# How Mary Lou Williams shaped the sound of the Big band era: Videos, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2019/09/12/how-mary-lou-williams-shaped-the-sound-of-the-big-band-era-videos-photos/
- Published: 2019-09-12T00:44:58+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Mary Lou Williams seemed to learn early that playing piano would keep her alive.**

Maybe she realized this at age six, when she started venturing to her white neighbors’
homes to play piano for them. As Williams later recalled to the journalist John 
Wilson for the Jazz Oral History Project at the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies,
she got the neighbors to stop throwing bricks into her family’s house by giving 
them private concerts.

Williams’ mother didn’t know why the neighbors had _stopped_ terrorizing her family
until young Mary Lou broke her arm. Her concerts suddenly stopped, and the neighbors
came by to ask where the music had gone.

By 1925, at just 15 years old, Williams was a “full-time working musician,” says
Tammy Kernodle, professor at Miami University of Ohio and author of _Soul on Soul:
The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams_. By the middle of the 20th century, Williams
had solidified her status as a jazz great. She helped develop the Kansas City swing
sound of the 1930s. And in the 1940s, she mentored some of bebop’s most famous innovators
like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk.

Jazz helped Williams stay alive: It had kept the racist neighbors at bay, helped
pay her family’s bills, taken her all over the country and across the Atlantic to
Europe. But jazz, it seemed, was also killing her.

By 1954, Williams was physically and emotionally exhausted, and she quit the scene.
As Wilson wrote in [his 1981 New York Times obituary for Williams](https://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/30/obituaries/mary-lou-williams-a-jazz-great-dies.html),
she stood up from the piano during a Paris performance and refused to perform again
for three years.

During her break from performance, Williams went through a period of intense reflection
about the meaning of her life’s work. When she returned in 1957, she claimed her
true power as one of jazz’s fiercest advocates, making spiritual, political music—
and with her clarified purpose, she pushed the genre to new places.

In her Rutgers oral history interview, Williams was vague about what drove her extended
retreat from public performance.

“I didn’t really stop on my own,” she said. “I just — something carried me away.
I began praying, and I never really thought about playing anymore.”

She converted to Catholicism and spent hours a day in mass. She had long been generous
with her home in Hamilton Heights, but she took that outreach to a new level, scraping
together whatever she could from royalty checks and friends (including Dizzy and
Lorraine Gillespie) to take in the poor and help musicians struggling with addiction.

Williams did not have savings to rely on: Despite her decades of jazz prominence,
she had experienced little economic stability.

“This was a system that saw her talent but didn’t see her humanity,” says Kernodle.“
If you are as talented as Mary Lou Williams was … and you’re continuing to have 
to work at a level and a rate that doesn’t afford you luxury, let alone rest, there’s
a level of frustration that comes there.”

On top of financial hardship — and what Kernodle calls “exploitation” on the part
of her white male manager and agents while she was in Europe — Williams also faced
emotional struggles.

“The world can destroy me,” she told Wilson during their discussion of her time 
away from performance. Then, she quickly added, “Not really — I’m a strong woman
through being around men. But I can really be bent badly.”

She lived in a context that could bend anyone badly. Jazz was a demanding, male-
dominated industry, and Williams had been in it for decades. By the 1950s, Williams
was watching the dawning of the civil rights movement. And in 1955, her friend and
mentee Charlie Parker died after a long battle with addiction.

But Williams’ intense period of prayer helped. It gave her the strength, she said,“
to do further work for God.”

Two priests — Father John Crowley and Father Anthony Woods — played a large role
in convincing Williams to return to music, by telling her that creating jazz was
her unique way of serving God.

And so Williams composed a series of religious works upon her return. The first 
was called _Black Christ of the Andes_ — a haunting choral work in honor of a Peruvian
saint. In 1975, she performed the first jazz mass at New York City’s St. Patrick’s
Cathedral, [to a crowd of thousands](https://www.nytimes.com/1975/02/19/archives/new-jersey-pages-mary-lou-williams-at-piano-leads-her-jazz-mass-at.html).

