Mary Lou Williams (born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs; May 8, 1910 – May 28, 1981) was an American jazz pianist, arranger, and composer. She created hundreds of musical pieces and recorded over one hundred records (in 78, 45, and LP formats). Williams wrote and arranged music for Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. She also served as a friend, mentor, and teacher to Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Tadd Dameron, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie.

In 1954, she converted to Catholicism, which caused her to take a break from music and later changed the style of her compositions. She continued to perform and worked as a philanthropist, educator, and youth mentor until her death from bladder cancer in 1981.

Early years

Mary Lou Williams was the second child of eleven. She was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and grew up in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She was a very talented child. At two years old, she could play simple songs. Her mother taught her piano when she was three years old. Mary Lou played piano because she needed to. Her white neighbors threw bricks at her house until she started playing piano in their homes. At six years old, she helped support her ten half-brothers and sisters by playing piano at parties. At seven years old, she started performing in public. People in Pittsburgh admired her and called her "The Little Piano Girl." She became a professional musician at 15. She said Lovie Austin was her greatest influence. In November 1926, she married John Overton Williams, a jazz saxophonist.

Career

In 1922, when she was 12 years old, Williams began performing on the Orpheum Circuit of theaters. The next year, she played with Duke Ellington and his early band, the Washingtonians. One morning at 3:00 a.m., she was performing with McKinney's Cotton Pickers at Harlem's Rhythm Club when Louis Armstrong entered the room and stopped to listen to her.

In 1927, Williams married saxophonist John Overton Williams. She met him during a performance in Cleveland, where he was leading his group, the Syncopators. She moved with him to Memphis, Tennessee, where he formed a band that included Williams on piano. In 1929, when she was 19 years old, she took over leadership of the Memphis band after her husband accepted a job with Andy Kirk's band in Oklahoma City. Williams joined her husband in Oklahoma City but did not play with the band. The group, Andy Kirk's Twelve Clouds of Joy, moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Williams worked as a musician and also transported bodies for an undertaker when she was not performing. When the Clouds of Joy accepted a long-term job in Kansas City, Missouri, Williams joined her husband and began playing with the band, as well as arranging and composing music for them. She wrote songs such as "Froggy Bottom," "Walkin' and Swingin'," "Little Joe from Chicago," "Roll 'Em," and "Mary's Idea."

Williams was the arranger and pianist for recordings in Kansas City (1929), Chicago (1930), and New York City (1930). During a trip to Chicago, she recorded "Drag 'Em" and "Night Life" as piano solos. She used the name "Mary Lou" at the suggestion of Jack Kapp at Brunswick Records. The records sold quickly, making Williams well-known nationally. Soon after, she became Kirk's permanent second pianist, playing solo performances and working as a freelance arranger for Earl Hines, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey. In 1937, she produced In the Groove (Brunswick), a collaboration with Dick Wilson. Benny Goodman asked her to write a blues song for his band. The result was "Roll 'Em," a boogie-woogie piece based on the blues, which followed her earlier song "Camel Hop," named for Goodman's radio show sponsor, Camel cigarettes. Goodman tried to sign Williams to an exclusive contract to write for him, but she refused and continued working as a freelancer.

In 1942, Williams, who had divorced her husband, left the Twelve Clouds of Joy and returned to Pittsburgh. She was joined there by bandmate Harold "Shorty" Baker, with whom she formed a six-piece ensemble that included Art Blakey on drums. After a performance in Cleveland, Baker left to join Duke Ellington's orchestra. Williams joined the band in New York City, then traveled to Baltimore, where she and Baker married. She traveled with Ellington and arranged several tunes for him, including "Trumpet No End" (1946), her version of "Blue Skies" by Irving Berlin. She also convinced Ellington to perform "Walkin' and Swingin'." Within a year, she left Baker and the group and returned to New York.

Williams accepted a job at the Café Society Downtown, started a weekly radio show called Mary Lou Williams's Piano Workshop on WNEW, and began mentoring and collaborating with younger bebop musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk. In 1945, she composed the bebop hit "In the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee" for Gillespie. "During this period, Monk and the kids would come to my apartment every morning around four or pick me up at the Café after I'd finished my last show, and we'd play and swap ideas until noon or later," Williams recalled in Melody Maker.

In 1945, Williams composed the classically-influenced Zodiac Suite, in which each of the twelve parts corresponded to a sign of the zodiac and were dedicated to several of her musical colleagues, including Billie Holiday and Art Tatum. She recorded the suite with Jack Parker and Al Lucas and performed it on December 31, 1945, at The Town Hall in New York City with an orchestra and tenor saxophonist Ben Webster.

In 1952, Williams accepted an offer to perform in England and stayed in Europe for two years. By this time, her musical career had left her mentally and physically exhausted.

A three-year break from performing began when she suddenly stopped playing the piano during a performance in Paris in 1954. She returned to the United States, converted to Catholicism in 1954 alongside Dizzy Gillespie's wife, Lorraine. In addition to attending Mass regularly, her energy was focused on the Bel Canto Foundation, an effort she started using her savings and help from friends to turn her apartment in Hamilton Heights into a halfway house for the poor and musicians struggling with addiction. She also earned money for the halfway house through a thrift store in Harlem.

Her break may have been influenced by the death of her long-time friend and student Charlie Parker in 1955, who also struggled with addiction. Father John Crowley and Father Anthony helped persuade Williams to return to playing music. They told her she could continue to serve God and the Catholic Church by using her gift of creating music. Gillespie also encouraged her to return to playing, which she did at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival with Gillespie's band.

