ABSTRACT
Early in his memoir, Really the Blues (1946), Jewish jazz clarinetist Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow describes a conversion experience. Mezzrow and his friends approach a segregated lunch counter in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. As someone who is, in his words, “dirty from riding the rails and dark-complexioned to begin with,” he is told, “We don’t serve niggers in here.” Clearly a mistake has been made, perhaps because of their dirty faces. However, the more he thinks about it, Mezzrow believes it was not a mistake: “We were Jews, but in Cape Girardeau they had told us we were Negroes. Now all of a sudden, I realized that I agreed with them.” He vows to become a “Negro musician.”3 Musicians like Mezzrow, to use Jewish saxophonist Stan Getz’s words, “played black,” not only by becoming part of a musical genre whose most influential figures have been African Americans, but also by adopting black speech inflections and vocabulary.4
