ROLLIN’ WITH MARY LOU WILLIAMS
By late autumn 1943, Harlem faced an uncertain future. It would never fully recover from the riot. Whites, who had been an important source of income, stopped patronizing its nightlife. Eventually, many of the residents of Sugar Hill moved to places like St. Albans, Queens, and the Bronx. Some of the buildings that had been damaged during the riots remained empty of occupants for years. The scourge of heroin and gang violence began to overwhelm Harlem’s streets. Eventually, urban renewal efforts would transplant large numbers of Harlem’s black poor from tenements to high-rise housing projects, thereby contributing further to the concentration of poverty.
Nonetheless, the sense of political optimism had not completely vanished, as was evident when, on October 24, 1943, the fourth Sunday of the month, close to 4,000 “too-too girls” and their companions found their way to the Golden Gate Ballroom at 140th and Lenox. New York would hold its first Fashion Week that fall, a gathering of designers, fashion editors, and buyers—fashion industry insiders all. Uptown, the “too-too girls” set their own trends, and the streets of Harlem were their runways. That night, some of them wore softly tailored suits with nipped waists and round collars; others donned shirtwaist dresses with thin fabric belts. Pompadours and platform pumps seemed to send them soaring. The sidewalk outside the Golden Gate filled with young couples and groups of young men and women, all anticipating the evening. The occasion: a political rally in support of African American Communist Benjamin J. Davis Jr., a candidate for city council.1
On October 16, 1943, a full-page ad had run in the Amsterdam News:
THRILLING—SENSATIONAL—INSPIRING—COLOSSAL
. . .
TERRIFIC ENTERTAINMENT TEDDY WILSON
PRESENTS
ALL STAR VICTORY SHOW
IN TRIBUTE TO
BENJ. J. DAVIS, JR.
CITY COUNCIL CANDIDATE.
The ad featured photographs of Fredi Washington, Coleman Hawkins, Paul Robeson, Billie Holiday, and Mary Lou Williams. Tickets ranged from 55 cents to $2.50. That same issue ran an article about the planned event.
After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1929, Benjamin Davis had opened a legal office in Atlanta, where he had represented Angelo Herndon, who faced the death penalty for simply leading a protest demonstration. Stunned by the bitter racism he confronted in court, Davis joined the Communist Party. It was the party’s support for and defense of Herndon—as well as the Scottsboro Boys, nine young black men indicted for the rape of two white women—that helped to garner the party such widespread respect in many black communities during the thirties and forties. Consequently, Davis was already an admired figure when he relocated to Harlem in 1935. In New York he edited the journal Negro Liberator and worked on the staff of the Daily Worker. By 1937, he had become a secretary of the Harlem Division of the Communist Party. Within a few years, Davis was one of the most popular political figures in Harlem. He was a leader who gave voice to the community’s concerns and placed their plight in the context of larger national and global struggles. Davis saw “perfectly legitimate grievances” as the cause of the riots of 1943, including an increase in police brutality against blacks even as black soldiers fought against the fascists abroad.
By the time he ran for Powell’s council seat, Davis had received the endorsement of the clergyman congressman and a bevy of Harlem’s religious, civic, and political leaders. Cultural figures, including the writers Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, and actress Fredi Washington had also endorsed him. Poet Countee Cullen joined Ben Gold, president of the Fur Worker’s Union, and Ferdinand Smith, secretary of the National Maritime Union, as a vice chairman of the nonpartisan committee to elect Ben Davis to the City Council of New York. Audley Moore, who would later be known as Queen Mother Moore, served as campaign manager. Moore is best known for her black nationalist politics, but at the time she was a leading black leftist. In the 1940s, ideological lines were not as harshly drawn between leftists and black nationalists; they were united in their commitment to the black freedom struggle. The brilliant pianist Teddy Wilson—the “Marxist Mozart”—chaired the Artists Committee. As pianist at Café Society and a widely respected musician, Wilson had helped to further Billie Holiday’s career by featuring her as vocalist on a number of his recordings. He was able to successfully organize his fellow artists to appear at the rally in support of Davis’s candidacy.
Two hours before the show started, the fire department had to close the doors because the ballroom was already filled to capacity. According to Davis, another 5,000 people stood outside the ballroom awaiting entrance. The committee quickly rented another hall six blocks away, the Renaissance, at 121 West 138th Street, and over 2,000 people came to hear the entertainers give a second show.
