to be held up as models for our time. Yet the book is a celebration, as it was once also a Bohemian manifesto—a rousing call to another life for many trapped in the choking choices of postwar America. As Barry Gifford wrote in 1990: “It’s still worth reading, not just for the history but the point of view.”

Praise for Really the Blues and its author:

“This perfectly marvelous book conveys a powerful, vital message of unadulterated joy.”—Henry Miller

“Really the Blues is the scatological soup bone of New Orleans…Mezz Mezzrow took me to Storyville.”—Tom Waits

"For me, the first signal into white culture of the underground black, hip culture."—Allen Ginsberg

“Mezz translated the experience for young cats of the ’40s and ’50s like Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and John Clellon Holmes, and inspired them not only in their lives but their writing, a valuable legacy.”—Barry Gifford

“When [Mezz] fell through the Mason-Dixie line, he just kept going.” —Eddie Condon