Mary Lou Williams

Pittsburgh and the Little Piano Girl, 1910–1925

Mary Lou Williams was born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs in Atlanta on 8 May 1910, the second of eleven children, and grew up in the East Liberty neighbourhood of Pittsburgh. Her mother taught her piano at three, and she could pick out tunes before that. She began playing for money at six, supporting her half-brothers and sisters by performing at parties, and by seven was known around Pittsburgh as the Little Piano Girl.

The playing started partly as a defence. White neighbours were throwing bricks through the family's windows, and the bricks stopped once she began playing piano in their houses. She turned professional at fifteen, naming the Chicago pianist Lovie Austin as the greatest influence on her, and went out on the Orpheum theatre circuit at twelve. One night in Harlem, playing with McKinney's Cotton Pickers at the Rhythm Club at three in the morning, Louis Armstrong walked in and stopped to listen to her.

Kansas City and the Clouds of Joy, 1926–1942

In 1926 she married the saxophonist John Overton Williams, whom she had met in Cleveland, and moved with him to Memphis. When he left in 1929 to join Andy Kirk's band in Oklahoma City, the nineteen-year-old Williams took over leadership of the Memphis group he had assembled. She followed him west, and while the band was based in Tulsa she took work driving bodies for an undertaker between jobs.

When Andy Kirk's Twelve Clouds of Joy settled into a long engagement in Kansas City, Williams began sitting in, then became the band's arranger and composer, and finally its pianist. She gave Kirk Froggy Bottom, Walkin' and Swingin', Little Joe from Chicago, Roll 'Em and Mary's Idea. On a 1930 trip to Chicago she cut Drag 'Em and Night Life as piano solos, and the records sold fast enough to make her a national name. It was Jack Kapp at Brunswick Records who told her to bill herself as Mary Lou.

She freelanced as an arranger throughout the swing years, for Earl Hines, Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman. Goodman asked her for a blues number for his band and got Roll 'Em, a boogie-woogie piece built on the blues, following her Camel Hop, named for the cigarette brand that sponsored his radio show. Goodman then tried to put her under exclusive contract. She refused, preferring to work for whoever asked.

Café Society and the bebop kitchen, 1942–1952

Williams divorced John Williams, left the Clouds of Joy in 1942 and returned to Pittsburgh, where she formed a six-piece group with the trumpeter Harold Baker and the drummer Art Blakey. Baker left for Duke Ellington's orchestra; Williams followed, married Baker in Baltimore, and spent a period arranging for Ellington. She wrote his 1946 Trumpet No End, a reworking of Irving Berlin's Blue Skies, and sold him on playing her Walkin' and Swingin'. Within a year she had left both the marriage and the band and gone back to New York.

She took a residency at Café Society Downtown and a weekly radio programme on WNEW called Mary Lou Williams's Piano Workshop. What she is most remembered for from these years happened off the stand. The young musicians building bebop came to her Harlem apartment around four in the morning, or collected her from the club after her last set, and played until noon. Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Tadd Dameron and Miles Davis were all in that kitchen. She wrote In the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee for Gillespie.

Her own writing was getting longer. The Zodiac Suite of 1945 gave each of the twelve signs a movement, dedicating them to musicians she knew, Billie Holiday and Art Tatum among them. She recorded it with Jack Parker and Al Lucas, and performed it at Town Hall in New York on 31 December 1945 with an orchestra and the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster.

Paris, the silence, and the conversion, 1952–1957

In 1952 Williams accepted an engagement in England and stayed in Europe for two years, working in London and Paris. She was exhausted by then, mentally and physically, after nearly thirty years of continuous professional playing that had begun when she was a child.

It ended abruptly. During a performance in Paris in 1954 she stood up and walked away from the piano, and she did not play in public again for three years. She went back to the United States and converted to Catholicism that year, alongside Lorraine Gillespie, Dizzy Gillespie's wife. She spent hours at Mass and put her savings into the Bel Canto Foundation. It turned her apartment in Hamilton Heights into a halfway house for poor musicians and those struggling with addiction, funded partly by a thrift shop she ran in Harlem. The death of her friend and student Charlie Parker in 1955 may have deepened the withdrawal.

Two priests, Father John Crowley and Father Anthony, argued her back to the piano on the grounds that she could serve the Church through the gift she already had. Gillespie finished the job, and in 1957 she returned at the Newport Jazz Festival with his band.

Sacred music, 1962–1975

From the 1960s Williams wrote mostly hymns, masses and other sacred music, which almost nobody in jazz was doing. Black Christ of the Andes is a hymn to the Peruvian saint Martin de Porres. It was first performed at St Francis Xavier Church in Manhattan in November 1962 and recorded the following October, with the shorter Anima Christi and Praise the Lord. She became the first jazz composer the Catholic Church commissioned to write liturgical music in a jazz idiom.

Her manager and close friend from the 1960s was Father Peter O'Brien, a Jesuit priest, who found her places to play at a time when barely two clubs in Manhattan booked jazz full time. Through Bishop John Wright of Pittsburgh she got a teaching post at Seton High School, where she wrote her first mass, and help founding the Pittsburgh Jazz Festival.

The mass that made the most noise was Music for Peace, which Alvin Ailey choreographed and his company performed in 1971 as Mary Lou's Mass. Ailey's defence of it was a question: if there can be a Bernstein mass, a Mozart mass and a Bach mass, why not a Mary Lou's Mass. She played the revised version on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971 and appeared on Sesame Street in 1975. In April 1975 she conducted youth choirs performing it at St Patrick's Cathedral before more than three thousand people, the first time a jazz musician had played in that church.

How Williams worked

Williams described herself as a soul player, meaning that she stayed close to melody and the blues and used gospel harmony and rhythm sparingly. Her own account of it was direct: she was praying through her fingers when she played, going for a good soul sound and trying to touch people's spirits. She said it to Time magazine in 1964.

What separates her from most of her generation is that she kept moving. Musicians who make their name in one style usually stay in it. Williams played stride and boogie-woogie in the 1920s and wrote the arrangements that defined a Kansas City swing band in the 1930s. She taught herself bebop in the 1940s, at an age when her contemporaries were dismissing it. In 1977 she sat down at Carnegie Hall opposite the avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor for a two-piano concert. The two clashed on stage and the recording came out anyway, as Embraced.

Duke University, death, and reputation

Williams played nightly at The Cookery in Greenwich Village through the 1970s, run by Barney Josephson, her old boss from Café Society. In 1977 she took an appointment as artist-in-residence at Duke University, teaching the history of jazz with Father O'Brien and directing the Duke Jazz Ensemble, and held it until her death. She performed at the White House for President Jimmy Carter in 1978 and played Benny Goodman's fortieth-anniversary Carnegie Hall concert the same year. Her last recording was a solo set at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1978.

Mary Lou Williams died of bladder cancer in Durham, North Carolina, on 28 May 1981, aged 71. Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman and Andy Kirk came to her funeral at the Church of St Ignatius Loyola in New York, and she was buried at Calvary Catholic Cemetery in Pittsburgh. Looking back near the end she said she had done it through muck and mud.

She was called the first lady of the jazz keyboard in her lifetime, and was one of the first women to build a major career in jazz on terms set by her own playing and writing rather than by singing. Duke University opened the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture in 1983. The Kennedy Center has run an annual Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival since 1996, and her archive has been at Rutgers University's Institute of Jazz Studies since 2000.