Musicians Coleman Hawkins, Hazel Scott, Count Basie, Lucky Roberts, Art Tatum, Jimmie Lunceford, and Mary Lou Williams; vocalists Billy Daniels, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Josh White, and Ella Fitzgerald; and dancers Helen Tamiris and Pearl Primus were among the featured performers. There was even a performance by the Swa-Hili Dance Group “in Native African Dances.” Fredi Washington served as mistress of ceremonies. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. roused the crowd with his opening remarks: “The will of the anti-Fascists, anti-Christian Frontiers and anti–Ku Klux Klan will send Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., to the City Council on November 2.” Paul Robeson introduced Davis, remembering their long friendship, which had started when Robeson’s Rutgers football team played against Davis’s Amherst College team. (Davis had been the star of the team and was named “All Eastern Tackle” his senior year.) Hazel Scott received a roar of applause, not only because of her performance but also because of her $100 contribution to Davis’s campaign ($1,333 in today’s dollars). The cast of the Broadway play Oklahoma pledged $100 each to the campaign. And labor leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn joined others of note on the platform. The People’s Voice reported that the event “brought out more top flight stars than have ever honored any political candidate in the history of Harlem.” According to the Amsterdam News, the artists “gave from the heart in a thrilling performance for a cause close to their hearts.”2
In November 1943, Harlem sent Benjamin Davis, a Communist leader, to the New York City Council to represent their interests. On November 11, 1943, shortly after the election, a New York Times headline read “Democrats Margin in New Council Cut, ‘Left’ Forces Gain.” Fellow Communist Peter V. Cacchione of Brooklyn joined Davis on the council. Davis noted that it was “crystal clear” that he had not been elected by Harlem alone or by the Communist Party alone. Davis had been elected by a coalition of voters who crossed religious, ethnic, and racial boundaries.3
When Davis returned to the Golden Gate Ballroom to deliver his first report on the city council, Count Basie, Teddy Wilson, Billie Holiday, Pearl Primus, Josh White, and Mary Lou Williams provided the entertainment again. In 1945, Davis won reelection with the second-highest vote ever received by a councilman. However, in 1949, he was expelled from the council. Tried and convicted, along with other Communists, under the Smith Act for conspiring to overthrow the US government, he was imprisoned, and he was not released until 1954. But Harlemites and their beloved celebrities refused to give up on Davis and continued to hold rallies in support of him even after his arrest. As late as 1949, Ann Petry wrote that Harlemites had “voted for Ben Davis because [they] felt he would never sell Harlem down the river,” not because they were members of the Communist Party.4 For Petry, Davis’s commitment to black people, particularly those who were economically disadvantaged, endeared him to Harlem. They believed he would fight for their concerns and that he would not comply with policies that were not in their best interest. For them, his racial loyalties were more significant than his party affiliation.
The artists who performed at the events in support of Davis’s candidacy more than likely shared these sentiments. They were not just the black community’s most popular stars; with the exception of Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald, most of the musicians were also affiliated with Café Society, which meant that they were likely staunch supporters of progressive causes. Teddy Wilson drew on his colleagues at Café Society, and the club’s owner, Barney Josephson, encouraged his artists to be involved in political and civic events.
Mary Lou Williams was one such artist. Williams performed at Café Society nightly, and the club quickly became the nexus of her political, social, and creative life. Mary Lou and other performers from Café Society performed at a number of benefits. According to Williams, “Josh White had just joined the show . . . and we used to do sometimes 2 or 3 benefits per night.”5 These might be performances for soldiers at the Canteen on 44th Street or benefits for war relief, war orphans, political rallies, or other causes.
The Davis rally was the beginning of Mary Lou Williams’s political activity.6
Of her political involvement, Williams later said, “There’s not one musician I think would be in any kind of political anything if they weren’t disturbed about the race, as being abused and whatnot, [and] trying to help the poor.”7 A child of the black poor, Williams believed they suffered from the twin evils of racism and poverty and that they were in need of special assistance. Williams remained deeply concerned about and committed to the plight of black Americans, especially the black poor, for the rest of her life. There were rumors she hosted Communist Party cell meetings in her Harlem apartment. It is unclear whether these rumors were true. But, although she sympathized with the Communist cause, and may have generously opened up her home to artists and activists who needed a place to meet, she was never a member of the Communist Party.
Most importantly, more so than Primus or Petry, Williams’s passion for racial and economic justice was as spiritually driven as it was politically motivated. In fact, one cannot separate her spiritual quest from her political and philanthropic activities. By the early 1940s, she had not yet found a religion or a denomination to which to direct her spiritual yearnings. Nonetheless, her sense of spirituality, deeply informed by a kind of organic mysticism, called her to act in the world to alleviate human suffering. Unlike Petry and Primus, Williams did not always do so through organized efforts; in fact, most often she was engaged in individual, one-on-one efforts to free people of debt, addiction, violence, and homelessness.
