PIANIST AND COMPOSER UNITED STATESIt’s not what you play, it’s how you play it.
—MARY LOU WILLIAMS
Mary was out on the sidewalk, skipping rope with her friends, when a man walked up with a boy from the neighborhood. “Where’s this piano player you’ve been telling me about?” he asked the boy.
“Right there, mister,” said the boy, pointing to Mary.
“What is this, a joke?” the man said, slapping his forehead. “I asked you to bring me to the best piano player in town! Ours got drunk and took off, and the show’s in a couple of hours. It’s a real gig, not some school talent show!” He rubbed his hands over his face. “Are you telling me you brought me all the way across Pittsburgh for some girl?”
This made Mary angry. What did he know about her piano playing?
“She’s not just some girl,” said the boy, jumping to her defense. “She’s the Little Piano Girl. Ain’t you heard of her?”
“Nope,” said the bandleader, turning to walk away.
One of the jump-rope girls chimed in. “Wait a minute, mister. You came all this way—might as well hear her play.”
So Mr. Harris, of the band Buzzin’ Harris and His Hits and Bits, asked fourteen-year-old Mary Lou Williams to play for him. Harris’s frown quickly turned into a grin. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. This girl could play!
“Can you play this?” he asked, humming the first song of their show.
Mary listened carefully until he finished and then said, “Sure thing.”
She proceeded to play the entire song, from start to finish, flawlessly. Harris could barely contain himself. He hummed each song in the show to her and she played each one back to him perfectly, as if she’d been practicing for weeks. As they sat together, Mary memorized the entire set for their show.
Two hours later, Mary joined the Hits and Bits onstage at a Pittsburgh theater. She tore it up with the band, and the audience loved her. The teenage musical sensation brought down the house!
After the show, Mr. Harris begged Mary to join the band. At the end of the summer, they’d be leaving Pittsburgh to tour the country. “Won’t you come with us?” he asked.
Mary couldn’t wait to get away from home. “Sure thing,” she answered.1
Mary’s musical adventures began in Atlanta, Georgia, where she was born in 1910. As one of eight children, she didn’t get much attention from her mother, and she never knew her father at all. When she was young, the family moved north to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Mary experienced racism for the first time in her life. Because of her dark skin, white and light-skinned-black parents wouldn’t let their children play with her. Neighbors threw bricks through the windows of her house.
Mary escaped into music. When she was around three years old, she was sitting on her mother’s lap as she played a song on the harmonium (a type of organ). Suddenly, toddler Mary reached up and played the same song, note for note. Her mother was so shocked that she leaped up from the piano bench, spilling Mary to the floor, and ran to get the neighbors to listen to the toddler play. “I never left the piano after that,” Mary remembered. “Always played. Nothing else interested me.”2
Mary was born with the caul, or amniotic membrane (the sack surrounding the fetus), over her face. Some, including her mother, believed it a sign of “second sight”—the ability to see ghosts, visions, and even the future. Mary did have visions: “Everybody was afraid to be around me because I was seeing so many weird things.”5 She believed her strange ability also helped her with music. She could predict the notes coming before musicians played them, so she was a step ahead during rapid jazz improvisations.
Mary’s family was dirt poor and her mother an alcoholic. “The kids had to fend for themselves,” said Mary’s niece.3 Mary didn’t even have shoes until she was four years old. But she learned early on that she could make money playing the piano. Neighbors requested her as entertainment for their parties or just to hear a song (radios and TV were rare then), and they were all willing to pay. Sometimes as much as fifty cents a song!4 At a time when adult jobs paid just a few dollars a day, that was big money. By age six, Mary was playing piano professionally, everywhere from birthday parties to gambling houses to vaudeville stages. But she kept it a secret from her family—she knew her mother would take the money if she found out.
She might have gotten away with it, but then she broke her arm. As she recuperated, neighbors stopped by wondering why she wasn’t playing for them anymore. The jig was up. Mary’s mother began hiring her out to play at dances, funerals, silent movies, churches, even brothels! Her rates went up to one dollar an hour, and her mother took most of her pay. Soon Mary was supporting their entire family.
Mary’s only father figure during her childhood was her stepfather, Fletcher Burley. He gave her the attention she craved and nurtured her musical talent. He was a gambler, and sometimes when he went out, he took young Mary with him: “He bought himself an extra-large coat and would put me underneath and sneak me into one of his gambling joints, most of which had an upright piano against one wall.” Mary would play for tips, often earning twenty or thirty dollars a night!6
When Mary couldn’t get work playing piano, she did other jobs. She did laundry, worked as a maid, and helped make wigs. She even moved bodies for an undertaker!
Before long, young Mary was known across Pittsburgh as “the Little Piano Girl.” Her musical gift could not be ignored. Whenever Mary practiced, people on the street couldn’t help but take notice: “Everyone would stop on their porch, and truck drivers would stop,”7 whenever Mary played.
