Celebrating Jazz
Jazz Appreciation Month - April 2007
Mary Lou Williams
1910-1981
Birth: May 8, 1910 in Atlanta, Georgia, United States
Death: May 28, 1981 in Durham, North Carolina, United States
BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs, Williams was the second child of Virginia Scruggs. Her father, whose name and occupation are unknown, abandoned the family. Virginia Scruggs had difficulty caring for her children, but she managed to keep her family together by doing domestic work. She played piano and organ, and Williams learned by sitting on her mother's lap and picking out notes. In 1913 the family moved from Georgia to Pittsburgh, where Williams's talent flourished. She attended Lincoln Public School in Pittsburgh and often entertained the teacher and other students with her pianistic genius.
Williams's childhood was relatively happy, and despite her poverty, she never thought of herself as poor. She was noted for her occasional pranks. Once she was challenged to jump over a series of boxes, and in doing so, she fell and broke her wrist. As a child, she developed a stuttering impediment that she never completely conquered. By age six, Williams was a favorite in neighbors' homes. She earned money by playing at local churches, thus supplementing her mother's meager earnings. Williams's youthful celebrity brought her to the attention of the prominent Mellon family, who asked her to perform at one of their parties.
In 1926, at age sixteen, Williams left Westinghouse High School and joined Seymour and Jeanette, a vaudeville band. That year she married the band's saxophonist, John Williams. They had no children. Touring with the vaudeville band, Williams attracted the attention of Thomas "Fats" Waller and Duke Ellington. After a few weeks, John Williams left the band to form the Syncopaters. He soon left that band also, but Mary Lou remained with the Syncopaters, led by Andy Kirk after 1929. She became popular playing boogie-woogie tunes, such as "Froggy Bottom," which was one of her standards. Under Kirk's tutelage, she learned how to arrange music and quickly became one of the band's principal arrangers. In 1930 she made her first professional recording with Andy Kirk's Twelve Clouds of Joy. She performed with Kirk's band for twelve years while independently arranging for Benny Goodman and Ellington. Her long separations from her husband led to their divorce in 1940.
The 1940s began a period of small groups of players or combos, called the bebop era. Along with Charlie "Bird" Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, Max Roach, Bud Powell, and Thelonious Monk, Williams was at the center of this jazz evolution. In 1942, when the Kirk band was working in New York City, Williams left it and went home to Pittsburgh. She stayed with her sister, but her semiretirement was short-lived. Art Blakey, a drummer, pestered Williams to form her own group. That year she established a sextet that included alumni from the Kirk band, among them Harold "Shorty" Baker, a trumpet player. About 1942, she married Baker because, she said, she fell "in love with the sound of his horn." The marriage ended in 1944; they had no children.
During her marriage, Williams toured with the Duke Ellington Band and arranged some of the band's music. She also performed as a soloist, playing to sellout crowds. Always eager to experiment, she opened her New York apartments to gatherings of old and new jazz performers. "I loved them," she said. "I learned a great deal about their chord changes and style of expression. The old blues took on a new look. The bop era blues chords added a great richness and more technique."
Williams embraced other interests. A humanitarian, she devoted much time to benefits supporting the World War II effort. Maturing as a composer, she wrote music for big-time stage revues, such as The Victory BandwagonPhilco Hall of Fame, who awarded Williams a citation for her achievements. Generosity was characteristic of Williams. For example, in Pittsburgh she was once introduced to the young Erroll Garner, whose incipient genius was as unlearned as hers had been. She offered to help him learn to read music, but he was not interested. "I realized," she recalled, that Garner was "born with more than most musicians could accomplish in a lifetime."
During the 1940s, Williams's genius in performing and composing blossomed. In 1945 she introduced her ambitious work The Zodiac Suite. Late in the decade, however, despite her success, a sense of isolation troubled her. In the early 1950s, she traveled throughout Europe, and while performing in a Paris club in 1954 she suffered an emotional breakdown. She walked off the set, left the club, and retreated to a friend's French villa to take stock of her life.
Williams returned to New York City in 1954, and in 1957, feeling the need for a spiritual center to her life, she became a Roman Catholic. In 1957, she established the Bel Canto Foundation to help needy musicians. She supported the foundation by opening a thrift shop and with proceeds from her record company, Mary Records. Encouraged by a young priest, Father Peter O'Brien, and by Dizzie Gillespie's wife, Williams performed at selective forums, such as the Newport Jazz Festival.
By the 1960s Williams was more focused and more secure in her faith than earlier. She began a series of religious compositions, using a liturgical base with a jazz motif. In 1962, she created St. Martin de Porres: Black Christ of the Andes, a jazz hymn. Williams's sense of music as mission turned her toward young people, whom she hoped to inspire with the knowledge and history of jazz. About 1966, she began teaching jazz theory in a parochial school in Pittsburgh.
In 1977 the chairman of the Duke University music department in Durham, North Carolina, offered Williams a position as artist in residence, which, at age sixty-seven, she accepted. A year later she learned she had cancer. According to Father O'Brien, Williams took her illness in stride, using "her music [to] ease her pain." In 1980 Williams played her last concert, in Tallahassee, Florida. After radiation treatments she insisted on performing one of her masses at Sacred Heart Cathedral in Raleigh, North Carolina, in November 1980. A few weeks later, she was confined to her bed. On 10 May 1981, Duke University honored Williams with its Trinity Award, "praising her accomplishments as an artist and humanitarian." At her death in Durham, most of the major figures in the jazz world paid tribute to her. She was buried in Pittsburgh.
Mary Lou Williams was admired and respected as a preeminent figure of what is known as America's only indigenous music. Deeply in need of adulation, she craved a life of simplicity and solitude but needed to be useful to others. A strong feature of Williams's life was her uncompromising attitude toward her art. Often she chastised her fellow musicians about their lack of seriousness. Along with her musical gifts, she was recognized for her humanity, which was as instinctive as her musical skills. Her genius encompassed much more than her musical legacy.
(1944). In 1944 her musicianship and popularity were recognized by Paul Whiteman, a bandleader and host of the NBC
SOURCE CITATION
The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, Volume 1: 1981-1985. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1998.