By the time she moved to Sugar Hill in Harlem during the summer of 1943, Williams was already an established star in the black community. Black newspapers across the country documented her move to the city as well as her residency at Café Society. (It should be remembered that papers such as the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender, and the Baltimore Afro-American had national distribution, so the news they reported was the news of black America.) When Williams moved to Harlem, the Amsterdam News reminded readers that “she is an Immortal of Jazz, one of the best female pianists in the business, and one of the top arrangers and composers regardless of sex.”
A child prodigy, Williams had proven herself to be a gifted musician, composer, and arranger long before settling in New York. Born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs, the second of eight children, on May 8, 1910, in Atlanta, Georgia, she was recognized early for her musical and spiritual gifts. Williams emerged from the womb with a veil, a thin membrane of placenta, thought by African Americans to be a sign of the child’s clairvoyance. “I used to hear so many stories about spooks and ghosts,” she remembered. “Seemed like I picked up on that when I was about two or three years old because my mother was afraid to take me out anywhere with us.”8 Early on the young girl experienced visions. Blessed from birth with a psychic sensibility, Williams would always link her musical gift to her deep spirituality.
At age three, Williams stunned her mother, herself a talented musician (though not a professional one), when she played melodies on the piano that she’d heard. Mary Lou, on her mother’s lap at the piano, played the notes she had just watched her mother play, and it shocked her mother so much that she dropped her.9 An introspective child, Williams possessed a complex inner life that helped her to see both the significance of her musical gift and the role it might play in helping her make her way to a better life than that into which she was born. Williams always possessed a sense of self far beyond what might have been expected for a young person in her situation. At best, a young black woman born into poverty might have worked as a domestic servant for most of her life. A musically talented one might have become a highly respected church musician. Had she acquired education, she might have become a teacher. As an entertainer, she might have acquired a modicum of success and fame. But Williams’s ambitions went beyond all of this. She was confidently aware of her genius, and throughout her life she sought opportunities to express it fully.
Williams described her family’s home in Atlanta as “a wooden frame house near swampy woods” where her mother and grandmother went on “regular weekend drinking sprees.”10 In fact, Williams’s mother spent the week as a live-in domestic servant. If she enjoyed partying on Saturday night, she also regularly attended church on Sunday morning. There she served as pianist and organist. Eventually, both Williams’s mother, Virginia Burley (who married Williams’s stepfather, Fletcher Burley), and her grandmother, Anna Jane, earned money as laundresses.
Williams hid under the bed when her great-grandparents recounted stories about slavery, but she heard the tales nonetheless. From these stories she learned about the history of her people and their music, and for the rest of her life she saw black music as the deepest expression of black history. This association drove her sense of purpose and mission as well as her pedagogy. In a number of essays, both published and unpublished, Williams insisted that “jazz began with the spirituals.” She wrote, “The black American Slaves were taken to church. They learned the hymns of the white people. Soon they began to create their own psalms or hymns. These became known as the spirituals. This is the first music that was later to develop into what we know as jazz.”11 Years later, she would have her friend David Stone Martin create an illustration of a black music tree with its roots in slavery and suffering.
Williams had no knowledge of her father, Joseph Scruggs, until years later. As she explained, “I was born out of wedlock, a common thing not only for black people, but also whites in the South.” Eventually, she took the name of her stepfather, and throughout her life she thought of Fletcher Burley as her daddy. Burley nurtured Williams’s musical gift, taught her the blues, and bought her her first player piano. On the player piano she heard and learned from the masters, people like Jelly Roll Morton and James P. Johnson. Before long she became a student of the Atlanta native Jack Howard. Later she said of him, “I like Jack Howard because he played such a strong piano he could break up all the pianos and as a baby I started playing like that. I think I got the masculine quality [of playing] from him.” But for the most part, Williams was a self-taught pianist who learned by listening and playing. She learned to play in a variety of music styles from the player piano, including Harlem stride, boogie-woogie, waltzes, and light opera. She was also aware of the black religious music that permeated her surroundings.12
Unlike Petry and Primus, who grew up far removed from the racism and violence of the South, Williams experienced this prejudice firsthand. Williams certainly did not grow up in a family of middle-class professionals like Petry. She did escape the South. When she was five years old, she and her family joined the first wave of black migration, moving to Pittsburgh in 1915. Nevertheless, some of Williams’s earliest memories were of racial violence. She retained images of lynching and of seeing a man’s head “split open with an ax.”13 In Pittsburgh, white neighbors threw bricks into their windows and harassed her family, who lived with the constant threat of physical abuse. If that were not enough, lighter-skinned blacks were prejudiced against the chocolate brown child as well. Williams’s great-grandfather was nearly white, with blond hair, and her great-grandmother, Matilda, was believed to be part Native American. According to Williams, Matilda, the most powerful figure in the family (especially after the death of her husband), was a color-struck woman who beat her dark-skinned grandchildren more often than she did the lighter ones.
