Mary Lou Williams Collection

Mary Lou Williams (1910 May 8 – 1981 May 28) was a composer, arranger, musician, and educator. She is widely regarded as the foremost female instrumentalist in jazz history and her work in both longform composition and spiritual music has few parallels in the music. Considered by Duke Ellington to be “perpetually contemporary,” she was a native performer in nearly every era and idiom of jazz.


She was born Mary Elfrida Scruggs, May 8, 1910—a Taurus—in Atlanta, Georgia. Her family moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1914. She took an early talent for music, becoming known locally as the “little piano girl,” and was performing semi-professionally before she was in her teens. Her talents drew attention and opportunities and in 1924, she hit the road, joining Buzzin’ Harris and His Hits ’n Bits on the Theatre Owners’ Booking Association (TOBA) circuit. Shortly later, saxophonist John Overton Williams joined the revue. Shortly after that, John and Mary became couple. They would marry in 1927.


John started his own group, the Syncopators, in 1925, with Mary at the piano. This led the pair to Tulsa, Memphis, and all points in between, eventually finding their way to Oklahoma City, where John took a gig with the Dark Clouds of Joy in 1928. The group, with John and Mary in tow, moved to Kansas City in 1929, now under the direction of Andy Kirk and rechristened Andy Kirk and His Twelve Clouds of Joy. Tom Pendergast’s Kansas City had a vibrant scene at the time, with George and Julia Lee, Bennie Moten, and Walter Page (the Blue Devils) all leading prominent bands, with Count Basie and Jay McShann stepping forward as the scene drew national attention a few years later. It was here that she made her mark as a performer and her first recordings under her own name (“Lou” was added at the suggestion of Jack Kapp of Brunswick Records).


After some false starts, Mary would officially join Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy in 1931. She quickly became the band’s star attraction and chief composer and arrangerand was the driving creative force behind the group’s signature hits, including “Mess-A-Stomp,” “Walkin’ and Swingin’,” “Froggy Bottom,” and “The Lady Who Swings the Band.” Unfortunately, between 1931 and 1936—nearly a five-year period—the Kirk orchestra did not record. Nonetheless, her charts were so widely respected that Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and others solicited works from her. Buoyed by her success and dissatisfied with Kirk, Williams would leave the group in 1940, striking out on her own. Separated since the late 1930s, she divorced John in 1942.


She moved back east, first to Pittsburgh, where she started a group with her then beau, trumpeter Harold “Shorty” Baker. They married and 1942 and separated in 1943. She moved to New York in 1943 and became a mentor to young musicians then developing a new language of jazz, bebop, with Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, and Tadd Dameron becoming frequent visitors to her Harlem home. Monk and Gillespie became life-long friends. She also held a steady gig at Barney Josephson’s Café Society and had a radio program on WNEW, Mary Lou Williams’ Piano Workshop.


It was during this period that Williams developed the Zodiac Suite, a cycle of twelve individual pieces named for a sign of the Zodiac, each dedicated to friends, musicians, and/or public figures born under a given sign. Drawing inspiration from Bebop, contemporary classical music introduced to her by Milton Orent and others, and examples of longform composition by Ellington, Williams would anticipate “Third Stream” developments by over a decade. Performing many of the constituent pieces for the first time on her WNEW radio show, she recorded the suite for Asch records in 1945 and staged two large orchestral performances at Town Hall, on December 31, 1945 and at Carnegie Hall, June 22, 1946. While these performances were perceived as being unsuccessful at the time and the Asch recordings only intermittently available, the Zodiac Suite is now widely considered a landmark composition in jazz history.


Williams would continue to perform in New York and on tour, compose and arrange for herself and others, and to record, but her success and ambitions had dimmed. In 1952 she went on a tour of England. Initially intended to be a short trip, she would not return to America until 1954. It was a largely unpleasant experience. 1954 was the start of an extended hiatus.


Her hiatus was precipitated in part by her religious reawakening. After 1954 she became a devout Catholic, taking her first communion the same day as her dear friend, Lorraine Gillsepie, in May of 1957. 1957 also saw her return to music, performing three numbers from her Zodiac Suite at the Newport Jazz Festival with the Dizzy Gillespie Orchesta. She began the Bel Canto Foundation in 1957 to help musicians under the throes of addiction or in need of medical care and opened a thrift shop in 1959. It would close in 1963. Williams started a namesake record label in 1962, Mary Records, as well as a publishing company named for the Catholic patron saint of music: Cecilia Music Publishing.


During this time, she developed deeper relationships with the Catholic Church, especially a pair of young Jesuits: Mario Hancock and Peter O’Brien. She met Mario (née Grady Hancock in 1937) at Graymoor, a Franciscan retreat center in the Hudson Valley in New York. He and Williams became close friends and frequent correspondents. Hancock was sent to the Vatican in 1964. O’Brien and Williams met the same year, with O’Brien (born 1940) first writing her after reading about her in Time magazine and subsequently seeing her at the Hickory House. O’Brien too became a close friend and supporter, and started working on her behalf in 1967, becoming her official manager in 1970—a role he held until her death in 1981—and later head of the Mary Lou Williams Foundation—a role he held until his own death in 2015.


The early 1960s saw Williams take a greater interest in exploring the sacred through music. This began in earnest with her 1964 self-titled album released on Mary Records, which was subsequently known as Black Christ of the Andes. The first track on that album, now considered a classic, explores the life of St. Martin de Porres, the first person of color to be canonized by the Catholic Church. In 1967, following the liberalization brought by the Second Vatican Council, Williams explored the concept of a jazz mass. Her first publicly performed jazz mass occurred July 24, 1967 at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Pittsburgh. Her second, composed for the Lenten liturgy, was performed at St. Thomas in Harlem in April of 1968—with elements added following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.—and in Rome in 1969. Her third mass, initially titled Music for Peace, but more commonly known as Mary Lou’s Mass, was first performed in 1970. While composed for inclusion in a proper Catholic mass, it was also used as part of the Alvin Ailey choreography of the same name, and was recorded as an album in 1970 as Music for Peace, which was expanded in 1974 and released as Mary Lou’s Mass.


The late 1970s saw Williams taking an increased interest in the legacy she was leaving behind. She created musical lectures on the history of Jazz, developed a tree of jazz in collaboration with her friend, artist David Sloan Wilson, and made history-inflected recordings. In 1977, she accepted a position at Duke University, where she spent her final years educating young students on Jazz. In 1980, she started the Mary Lou Williams Foundation with O’Brien and Joyce Breach. Its purpose was to “advanc[e] public knowledge of the art of jazz music by teaching the same in all its forms to children between the ages of 6 and 12….” The Foundation expanded its mission to emphasize her music and legacy and continues to the present day, though she would not live to see it. Mary Lou Williams died May 28, 1981, in Durham, North Carolina.