Williams, Mary Lou 1910–1981

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Mary Lou Williams 1910–1981

Jazz pianist, composer, and arranger

Became a “Cloud of Joy”

Joined Ellington

Focused on Liturgical Compositions

Selected discography

With Andy Kirk:

Sources

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To describe Mary Lou Williams as merely the most influential woman in the history of jazz does not do her justice. Over the course of her more than 50 years in music, Williams did far more than simply break down the gender barriers that kept women out of the elite ranks of jazz instrumentalists for so long. She was among the handful of musicians whose creative input helped to determine the direction of jazz over much of the twentieth century. In some ways, Williams’s career mirrors the evolution of jazz itself. From her early infatuation with boogie-woogie piano, the “First Lady of Jazz” went on to help steer the transitions from big band swing to bebop, and she later even dabbled in avant-garde. When she died in 1981, Williams left behind a musical legacy that few people of any gender or race can match.

Williams was born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs on May 8, 1910, in Atlanta, one of eight children. At the tender age of two-and-a-half, Mary was able to pick out ragtime and spiritual melodies on the organ from her mother’s lap. When she was four, her mother moved the family to Pittsburgh. Although she did not study piano formally, her musical gift was nurtured by her mother, stepfather Fletcher Burley, and other relatives, all of whom saw to it that she was exposed to a rich variety of music that included the classics as well as jazz. From player piano rolls, she copied the techniques of early jazz artists like Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton. By the time she was 12, Williams—then known as Mary Lou Burley—was ready to launch her professional career as a substitute pianist for the Buzz and Harris Revue, a touring show that happened to be passing through Pittsburgh.

Became a “Cloud of Joy”

Burley continued to tour with various traveling shows throughout her high school years. In the Seymour and Jeanette Show, she met a saxophone player named John Williams, whom she married in 1926. After a brief stay in Memphis, where Mary Lou Williams made her first recordings as part of a group called the Synco Jazzers, both Williamses moved in 1929 to Oklahoma, where John had earned a spot in a band called Andy Kirk and the Twelve Clouds of Joy. At first, Mary Lou would fill in occasionally on piano and perform other tasks for the band. Within a couple of years, however-during which time the band moved its base to Kansas City-she became not only its full-time pianist, but also its chief musical arranger.

At a Glance…

Born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs, May 8, 1910, in Atlanta, Ga; died May 28, 1981, in Durham, NC; daughter of Virginia Burley (an organist and domestic worker) Winn; married John (a jazz saxophonist) Williams, 1926 (divorced 1940); married Harold “Shorty” (a jazz trumpeter) Baker, 1942 (divorced 1944).Religion: Formerly Baptist; converted to Catholicism, 1957.

Began playing piano professionally at age 12; pianist, The Hottentots, Pittsburgh, mid-1920s; Seymnour and Jeanette, vaudeville troup, 1926; Terrence Holder Band, 1930; pianist, arranger, and composer, Andy Kirk and His 12 Clouds of Joy, 1931-42; staff arranger, Duke Ellington Orchestra, 1942-44; bandleader and composer with own groups, 1942-80; founded Bel Canto Foundation, 1957; artist in residence, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1975-77; Duke University, 1977-81.

Awards: Guggenheim Fellowships, 1972 and 1977; Trinity Award, Duke University, 1981; honorary doctorates from numerous universities, including Boston University, Fordham, and Loyola;Down Beat Hall of Fame, 1990.

The brilliance of Williams’s arrangements quickly caught the ears of some of the biggest jazz bandleaders of the day. Over the next several years, she wrote arrangements for Duke Ellington, Earl “Fatha” Hines, Louis Armstrong, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and others. Among her better-known arrangements of this period were “Camel Hop” and “Roll ’Em” for Goodman and “What’s Your Story Morning Glory” for Jimmie Lunceford. Throughout the 1930s, she was one of the leading personalities in the thriving Kansas City jazz scene. By around 1940, however, both her marriage and her involvement with the Kirk band had become less than satisfying. Williams got a divorce, and, in 1942, she left the Clouds of Joy and moved to New York City. There she started a combo with her second husband, trumpet player Harold “Shorty” Baker.