From the moment Williams discovered the piano, she could not be dragged away from it. The music became her refuge from poverty and maternal indifference. In Williams’s memory, her mother was a cool, distant figure who never came to hear her play after she became famous. Her older sister Mamie, four years her senior, acted as her caregiver and confidante. Williams’s younger siblings and her niece Bobbie Ferguson dispute this characterization of Virginia Burley.14 In the beginning of Williams’s life, Virginia was a single mother who had to work two jobs to care for her children. Once in Pittsburgh, though married, Burley continued to work long hours, and she had a number of other children.
In Pittsburgh, Williams earned the nickname “the little piano girl of East Liberty.” She played around town at parties for the city’s elite, for funerals, and at silent films. She was even discovered by neighborhood prostitutes, who paid her to play in the local brothel. So, like Billie Holiday, who started out as an errand girl doing housework, eventually singing for money in Baltimore brothels, Williams found that her talent brought her paying brothel gigs. Unlike Holiday, however, Williams never became one of the working girls. In fact, her stint in the brothel didn’t last long: instructed to peep through a view hole and play for the entire sexual encounter, she quit when one such encounter went on too long.
When she wasn’t playing the piano at home or on her many local gigs, Williams attended Lincoln School, where she excelled in music and mathematics. From Lincoln she went to Westinghouse High School. Westinghouse boasted an array of important former students, pianists all: Ahmad Jamal, Billy Strayhorn, and Erroll Garner among them. Williams attended for only one term. During the summer of her twelfth year, in 1922, Williams joined the tent show “Buzzin’ Harris and His Hits and Bits,” and thus began her time on the black vaudeville circuit. During summer break, Williams’s mother agreed to let her go on tour. By that time, she’d already earned a professional reputation in her hometown; been squired around the city’s nightlife by an uncle figure, Roland Mayfield; and begun to develop into the beautiful young woman she would become. “At the age of 12 I looked like 18,” she later said. Protected by Mayfield and her stepfather, she escaped numerous attempts by men to seduce and even rape her. When the opportunity to join Buzzin’ Harris’s outfit came along, she gladly jumped at it.
In spite of her multiple musical gifts, Williams had not learned to read music, a skill she wouldn’t develop until a few years later, when she wanted to write down the sounds she heard in her head. Andy Kirk, tuba player and bandleader of the Twelve Clouds of Joy, and Johnny Williams, the show’s saxophonist bandleader, helped her to transcribe them. Johnny Williams became her mentor and, eventually, her husband.
Bitten by the show-business bug, Williams eventually joined Andy Kirk’s Twelve Clouds of Joy, an important territory band that toured the Southwest. Territory bands traveled within a designated area, transporting new musical styles along the way. Along with Benny Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra, Andy Kirk’s Twelve Clouds of Joy helped to nationalize the Kansas City sound, a highly rhythmic blues-based style of jazz that first developed in Kansas City, Missouri. Williams traveled extensively with the Kirk band and gained a reputation as an important and gifted musician. In her capacity as soloist and arranger, she soon became known as “The Lady Who Swings the Band.” She’d reached her peak with the Kirk band when she began to set her sights on New York. She also divorced her first husband, and on December 10, 1942, she married the trumpeter Harold “Shorty” Baker. Williams and Baker began an affair when both were working for Kirk, and while Mary Lou was still married to John Williams. By this time, John and Mary Lou were married in name only.
Baker left the Kirk band first, to play with Duke Ellington, and Williams eventually followed him. During this time, Williams wrote arrangements for Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. She wrote the rollicking “Roll ’Em,” a blues-based boogie-woogie tune, for the Goodman orchestra. The tune moves through space and time with a momentum and sense of joy that surely sent dancers soaring. She also arranged a number of tunes for Ellington, including “Trumpet No End” and “Blue Skies.”
Throughout much of their brief time together, Baker was on the road with Ellington. In late 1943 or early 1944, Baker was drafted into the military.15 Williams, desperate for a little stability, found an apartment for them in Harlem, #21 at 63 Hamilton Terrace. But Baker would never live there. Williams, excited about the possibility of a stable gig and eager to create a home for herself and her husband, moved in, but the marriage did not survive the war. Although Williams and Baker never legally divorced, Baker did not share Williams’s life after the move. Nonetheless, the move to New York did bring the much-needed stability to Williams’s life that she had sought. She had been on the road since she was twelve or thirteen years old. Williams lived at Hamilton Terrace throughout her time in New York and maintained the apartment after she left for Europe in 1952. She would continue to live there throughout the rest of her life, keeping it even after moving to Durham, North Carolina, in the 1980s, when she began to teach at Duke University.
