Rhythm planet Book

REALLY THE BLUES is the story of Mezz Mezzrow, one of the first hipsters, white negroes, cultural appropriators, whatever they're calling it nowadays. A Jewish ghetto snipe from Chicago, he was introduced to dixieland jazz on a stint in prison as a boy and never looked back. Though a decent clarinet player and professional musician of some renown, he's more infamous as a pot dealer, and the book can be read as a love poem to getting stoned. But it's also a lexicon of hip slang of the time, the development of early jazz and championing the plight of black Americans. By the end of the book, Mezz has basically transitioned to a black man, or at least the prison categorizes him as one and holds him in a cellblock for black prisoners (Mezz is in and out of jail a lot). He marries a black woman and lives in Harlem and goes out of his way to illustrate how fully he was accepted by other blacks as one of their own. At the end of the book there are several appendixes on the music and the slang, but most interesting is by Mezz's co-writer, the sci-fi scribe Bernard Wolfe, who explores the concept of where negrophilia and negrophobia meet.