Really The Blues by Mezz Mezzrow

[mjzee]

One hundred years ago, the corner of Division Street and Western Avenue in Chicago was home to a less delicate sort of hipster than hangs out there today. Among the gangsters, bootleggers and pool sharks was Milton Mezzrow, a Jewish kid from a good family who was drawn to the fast life, got caught with a stolen car, and at the age of 15 was sent to Pontiac Reformatory in Joliet, where he fell in love with the blues. “Night after night we’d lie on the corn-husk mattresses in our cells, listening to the blues drifting over from the Negro side of the block,” he later recalled. After Pontiac, he discovered New Orleans jazz and learned enough saxophone and clarinet to chart a rough and riotous course through several decades of American music history.

“Mezz” Mezzrow (1889-1972) eventually played alongside Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet, became a pot dealer in Harlem and served as a self-proclaimed “link” between black and white culture. He also landed back in prison, in gangster-run clubs, in an opium den and finally, in his mid-40s, in a Greenwich Village bar, where he met Bernard Wolfe, a young, Yale-educated writer who was friends with Henry Miller and had read French novelists like André Gide and Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Over the course of a couple years, they turned the story of Mezzrow’s life into the American counter-culture classic “Really the Blues,” a stylized oral history that anticipates the Beat novel, first published in 1946 and now reissued by New York Review Books.

More here: WSJ (article title: The Hipster Odysseus)

[T.D.]

I saw the new reissued edition in a bookstore last week. It's on my list of books to consider, but I didn't find it compelling enough to purchase at the time.

[gmonahan]

I've always been interested in this one, despite its reputation for being mostly fiction.

 

gregmo

[Big Beat Steve]

It's an interesting read (and shows that - regardless of Wolfe's part in it - Mezzrow was a better writer (or narrator?) than clarinet handler - which of course ain't sayin' much ) but in this category of "early memoirs" I definitely find Eddie Condon's "We Called It Music" more compelling ...