Hamilton Terrace is located near 144th and St. Nicholas Avenue, in a neighborhood known as Sugar Hill. Bound by 155th Street to the north, 145th to the south, Edgecombe Avenue to the east, and Amsterdam Avenue to the west, Sugar Hill was home to many of Harlem’s most prosperous and prominent citizens, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Duke Ellington. Describing Sugar Hill in the 1940s, Ann Petry wrote, “There is a moneyed class, which lives largely in and around the section known as the Hill. . . . The Hill suggests that Harlem is simply a pleasant and rather luxurious part of Manhattan.”16 In an essay on Sugar Hill in the New Republic, Langston Hughes explicitly stated what Petry implied. His wasn’t a celebration of black achievement, but an effort to point out the contradictory experiences of Sugar Hill residents, always a minority, and that of other, poorer Harlemites.
Elegant and secured with a doorman, Williams’s building housed her small, sunlit, one-bedroom apartment. She painted the kitchen lemon yellow and furnished the bedroom with two twin-sized Hollywood beds, upholstered in pink. She wrote music and kept up with correspondence in the bedroom. The apartment also had cabinets and files that held her compositions and arrangements as well as important papers and the essays and other writings she published. The heart of the apartment was the small living room, where a small upright Baldwin piano stood. On top of the piano she had placed various knickknacks, vases, and photos. Photographs taken by William P. Gottlieb in 1947 show Williams entertaining musician friends in this apartment. Dizzy Gillespie, Tadd Dameron, Jack Teagarden, and others surround Williams or Hank Jones as they play. Sometimes they are all seated in front of the piano engaged in conversation; at other times, they play cards on a small table that sits near the instrument. Williams had purchased a white rug for the center of the room, and she and her friends often sat there on the floor, listening to records on a portable record player.
In short, Williams made a home at Hamilton Terrace. Her marriage ended, but she created her own family and community. The apartment became a salon for musicians, writers, painters, journalists, and photographers. The younger musicians, such as Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell, who pioneered the bebop revolution, were especially welcome. They would find the door open, an inviting pot on the stove, and, when she was there, Williams—as mentor, collaborator, and friend. They respected and admired her as an elder in the music world and a model artist.
Williams’s status as a single, childless woman, as well as the stability afforded by her move to New York, helped to stimulate one of her most exciting and productive periods, ushering in a new phase of artistic creativity and political activity. The crowds, the vibrancy, and the excitement of the city found its way into her music. The city’s institutions—its libraries, museums, and performance venues—offered material and inspiration. The marriage of progressive political activism and innovative art forms provided a space for her own creative growth and political maturation to occur. In other words, the city served as an incubator for the further development of her inherent musical gifts, her spiritual sensibilities, and her desire for social justice. It is during this period that we see the beginnings of the spiritual, musical, and activist flowering that would occur in later decades.
Interestingly, at a time in life when most women were creating a home space and nurturing husbands and children, Mary Lou was creating a space that nurtured her own creativity and that of her fellow artists. As a result, she embarked upon a phase of her life characterized by fecund creativity grounded in place and community, as if she had been searching for a way to give back and had discovered a way to better her community and her nation. Her time in New York was not without its difficulties. Williams’s later involvement with gamblers and other denizens of the Harlem night revealed the underside of New York’s glamour, but Williams would use this to fuel her creativity and her humanitarian efforts.
During the 1940s, while writing and arranging music, Williams also wrote prose essays about her music, mentored and taught, recorded a number of albums, and performed throughout the city. On many nights, she took the subway, composing music in her head as the train rattled through the tunnel headed to The Village. “I get my inspiration from modern things,” Williams said, and she counted the subway as one of them. Just as the subway gave Petry images and ideas for her fiction, it delivered musical ideas and sounds to Williams. She would arrive at the club “with the complete arrangement worked out.”17
Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train” is more famous, but Williams penned and recorded her own tribute to the famous subway line: “Eighth Avenue Express,” which she recorded in 1944.18 The choo-choo of the drummer and Williams’s hard left hand drive this highly energetic boogie-woogie blues song. The piece is complete with train stops and announcements beckoning arrival in Harlem.
