Mary Lou Williams

Mary Elfrieda Scruggs was born on the eighth of May 1910 at Atlanta and raised from about five in Pittsburgh's East Liberty, where they called her the little piano girl. Married at sixteen to the saxophonist John Williams, she joined his Synco Jazzers, and from 1929 to 1942 she was the pianist and chief arranger of Andy Kirk's Twelve Clouds of Joy — "Walkin' and Swingin'," "Mary's Idea" — while Benny Goodman ("Roll 'Em"), Tommy Dorsey, Earl Hines, and Duke Ellington ("Trumpet No End") bought her charts.

Her Hamilton Terrace apartment in Harlem became bebop's salon — Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie at her piano at four in the morning. Her Zodiac Suite premiered at Town Hall on the thirty-first of December 1945, and on the twenty-second of June 1946 three of its movements were played at Carnegie Hall by the seventy-piece Carnegie Pops Orchestra — among the first times a symphony orchestra performed jazz composition.

At Paris in 1954 she walked away from the piano mid-performance and gave three years to prayer and works of mercy; baptized Catholic in May 1957, she returned that summer at Newport with Dizzy Gillespie's band. The sacred works followed — the hymn to St. Martin de Porres, the 1964 album Black Christ of the Andes on her own Mary Records, and Music for Peace, staged by Alvin Ailey at New York City Center in 1971 as Mary Lou's Mass. In 1977 she met Cecil Taylor in the two-piano concert Embraced at Carnegie Hall.

From 1977 she taught at Duke University as artist-in-residence, founding her Foundation in 1980 to carry jazz to children. She died at Durham on the twenty-eighth of May 1981, of bladder cancer, at seventy-one — having played and written through every era of the music, ragtime to the avant-garde, and bowed to none of them. Honored be Mary Lou Williams, pianist of every era, servant of the music's soul.