Mary Lou Williams

Jazz musician and composer

• Born: May 8, 1910
• Birthplace: Atlanta, Georgia
• Died: May 28, 1981
• Place of death: Durham, North Carolina

Williams was best known as a jazz pianist whose style evolved with the times. She also was a composer and arranger who is credited with more than three hundred original compositions and countless arrangements. She endeavored to help struggling jazz musicians in need and grew deeply involved in the Roman Catholic Church, even composing three jazz masses and other religious anthems.

Early Life

Mary Lou Williams was born on May 8, 1910, in Atlanta, Georgia, to Virginia Riser and Joseph Scruggs. Confusion over Williams’s surname during the early years is attributed to her mother’s brief marriage to Mose Winn shortly before Williams’s birth and then to Fletcher Burley sometime before 1915; Williams herself did not discover the identity of her biological father until the 1930’s. In 1915, Williams migrated with her family (stepfather, mother, and sister Mamie) to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in search of opportunity and prosperity.

Williams’s prowess as a musician was evident very early. As a small child, she often sat on her mother’s lap as Virginia played the organ at church. On one occasion, the young girl reproduced, note for note, what she had just heard her mother play. Once in Pittsburgh, Williams developed her talents through exposure to the many musical groups that came through the city. In addition, her stepfather (an important early influence) purchased a player piano on which Williams could learn the piano techniques of jazz greats such as Jelly Roll Morton and James P. Johnson. While her mother and stepfather worked long hours to make ends meet, Williams entertained neighbors’ families with her piano playing and even earned a little money doing so. By the age of six, she was known as “The Little Piano Girl,” playing for parties and teas throughout the city. She first experienced life on the road in 1922 as a member of a traveling musical group called Buzzin’ Harris and his Hits and Bit. This first experience was limited to eight weeks, but two years later she was back on the road with the group, traveling the black vaudeville circuit and earning thirty dollars per week.

Life’s Work

Williams became the pianist for a popular dance team called Seymour and Jeanette after the Hits and Bits show folded in 1925. The next year, she married the saxophonist in the group, John Williams. When the dance act fell apart, Williams and her husband moved to Memphis, where they started a group called the Syncopators. A short time later, John accepted a job with a band based in Oklahoma City known as the Clouds of Joy, while Williams stayed in Memphis with the Syncopators. In 1928, Williams rejoined her husband; however, she was not given a role in Clouds of Joy until 1929, after it had reorganized and relocated to Kansas City.

Williams became the band’s pianist as well as its chief composer and arranger. Led by Andy Kirk, the Clouds of Joy hustled to make a living, routinely traveling hundreds of miles overnight after one engagement had ended in order to get to the next. Williams’s reputation in the music world grew quickly, and she turned down a number of opportunities to join other bands. Philosophical differences between Kirk and Williams over their preferred musical styles and other factors converged in 1942, and she finally left the band and relocated to New York.

Williams spent the next decade as a freelance musician. She was at the peak of her musical career, both as a performer and as a writer. She supplied arrangements to numerous bands, including those led by Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. Williams also remained a highly regarded performer, regularly fronting trios and larger combos. She found her greatest job security with a steady engagement at the Café Society in New York, especially during the first half of the decade.

By the end of the 1940’s, Williams’s debts had begun to mount, and she devoted much of her time corresponding with recording companies, attempting to collect royalties. During the fall of 1952, she traveled to England for a nine-day performing engagement, but this trip was disastrous. Although her financial woes persisted, she stayed active in London and earned the respect of many fans who proclaimed her the “Grande Dame of Jazz.” In 1953, Williams moved to Paris to be near friends and to take advantage of the active jazz scene there, but this move did not translate into the artistic or fiscal success she had expected. She could not afford a ticket home, and it was not until friends arranged for her passage back to New York in late 1954 that the trip finally came to an end.

By this time, Williams had experienced a profound spiritual awakening and turned to Roman Catholicism for comfort and strength. She ceased nearly all musical endeavors and instead began assisting jazz musicians suffering with substance abuse, providing them with food, clothing, and shelter and helping them find gigs. Her apartment served as a makeshift boardinghouse for musicians in need. She established the nonprofit Bel Canto Foundation with the hope of purchasing and maintaining a staffed addiction recovery center with music facilities to allow its patients to continue playing during their stays. This center never materialized. Williams resumed her performance career with an appearance at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival, persuaded by her priests that she could help people the most by using her natural talents. Searching for ways to raise funding for her foundation, she opened the first of a series of thrift shops in 1958. By the early 1960’s, she had begun focusing her compositional energies on sacred music written in a jazz idiom. The result was a body of music for the church that included not only sacred songs and anthems, but also three settings of the Catholic mass.

Williams maintained an active performing and recording career during the 1970’s, even embracing the rhythms of rock and roll and integrating them with the jazz and blues of her musical heritage. She taught and performed as an artist-in-residence at Duke University from 1977 until she died of cancer in 1981.

Significance

Williams’s prodigious talents as a jazz pianist helped her to break down stereotypes of both gender and race. She was a versatile performer whose style changed with the times from stride and boogie-woogie to swing, bebop, and rock and roll. Ultimately, however, her style remained infused with the blues and spiritual influences that she believed formed the essence of jazz. As a jazz composer and arranger, Williams managed to assimilate the styles around her while pushing the conventions of the day in new directions, a quality that Ellington described as her ability to be “perpetually contemporary.” Her focus on writing sacred music in the jazz idiom places her (along with Ellington) among the first to write music for the church in this style.

Bibliography

Dahl, Linda. Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams. New York: Pantheon Books, 2000. The first complete biography of Williams, including several useful bibliographic and discographic appendixes.

Kernodle, Tammy. Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004. Another significant biography on Williams, this one with a more scholarly tone.

Williams, Mary Lou. “Mary Lou Williams.” In Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now, edited by Robert Gottlieb. New York: Pantheon Books, 1996. Lengthy autobiographical essay by Williams first published in Melody Maker in 1954.