Williams also continued with gigs in the city’s jazz clubs. And during this period,
she made records that blurred the distinction between jazz and sacred music. She
insisted, despite objections, that the African-American expression of jazz was sacred—
that it belonged in the Catholic mass. She also seemed to see performance outside
of the Church, and music without explicit religious references, as central to her
spiritual mission.

We hear the breadth of her new sound in the 1974 record _Zoning_. On the cover, 
she looks up to the sky, hair blowing; it’s rapturous. The record includes the track“
Medi II,” which embraces the fast pace popularized during the bop era. There’s “
Ghost of Love,” which takes on the solemnity of a hymn. And then there’s “Rosa Mae,”
a full-on blues song with a funky base line. (You can also hear a rare vocal performance
from Williams — a response to a dare — in her [_Piano Jazz _version](https://open.spotify.com/track/65OjRmxI2kN6poSI1M85Jo)
of the song.) With _Zoning_, Williams was saying she owned it all: that as a jazz
musician, she was a keeper of the entirety of 20th century American sound.

Williams, [Wilson wrote in the Times](https://www.nytimes.com/1975/02/09/archives/mary-lou-takes-her-jazz-mass-to-church.html),
once said jazz was “the only true art in the world.” Then, a little shocked at herself,
she walked the statement back and said, “Oh, should I say that?”

But she was never apologetic about how essential she thought her music to be.

“Americans don’t realize how important jazz is,” she told the _New York Post_ in
1975. “It’s healing for the soul. It should be played everywhere — in churches, 
nightclubs, everywhere. We have to use every place we can.”

Later in her life, Williams spent a great deal of energy trying to convey an accurate
history of jazz to the American public. She was known to distribute an illustrated“
Tree of Jazz,” which drew a direct line, on the trunk of a tree, from the suffering
of slavery to the spirituals, ragtime, Kansas City swing and then be-bop. She taught
school children about jazz — and she later accepted an appointment at Duke University,
which was her last home before she died.

At a time, Kernodle said, when revisionists where trying to whitewash jazz history,
Williams was asserting its blackness.

“At the very same time that black studies and women’s studies and gender studies…
in the academy are being crafted and constructed, she is constructing some very 
similar narratives in jazz history,” said Kernodle. “It’s very progressive.”

Jazz has always been about survival; about finding a way to live through oppression
and pain. Williams, who did her educational work with a sense of strong urgency,
spoke often about wanting to make sure jazz survived.

But first, when she reached what looked like a breaking point, Williams had to make
sure she would survive herself.

“The greatest woman jazz pianist in captivity.” “The greatest woman jazz pianist
in the world.” “Highly acclaimed as a deluxe tickler of the ivories.” “One of the
foremost swing pianists of either sex.” By 1936, then-25-year-old Mary Lou Williams’
reputation already preceded her. The pianist’s primary gig — Kansas City band Andy
Kirk and His Clouds of Joy — was taking off, booked for packed dances around the
country alongside artists like Louis Armstrong. Williams was the group’s marquee
attraction, a little for the novelty of a _woman_ pianist but mostly because of 
her undeniable artistry — one critic, for example, questioned whether Art Tatum 
could really swing like Mary Lou Williams, with no caveat in sight. She’d even already
garnered enough acclaim to record [solo sides](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QBBS8236rM).

But Williams’ remarkable, prescient playing with the Clouds of Joy was only part
of the explanation for her and the band’s success. Her arrangements for the group,
which she’d started contributing at age 19, helped spark their national breakthrough—
and gave her a role even more unusual than “woman pianist.” “Until the Real Thing
Comes Along,” with Williams’ arrangement, had become “the biggest song of 1936” 
according to one Virginia paper; as a result, she got calls from bandleaders including
Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington for fresh versions of the hits
of the day, as well as her own compositions.

The comparatively unglamorous work of arranging — essentially, designing each band
member’s parts so they fit together, and coming up with new spins on familiar pieces—
might not seem like one of Williams’ most noteworthy endeavors, given her unmatched
history as a player and composer. But too often women’s contributions to music, 
particularly jazz, are diminished by the assumption that they’re intuitive and thus
unintentional — an assumption that’s clearly incorrect, but perhaps nowhere more
baldly than in the fact that a woman was doing the intellectual work of writing 
arrangements for some of the swing era’s most beloved bands.