When she was twelve years old, Mary moved out of her house and never went back. First she lived with her big sister; then she got her break with Buzzin’ Harris and His Hits and Bits, and hit the road. The band’s saxophonist (and Mary’s future husband) remembers hearing her for the first time: “I’d never heard nothing like that in my life . . . She outplayed any piano player I’d ever played with. . . . At fourteen.”8 When jazz great Louis Armstrong heard fifteen-year-old Mary playing at a club, he was impressed. Still barely a teenager, Mary was becoming famous in the highest music circles.
She married saxophonist John Williams when she was seventeen, and together, they moved to Kansas City, Missouri. There, Mary joined the band Twelve Clouds of Joy and became part of the growing swing scene (the popular American dance music of the 1930s and ’40s). Other bands were always trying to steal her away. She was in high demand to write songs and arrangements for big-time bandleaders like Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey, Earl Hines, and Benny Goodman.
In 1942, Mary divorced Williams and left Twelve Clouds of Joy. She returned to Pittsburgh, formed a new band, and married again—this time to trumpeter Shorty Baker. When Shorty left to join Duke Ellington’s orchestra, Mary joined as well. They traveled together, playing shows, and Mary wrote several successful tunes for Duke.
Within a year, that marriage was over, and Mary moved on to New York City. There, she got a weekly gig playing piano at the Café Society club in Greenwich Village, and she launched her own weekly radio show called Mary Lou Williams’s Piano Workshop. All kinds of musicians gathered in her Harlem apartment to try out new songs and jam with her. These up-and-comers would later become the biggest names in jazz, like Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Dizzy Gillespie. “During this period, Monk and the kids would come to my apartment every morning . . . after I’d finished my last show, and we’d play and swap ideas until noon or later.”9
Teenage Mary once played piano at a high-society tea party. When the hostess asked what she charged, Mary said, “Dollar an hour, my standard fee.” She played for a few hours, then as the chauffeur drove her home, she looked at the check. It was for $100! That was a couple months’ salary for most people. “My mother almost fainted,” Mary said.10
In the 1940s, Mary moved away from swing and into bebop, a new style of jazz that was faster and more complicated, and demanded improvisation from musicians. She also wrote longer pieces, including Zodiac Suite, a twelve-movement composition, which was performed at Carnegie Hall in 1946.
In 1952, Mary, who had never been to Europe, was invited to perform in England. She accepted and ended up playing around Europe for two years.
But when she returned to the United States, she felt like her life was missing something. She converted to Catholicism and quit playing music altogether. Instead, she focused her energies on helping others, including many of her friends in jazz who had become addicted to drugs. She started a foundation that helped addicted musicians get clean and return to performing.
It took two priests plus Dizzy Gillespie to pull her back into the music world. She finally returned in 1957, when she joined Dizzy’s band at the Newport Jazz Festival. She began composing religious jazz music, including several masses. World-famous African American choreographer Alvin Ailey choreographed one of these, Mary Lou’s Mass; four years later, it was the first jazz piece ever performed at New York City’s Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.
Mary is finally getting the name recognition she deserves. Duke University established the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture; the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, has a yearly Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival; there are several children’s books about Mary’s life; and in 2015, a documentary film called Mary Lou Williams: The Lady Who Swings the Band aired on TV.
Mary also continued focusing her energy and talent on helping others, especially musicians. She opened thrift stores in Harlem and gave the proceeds—along with 10 percent of her own money—to struggling musicians. In the 1960s, when there were only two jazz clubs in all of New York City, she found new venues where jazz musicians could play. She started the Pittsburgh Jazz Festival, as well as Mary Records (the first record company to be started by a woman!) and Cecilia Music Publishing Company. In her later years, she established the Mary Lou Williams Foundation, which teaches children and young adults about jazz.
When Mary hit her sixties, a time when many people are thinking about retirement, her career continued to soar. She recorded numerous albums, played at many prestigious jazz festivals, and was the artist in residence at Duke University. She won two Guggenheim Fellowships and was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Performance. She even performed at the White House for President Jimmy Carter in 1978!
Mary died at age seventy-one. Her career and body of work put her at the top of the list of notable musicians, female and male. At a time when women, especially black women, weren’t allowed into the music world except as singers or dancers, Mary Lou defied expectations. She wrote 350 songs and recorded more than a hundred records. She wrote and arranged for some of the greatest bandleaders of the era and was a mentor to the future jazz greats. Mary’s amazing talent meant she was able to be her own woman—she supported herself doing what she loved and left behind her own jazz legacy.
Looking back at the end of her life, Mary was pleased, “I did it, didn’t I? Through muck and mud.”11
HOW WILL YOU ROCK THE WORLD?
I will rock the world by becoming a teacher. I want to encourage kids to open up and be creative before they get shut down. I think this is one of the most important jobs in the world.
AUGDEN HAYES 
AGE 13