Really The Blues tells the riveting story of one man's immersion into the underground culture of black America that thrived during the Twenties, Thirties and Forties. It documents with humour and affection a vital part of American life and remains as fresh and compelling to the modern reader as it did when it stunned a post-war generation eager to have their eyes and ears opened.

Mezz Mezzrow was born in Chicago in 1899 and was one of that city’s leading clarinettists during the golden jazz age of the twenties. Many of Mezzrow’s records reveal his deep feeling for the blues and his playing is characterised by well-thought lines, frequent agility and an appealingly acid tone, but despite touring regularly with various bands and with Louis Armstrong, his most notable contribution is this autobiography, written with Bernard Wolfe, first published in 1946. It is its unbounded vitality that so captures the revolution which jazz represented to the youth of Chicago in the twenties, and even more that of Harlem in the thirties and forties.

Told in the jive jingo of the virant black scene that sucked Mezzrow in, Really The Blues is an unforgettable chronicle of street life, smoky clubs, roadhouse dances and, above all, reefer culture.

"Really The Blues, read at the counter of the Columbia U Bookstore in the mid-forties, was for me the first signal into white culture of the underground black, hip culture that pre-existed before my own generation" - ALLEN GINSBERG

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