ABSTRACT
Autobiographies by important jazz artists present problems for readers and researchers. The books were ghost-written or heavily edited; the authors hid behind carefully constructed personae; or the autobiography was written by a collaborator who tried to give shape to words spoken by the artist. The most remarkable book in the genre is surely Charles Mingus’s Beneath the Underdog (1971). Mingus reveals powerful skills as a writer and storyteller, and the evidence shows that he, unlike most other self-narrators in jazz, is responsible for virtually every word in the book.
