Mary Lou Williams

Mary Lou Williams enjoyed such an extended and fruitful span in music that calling her career lengthy would scarcely do it justice. For many years she earned the label of jazz’s foremost woman instrumentalist—an honor that reflects the relentless obstacles she faced in a male-dominated field—yet her stature as a significant figure would have held firm irrespective of gender.

Few stride pianists besides Williams and Duke Ellington succeeded in continually updating their approach across decades, a distinction alone sufficient to secure her lasting recognition. Throughout five decades of performing she remained contemporary while retaining command of earlier idioms and the foundational elements of her playing.

She entered the world as Mary Elfrieda Scruggs, later adopting the surname of her stepfather and becoming known as Mary Lou Burley. After learning piano entirely by ear she appeared before audiences at the age of six. Pittsburgh, where she spent her formative years, surrounded her with music from an early age. At thirteen she entered vaudeville; three years afterward she married saxophonist John Williams. The couple relocated to Memphis, where she made her first recordings with the Synco Jazzers. In 1929 John became a member of Andy Kirk’s Kansas City-based orchestra, and Williams soon contributed charts, substituted on piano during the band’s inaugural session, and joined the ensemble herself. Her writing shaped the group’s characteristic sound and helped drive its rise. Before long she stood out as Kirk’s leading soloist, a stride player whose command impressed even Jelly Roll Morton. She composed pieces such as the Benny Goodman favorite “Roll ’Em” and “What’s Your Story Morning Glory,” while also supplying arrangements to the orchestras of Goodman, Earl Hines, and Tommy Dorsey.

Williams remained with Kirk through 1942, the year she divorced John Williams and wed trumpeter Harold “Shorty” Baker. The pair co-directed a small group until Baker moved to Duke Ellington’s band. She created material for Ellington, most memorably transforming “Blue Skies” into the brass showcase “Trumpets No End,” and in 1948 spent a brief period with Benny Goodman’s bebop unit. Having steadily refreshed her style, she supported the emerging modernists of the early and middle 1940s—Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Tadd Dameron, and Dizzy Gillespie—by word and example. Her “Zodiac Suite” displayed these forward-looking concepts, while “In the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee” offered a bebop narrative that Gillespie later recorded.

From 1952 to 1954 Williams resided in Europe, after which she immersed herself in Catholicism and stepped away from performance for several years. She resurfaced in 1957 as a guest soloist with Dizzy Gillespie’s orchestra at the Newport Jazz Festival. Upon her return she adapted so convincingly that by the early 1970s her playing suggested a younger modal stylist acquainted with McCoy Tyner rather than a veteran of the 1920s. Though she generally avoided the avant-garde, she sometimes ventured into freer territory; a 1977 duet concert with Cecil Taylor proved notably unsuccessful. She composed three masses and a cantata, appeared prominently at Benny Goodman’s fortieth-anniversary concert at Carnegie Hall in 1978, held a teaching position at Duke University, and frequently structured her later programs as surveys tracing jazz history. At her death at age seventy-one she left behind a body of work that might have occupied several lifetimes.

Over the decades she led sessions for numerous imprints, among them Brunswick, where she cut a pair of solo piano pieces in 1930, Decca in 1938, Columbia, Savoy, Asch and Folkways extensively between 1944 and 1947, Victor, King in 1949, Atlantic, Circle, Vogue, Prestige, Blue Star, Jazztone, her own Mary label from 1970 to 1974, Chiaroscuro, SteepleChase, and finally Pablo in 1977 and 1978.