In 1958, she appeared as one of only three women in the famous photograph of jazz greats, A Great Day in Harlem.

Father Peter O'Brien, a Catholic priest, became her close friend and manager in the 1960s. Gillespie introduced her to Pittsburgh's Bishop John Wright. O'Brien helped her create new venues for jazz performances when few clubs in Manhattan offered jazz full-time. In addition to club work, she played at colleges, formed her own record label and publishing companies, founded the Pittsburgh Jazz Festival (with the bishop's help), and made television appearances.

After her break, Williams wrote and performed Black Christ of the Andes, based on a hymn honoring the Peruvian saint Martin de Porres, and two other short works, Anima Christi and Praise the Lord. It was first performed in November 1962 at St. Francis Xavier Church in Manhattan. She recorded it in October of the next year.

Throughout the 1960s, Williams' composing focused on sacred music, hymns, and Masses. One of the Masses, Music for Peace, was choreographed by Alvin Ailey and performed by the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater as Mary Lou's Mass in 1971. About the work, Ailey said, "If there can be a Bernstein Mass, a Mozart Mass, a Bach Mass, why can't there be Mary Lou's Mass?" Williams performed the revised version of Mary Lou's Mass, her most acclaimed work, on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971. She also made a guest appearance on Sesame Street in 1975.

Williams worked with youth choirs to perform her works, including Mary Lou's Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City in April 1975 before a gathering of over three thousand people. It marked the first time a jazz musician performed at the church. She opened a charitable organization and thrift stores in Harlem, directing the proceeds, along with

Later years

Mary Lou Williams' last recording, Solo Recital (Montreux Jazz Festival, 1978), included a mix of spirituals, ragtime, blues, and swing music. This was made three years before her death. Other important songs on the recording include her new versions of "Tea for Two," "Honeysuckle Rose," and her own compositions "Little Joe from Chicago" and "What's Your Story Morning Glory." Additional tracks are "Medley: The Lord Is Heavy," "Old Fashion Blues," "Over the Rainbow," "Offertory Meditation," "Concerto Alone at Montreux," and "The Man I Love."

In 1980, she created the Mary Lou Williams Foundation.

In 1981, Mary Lou Williams passed away from bladder cancer in Durham, North Carolina, at the age of 71. Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, and Andy Kirk attended her funeral at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola. She was buried in Calvary Catholic Cemetery in Pittsburgh. Near the end of her life, Mary Lou Williams said, "I did it, didn't I? Through muck and mud." She was called "the first lady of the jazz keyboard." Williams was one of the first women to achieve success in jazz.

Her final work for wind symphony, History…, was recreated and rearranged by Duke faculty member Anthony Kelley. It was first performed in 2024.

Awards and honors

• Received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1972 and again in 1977.
• Was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1971 for Best Jazz Performance – Group, for the album Giants, performed by Dizzy Gillespie, Bobby Hackett, and Mary Lou Williams.
• Received an honorary degree from Fordham University in New York in 1973.
• Received an honorary degree from Rockhurst College in Kansas City in 1980.
• Received the 1981 Duke University's Trinity Award for contributions to the university, an award chosen by Duke University students.

Legacy

• In 1983, Duke University created the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture.
• Since 1996, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. hosts an annual Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival every year.
• Since 2000, her papers and music are stored at Rutgers University’s Institute of Jazz Studies in Newark.
• A Pennsylvania State Historic Marker was placed at 328 Lincoln Avenue, Lincoln Elementary School, Pittsburgh, PA, to recognize her achievements and the school she attended.
• In 2000, trumpeter Dave Douglas released an album called Soul on Soul to honor her, including new arrangements of her music and original pieces inspired by her work.
• The 2000 album Impressions of Mary Lou by pianist John Hicks included eight of her musical compositions.
• The Dutch Jazz Orchestra studied and performed rediscovered works by Williams on their 2005 album Lady Who Swings the Band.
• In 2006, Geri Allen’s Mary Lou Williams Collective released an album called Zodiac Suite: Revisited.
• A young adult historical novel titled Jazz Girl, written by Sarah Bruce Kelly, was published in 2010. It is based on Mary Lou Williams’ early life.
• A children’s book titled The Little Piano Girl, written by Ann Ingalls and Maryann MacDonald with illustrations by Giselle Potter, was published in 2010.
• A poetry book titled Hemming the Water by Yona Harvey was published in 2013. It was inspired by Williams and includes the poem “Communion with Mary Lou Williams.”
• In 2013, the American Musicological Society published Mary Lou Williams’ Selected Works for Big Band, a collection of 11 of her big band scores.
• In 2015, a documentary film titled Mary Lou Williams: The Lady Who Swings the Band, produced and directed by Carol Bash, premiered on American Public Television and was shown at film festivals worldwide.
• In 2018, the What’sHerName women’s history podcast aired an episode titled “THE MUSICIAN Mary Lou Williams,” featuring Carol Bash as a guest expert.
• In 2021, the Umlaut Big Band released an album called Mary’s Ideas (Umlaut Records), a double-CD containing rare and newly discovered works by Mary Lou Williams. The album includes arrangements and compositions for Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and excerpts from the Zodiac Suite in its 1945 orchestral version, as well as parts from History of Jazz for Wind Symphony, her final and unfinished composition.
• A street near 10th and Paseo in Kansas City, Missouri, called Mary Lou Williams Lane, was named after the famous jazz musician.

Discography

• Dizzy Gillespie's album At Newport was released by Verve in 1957.
• The album Giants by Perception from 1971 features Bobby Hackett.
• Buddy Tate's album Buddy Tate and His Buddies was released by Chiaroscuro in 1973.