Williams opened at Café Society sometime in June 1943 to a full house. “My opening, the people were standing upstairs,” she recalled. “Pearl Primus, my favorite dancer, was also in the show,” she later wrote. “I don’t know of any other place quite like it. I must say that Barney was the greatest nightclub owner in the business. He’d give most anybody that was talented a chance to make good by putting them in the club for a long run. If they didn’t become great then they just weren’t good to begin with.”19 Williams, of course, would become great. Years later, in the seventies, Josephson jump-started Williams’s career again when he booked her at The Cookery, a club he opened in the 1970s.
Williams befriended many of the other artists at Café Society, including Primus and Imogene Coca, but her most enduring friendship was with fellow pianist Hazel Scott. Some thought that there was a professional rivalry between the two, but this was far from true. Time magazine even tried to stoke such a rivalry by comparing the two women—without naming Scott, who was known for her glamour, her sexy presentation, her low-cut gowns, and her “swinging the classics” style. The July 26, 1943, issue of Time noted that Mary was “no kitten on the keys.” The reporter went further, writing, “She was not selling a pretty face or a low décolletage, or tricky swinging of Bach or Chopin. She was playing the blues, stomps, and boogie-woogie in the native Afro-American way—an art in which, at 33, she is already a veteran.” Barney Josephson wanted Williams to act more like Scott, but she refused to do so. As it had with Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus, the press often made comparisons between Scott and Williams, noting the former’s coy sexiness and the latter’s artistic seriousness. However, unlike the two dancers, Scott and Williams were devoted friends. When Scott left Café Society Uptown to marry Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Josephson replaced her with Williams.
For Williams, Hazel Scott was a beloved younger sister. Scott, in turn, adored Williams and referred to her as a “Saint.” Scott had access to greater opportunity than Williams did and was the more famous of the two, but she would later fall upon hard times. In 1950, Scott became the star of the first television program hosted by a black woman. The fifteen-minute show first aired on July 3, 1950. But later that month her name appeared in the Red Channels, the notorious anti-Communist publication that led to the blacklisting of a number of entertainers. Although Scott denied the charges, her show lost its sponsors; it was canceled in September. Scott’s political problems were exacerbated by personal ones. In later years, after having separated from Powell, she moved to Paris. She recalled receiving checks and money orders from Williams, who may have been suffering her own financial difficulties. Williams was even maid of honor at Scott’s second wedding. The two women loved and respected each other profoundly and had a lifelong friendship.20
At Café Society, Williams did three shows nightly, at 8:30 P.M., midnight, and 2:30 A.M. The 8:30 audience included parents and children. But as the evening grew late, the audience would change as well. Williams recalled: “Our 8:00 show was packed with dad, mother and smaller children. . . . After 8 females were not allowed without an escort. . . . It was really like being in a big family. . . . The clientele consisted of the elite yet even the poorest was welcome whenever they came to see their favorite artist.”21
She described Café Society as a community, almost a family: “On Sunday nights we had a little party, just the staff and a few musicians. Hazel Scott, Thelma Carpenter, Billy Strayhorn, Aaron Bridges and Lena Horne and friends would come by and we’d have the most enjoyable time.”22 In between sets, Williams would sometimes sit with her close friend Gray Weingarten, a college student at Syracuse, in Weingarten’s car. Sometimes she would join other musicians and the club’s emcee, Johnnie Gary, at the backstage door for a game of cards and a smoke.
On any given night at Café Society one might have found the artist David Stone Martin sitting in the audience, listening to and looking at the brilliant, beautiful pianist. Martin wrote notes to Williams on postcards depicting the club’s famous murals; sometimes he jotted down something on napkins as well. The two became very good friends; if his passionate letters to her are any indication, they became lovers as well. In her writings, Williams referred to him only as her good friend: “I met a very talented artist named David Stone Martin who today is very well known in the jazz world. I asked him to do an illustration cover for me for one of my albums. . . . We became quite chummy.”23 She may have been reluctant to acknowledge their romance because Stone was married at the time of their involvement. Williams helped to start Martin’s career; he produced many fine line drawings for jazz album covers throughout the 1940s and 1950s. His aesthetic concept helped to shape the mood through which the music would be heard.