Joined Ellington

When Baker joined the Duke Ellington band in the early 1940s, Williams was asked to come on board as staff arranger. Her 1943 arrangement of “Blue Skies (Trumpet No End)” for the Ellington orchestra became a classic. Williams’s marriage to Baker lasted only about one year. After the breakup, Williams carried on as a fixture on the New York jazz club scene, forging friendships and jamming regularly with many of the top names in the emerging bebop movement, such as Thelonius Monk, Bud Powell, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. During the mid-1940s, she made a number of small-label records with the likes of Don Byas and Coleman Hawkins.

In 1945, Williams composed the Zodiac Suite, a 12-movement work based on an astrological theme. After initially introducing the piece on her new radio show, the “Mary Lou Williams Piano Workshop, “she performed it later that year with an 18-piece orchestra at New York’s Town Hall. The following year, the New York Philharmonic premiered a three-movement orchestral version of the work. Around that time, Williams also recorded occasionally with an “all-girl” group on the RCA label.

Toward the end of the 1940s, Williams’s excitement about jazz in the United States began to wane, and her performances became less frequent. She moved to Europe in 1952, where she enjoyed a reasonable amount of success. Her enthusiasm for music continued to shrink, though, and gradually she became disgusted with the jazz business. In 1954, Williams stormed off the stage in the middle of a big Paris concert, and began a three-year self-imposed exile from music. Her withdrawal from the piano coincided with a spiritual transformation. Revolted by the greed and envy rampant in the music world, she sought solace in religion. Returning to the United States, Williams devoted her energies to prayer and charity work. In 1957, she converted to Catholicism, and shortly thereafter, founded the Bel Canto Foundation, an organization whose primary mission was to assist musicians with drug, alcohol, or medical problems.

Focused on Liturgical Compositions

Convinced by her spiritual advisors that music was her true calling and her best means of helping people, Williams returned to the stage in 1957, performing with Dizzy Gillespie at the Newport Jazz Festival. Soon she was an active member of the jazz scene once again, performing at clubs throughout the 1960s. She also formed her own record company, Mary Records. Religion remained a central force in her life, as was reflected in her composition of several masses and other liturgical pieces over the next several years. Her first major religious piece was a contata honoring St. Martin de Porres, Black Christ of the Andes, composed in 1962. The third of her three masses, Mary Lou’s Mass, is probably her most famous religious composition. It was commissioned by the Vatican in 1969 and later adapted into a ballet by Alvin Ailey in 1971. On the secular side, Williams’s 1970 solo piano/lecture recording The History of Jazz was a landmark work of combined scholarly and musical virtuosity.

During the 1970s, Williams embarked on a self-assigned mission to save jazz from the “perverting” forces of modernism and rock and roll. She toured throughout the U.S. and Europe as both a solo artist and with a trio. In 1977 she performed a dual piano concert at Carnegie Hall with avant-garde giant Cecil Taylor, a puzzling and delightful departure from her stated opposition to most of the developments in jazz since the bebop era. The concert was recorded and released as an album under the title Embraced. During the second half of the decade, she devoted a considerable amount of time to teaching, first at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst from 1975 to 1977, then at Duke University, where she served as artist-in-residence beginning in 1977. Along the way she performed at numerous international jazz festivals, on television, and at the White House.

Williams’s final recording was, Solo Recital: Montreux Jazz Festival, 1978. The following year, at the age of 69, Williams was diagnosed with cancer. Her condition worsened over the next two years, and she performed infrequently, although she continued to teach at Duke. She died in 1981. When Williams was elected into the Down Beat magazine Hall of Fame in 1990, she became the first woman instrumentalist to be so honored.