Williams’ arranging career began in 1929 when her husband, John Williams, joined
Kirk’s band. A missing pianist left a spot open for Mary Lou during an early session,
and she seized the opportunity to prove her worth by sharing a slew of new compositions.
Not yet confident enough in her own understanding of arranging to write them down,
she dictated her ideas to Kirk (one early cut is called just that: “[Mary’s Idea](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfEuf0Cv0XQ)“).

Through the early years of the Depression, while the band had few opportunities 
to travel and fewer still to record, Williams spent almost all her time refining
her new craft, learning more theory from Kirk and going to jam sessions with Lester
Young and Ben Webster while doing “five or six arrangements a week” by her own estimation,
as she put it a 1954 interview with [_Melody Maker_](https://www.ratical.org/MaryLouWilliams/MMiview1954.html).
A falling out with John over money meant that Williams no longer wanted to share
a bed with him; instead, she stayed up all night writing. “I always liked lying 
flat on my back on the grass in Paseo Park in Kansas City, looking up at the stars,
composing, late at night,” she explained, via Linda Dahl’s Williams biography _Morning
Glory_.

If “[Froggy Bottom](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bmSaTus4V4)” (first recorded
in 1929, but not widely released until a rerecording in 1936) was her first really
memorable composition and arrangement (“real jazz-‘dirty,'” according to _Variety_),
it paled in comparison to how “[Until The Real Thing Comes Along](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaQYQY7JPSQ)”
would change her entire trajectory. The song, recorded by the Clouds of Joy to meet
the label’s demand for something sweet, was based on a long-neglected melody (called“
The Slave Song”) by a Kansas City colleague named Lawrence E. Freeman. Williams 
fleshed it out with an arrangement, but it was a crew of Tin Pan Alley writers that
included Sammy Cahn and Saul Chaplin who got the credit after writing new lyrics.
Neither Williams nor any members of the Clouds of Joy (including Kirk himself) would
see royalties from the eventual American Songbook classic.

The record shows the band at its most glossy and saccharine — which Williams hated,
but she could play the part. The Depression still loomed large, and getting a hit
was a matter of survival as much as it was a boon for her career as a soloist. Despite
the fact that her preferred style was anything but pop, the understated saxophone
interlude that Williams penned is smooth and seductive, and the filigree she adds
on piano is romantic without being overbearing.

1937’s “[Roll ‘Em](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX8bca6pIaA)” was Williams’ biggest
song for Benny Goodman, a jazz-hands-ready swinger that helped solidify her status
as a heavyweight away from Kirk with its balance between a propulsive, chugging 
rhythm section and bawdy horns. It also served Goodman’s more nefarious intention
to — as the black papers of the time noted — import some of the sound of black bands
into his mostly-white ensemble (_Billboard_ regrettably called it a “real jive version”).
He repeatedly asked her to be his full-time arranger and his pianist — and she declined
just as often, filling the gossip pages.

“By now I was writing for some half-dozen bands each week,” Williams told _Melody
Maker_. “One week I was called on for twelve arrangements, including a couple for
Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines, and I was beginning to get telegrams from Gus Arnheim,
Glen Gray, Tommy Dorsey and many more like them. As we were making perhaps 500 miles
per night, I used to write in the car by flashlight between engagements. The band
parts too … Whenever musicians listened to the band they would ask who made a certain
arrangement. Nearly always it was one of mine.”

The sheer breadth of her work is tough to track down since many of her arrangements
were never recorded, and many have been lost. But if she was even partly as prolific
as she says she was, Williams had an indelible impact on the sound of the swing 
era’s dance bands, becoming increasingly bold with her arrangements and compositions
with each new success. Regarding her work with the Clouds of Joy, the _Pittsburgh
Courier_ noted that she was “responsible for many of the unusual arrangements used
by the band in playing their hit numbers”; _Billboard _sounded skeptical of how 
she “concocted some weird effects.” “[Walkin’ and Swingin’](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxUuSe1hfR8),”
for example, is still performed by big bands to this day (and was performed then
by Les Brown and Gene Krupa) thanks to its ever so slightly off-center phrasing 
and unexpectedly intricate melody; later, Thelonious Monk would quote it in his 
own standard, “Rhythm-A-Ning.”