Whether they were friends or a couple, when they were together in public Williams and Martin were subjected to the same prejudice and attacks that other interracial couples had to endure. Williams sometimes met Martin at his Village studio, and they took long walks through the winding streets of that legendary neighborhood. Once they were harassed by a group of young white men who disapproved of them. The confrontation became violent, and though David tried to fend them off, the men seem to have gotten the better of him. In spite of its long history of political progressivism, the Village was not always welcoming to black people or to interracial couples. Richard Wright’s biographer Hazel Rowley noted that because there were several violent incidents in the Village, where Italian gangs assaulted interracial couples in the spring of 1944, Wright never allowed his wife to take his arm or hold his hand in the street. When Wright and his wife Ellen, who was of Polish Jewish descent, decided to buy a home in the Village, they had to have a white surrogate act in their behalf. The real-estate agents, banks, and neighbors would not have welcomed a black resident. They set up a corporation, “the Richelieu Company,” to purchase the home.24
Martin also visited Williams in her Harlem apartment. There is no indication that they experienced similar harassment on the streets of Harlem. Ultimately, it seems, the inconveniences of Martin’s marital status may have worn on the couple. Or perhaps Williams was able to maintain a relationship because he was married—and thus unable to really interfere with her artistic ambitions and her independent lifestyle. In any event, by 1945, the romantic relationship, if there was one, appears to have been over. Williams and Martin remained dear friends for life, but by the mid-forties, Williams was involved with another musician, Milton Orent.
Significantly, both Martin and Orent were white men. Williams had been married to only black men, and all of her romantic attachments before Martin had been to black men—all of whom were musicians. The love of her life was the great Ben Webster, a highly regarded jazz saxophonist, with whom she became involved in the thirties. Prior to moving to New York, her world had been primarily black. Although New York was segregated, her social life in the city was not. There, she found herself in the company of young, hip, progressive men and women of both races. This was her community. It centered on the music.
Williams began performing at Café Society Uptown in 1945. Located on East 58th Street, the larger club lacked the warmth and intimacy of the downtown venue. Williams preferred the downtown venue, noting that, “for all its looks, the Uptown Café was nothing like Downtown—though it catered for the same kind of Eastside crowd: movie stars, millionaires and the elite. Downtown was groovy, more relaxed than uptown.”25 Josephson felt Williams could be as big a star as Hazel Scott, however, and he believed the move uptown would expose her to a broader audience.
Following the move uptown, Josephson helped secure a weekly radio show for Williams on WNEW. Called The Mary Lou Williams Piano Workshop, the show gave her an extraordinary opportunity to reach listeners who did not come to Café Society. It also gave her the chance to try out new works before premiering them.
Some nights between shows, Williams went to 52nd Street, “the Street,” to hear Billie Holiday at the 3 Deuces, or over to the Hurricane to see Duke Ellington’s band. One night she sat in with the band when Duke was late. Fifty-second Street, between Fifth and Seventh Avenues, housed a number of clubs where on any given night you could hear stars from all eras of the short history of jazz: 3 Deuces, Kelly’s Stable, the Hickory House, Leon & Eddies, Club Carousel, the Famous Door, the Onyx, Club Downbeat. Musicians, fans, and college students found their way to the Street, and so did the hustlers and the drug peddlers. Billie Holiday famously said, “I spent the rest of the war years on 52nd Street and a few other streets. I had the white gowns and the white shoes. And every night they’d bring me the white gardenias and the white junk.” Williams never used heroin—nor did she drink; her substance of choice was marijuana. But she never passed judgment on those who became addicted. In fact, she later tried to set up a one-woman rehab in her apartment. She claimed, “It doesn’t matter what a person does as long as I like him or he is blowing.”26 This was Mary’s major criterion: first and foremost, she liked talented musicians who were disciplined and serious about the music.
On 52nd Street, Williams noticed the drug use, but she was there for the music. When she did comment about narcotics, it wasn’t to spread tales about individual musicians, but to share observations about the ways unscrupulous people would plant drugs on unsuspecting musicians. At one of the clubs on 52nd Street, Williams was standing at the bar when a detective walked in. Another man, afraid of getting caught with whatever drugs he was carrying, hid them in a musician’s coat that was lying on the bar. “A girl I happened to know took it out of his pocket without the musician, who was a nice guy and a nondrinker, [noticing what she’d done],” Williams later wrote. “She said to me, ‘Did you see what that rotten so and so did? I guess he thought he’d be searched and rather than get in trouble he’d rather frame an innocent man.’ After this I was told to keep my hands in my pockets if I had pockets whenever I was on the street.”27
When Williams finally headed home, or in the afternoon before heading downtown, she might stop off to see Thelonious Monk and “the kids,” as she called the young bebop musicians. Bebop was a harmonically complex, fast-paced style of music requiring near virtuosic skill. While swing bands allowed individual soloists to break away and improvise before returning to the arrangement, in bebop most of the tune was taken up by long, improvised solos over difficult chord changes. The music developed in small clubs; in after-hours jam sessions; in some of the most innovative big bands, such as Billy Eckstine’s; and in the salonlike atmosphere of Williams’s Hamilton Terrace apartment.