Part of her success lay in her ability to translate jazz sounds — the mild dissonances
that come from playing between notes on the Western scale, and the subtle lope of
swing — onto the page, and thus into a variety of different big bands. “One of the
difficulties about jazz is that it’s very hard to notate it, but Duke Ellington 
could and so could Mary,” said former _Metronome_ editor Barry Ulanov. “She had 
discovered, because of her particular genius, a way to articulate on paper a jazz
pattern—how to accent a measure. And that’s why her best stuff is among the best
in jazz.”

Whether or not they were observing that level of detail, swing fans embraced their
new star. “Miss Williams is considered swing music’s only top arranger, a field 
she takes to with much alacrity because she likes the work,” wrote the _New York
Amsterdam News_ in a 1938 feature entitled “Miss Mary Swings For You” (a gendered
qualifier might be missing, but 80 years later it seems fair to take it as it’s 
written).

Another, called “Mary Lou Williams Tells Interesting Life Story,” explains details
about not only her arranging process but also her hobbies (football fandom apparently
among them) — the real celebrity treatment. A _Pittsburgh Courier_ story from 1937
describes a horde of reporters awaiting her arrival at Grand Central; when the author
invites himself into her cab (a questionable reporting tactic, at best), he can’t
stop gushing about her ability and how she has “one of the most outstanding conceptions
of what this thing we call ‘swing music’ is all about.” All this before she started
working with Duke Ellington, for whom she ultimately arranged 47 songs.

The response to her work was certainly gendered, and the fact that she was a woman
did inspire some resentment from her less-celebrated bandmates. But none of that
changed the fact that by the conclusion of her time with Kirk in 1942, Williams 
was among the most renowned arrangers in the business, at a moment when arrangers
had disproportionate sway. The peak of the swing era meant dancers were seeking 
out the hottest bands — “hottest,” meaning the ones giving the country’s most popular
melodies ever-more-thrilling twists and turns. A 1937 _Variety _piece called “Importance
Of Arrangers” (the subhed: “Overshadow Composers in Many Cases, Responsible for 
Dancemen’s Musical Reputations In Others”) listed 52 men and one woman: Williams.
When an_ L.A. Times_ columnist nominated his own “All-American Swing Band” the same
year, it was Williams whom he named first as his arranger of choice.

The perpetually contemporary Williams, as Ellington famously described her, mastered
the language of swing and pushed the genre towards more expansive, experimental 
sounds in under a decade, leaving now-untraceable fingerprints on the catalogs of
fellow legends like Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway. She also sensed how musical
trends were changing, and got out — into bebop and the open arms of Café Society—
in the early 1940s, before swing’s decline really hit. Her work inside the genre,
though, is an illustration of just how wide her sphere of influence actually was—
and how it was powerful enough to render whatever cliches about womanhood that she
was defying irrelevant. “I don’t like to cook, wash and iron,” Williams told the_
Amsterdam News_ before stepping onstage at the Apollo as the pianist and arranger
of one of the country’s biggest bands. “Since I never had it to do, why do it now?

⌊Mary Lou Williams began arranging in 1929. By 1942, she was among the most renowned
arrangers in the business.⌉⌊Mary Lou Williams began arranging in 1929. By 1942, 
she was among the most renowned arrangers in the business.⌉⌊Jazz helped Mary Lou
Williams stay alive — but after several draining decades as a musician, she quit
the scene. When she returned, she claimed her true power as one of jazz's fiercest
advocates.⌉⌊Jazz helped Mary Lou Williams stay alive — but after several draining
decades as a musician, she quit the scene. When she returned, she claimed her true
power as one of jazz's fiercest advocates.⌉

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