After Williams finished her work at Café Society, the young musicians would pick her up and head uptown to her apartment around 4 A.M. Miles Davis, Monk, Mel Tormé, Sarah Vaughan, Tadd Dameron, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie all found their way to 63 Hamilton Terrace: “Usually when Monk composed a song he’d play both night and day if you didn’t stop him,” Williams later wrote. “Bud, Monk or Tad would run to the house . . . playing their new things for my approval or showing them to me.”28 She became especially close to the young, gifted Bud Powell, encouraging Barney Josephson to hire him and then mentoring him both professionally and musically.
But their creative relationship was mutual. Williams insisted, “The things Bud wrote for me improved what little originality I had and inspired me to experiment with my own things.” Williams is being unduly modest here. As early as 1940, especially on the album Six Men and a Girl, one can hear her using harmonies that would be associated with bop. She had referred to them as “weird harmonies” and “screwy chords.” Williams was much more than a mentor, midwife, or maternal figure for the new music and the younger musicians; indeed, she was an active participant in and contributor to the technical development of the music. In many ways she was both a pioneer, laying the groundwork and pointing out future directions, and a student of bebop. She was always open to learning, changing, and growing, and thus she was constantly evolving as an artist.29
Like a number of other musicians, Powell fell in love with Williams. “Once or twice,” she wrote, “I had to hide away because I think he felt he was in love with me—he wouldn’t allow me even to sit with one of my little nephews. He wanted nobody around me. If I walked down the street with anybody he’d push them away from me. He began to depend on me emotionally.” Eventually she had to distance herself from him because of his insane jealousy, further exacerbated by his mental illness and substance abuse. “I wouldn’t let Bud Powell in my house when he’d come in high,” Williams later said.30
For many of the men, Williams was more of a maternal figure than a paramour, and they treated her with tenderness and respect. What she thought of them and their music mattered to them. Later on, the brilliant and innovative Herbie Nichols wrote her pages and pages apologizing for not living up to her standards; he expressed remorse for his own drug use and for letting her down. The tone of the letter suggests that he may have been more devastated than she was over his failings because he so badly wanted to earn her approval.
Williams spent many predawn hours at Minton’s on 118th Street to hear and support the “boppists.” She wrote, “The cats fell into Minton’s from everywhere, the customer had no place to sit for the instrument cases. I used to hear Mr. Minton grumble in a kidding way about all musicians packing the place and there wasn’t much space left for the customers.”31 A throng of musicians, hipsters, students, and others who appreciated the music filled Minton’s. Young white musicians came hoping to learn this exciting and innovative form that was being perfected among young black musicians. The beboppers created a counterculture as well as a music. Of course, many musicians of Williams’s generation had no time or ear for the music that would become known as bebop, but Williams heard their originality and brilliance and continued to support, encourage, and teach them. She also recognized that many of those who dismissed the new music, both black and white, were not beyond stealing and incorporating their ideas without crediting the boppers.
By now, Williams found herself growing tired of all the benefit performances required of her as a Café Society musician. She told British jazz critic Max Jones, “The only drag in New York was the many benefit shows we were expected to do—late shows which prevented me from running up on 52nd Street to see my favorite modernists.”32
In 1943, Williams began conceptualizing what would become one of her most significant and ambitious compositions, The Zodiac Suite. Ever since Duke Ellington had presented Black Brown & Beige at Carnegie Hall in January 1943, Williams had aspired to write an extended work of her own. She had recently begun to see Milton Orent, a classically trained bassist and arranger, and she and Orent worked together to prepare for the composition. They listened to live music. They went to the New York Public Library’s branch on East 58th Street to listen to classical recordings, and they read the scores of Paul Hindemith, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and other German modernists and French Impressionists. Williams’s friend Gray Weingarten also brought music to her, and the two would listen to and discuss them in Williams’s apartment. According to Weingarten, she introduced Williams to her favorites, the Russian modernists, and in exchange Williams introduced Weingarten to bebop. Still, Williams continued to think “bop [was] the only real modern jazz, despite the contentions of the copyists of Stravinsky, Hindemith and Schoenberg.” During the period of composition, Williams attributed much of her growth and development to her growing relationship with Orent. Her friends disagreed. Weingarten feels that Williams gave Orent credit because he was her boyfriend. Whatever the case, the two spent a lot of time together, and he worked closely with her on the extended composition and would eventually conduct it.33
At any rate, Williams was intent on diligently preparing herself for the production of her first extended work. She then began working on the suite at Café Society Uptown, composing the first three movements and improvising them nightly. She also introduced one Zodiac composition a week on her radio show. Ultimately, Williams dedicated all twelve signs to her artist friends and others involved in the music business. The dedications are a virtual who’s who of the New York jazz scene at the time, with Ben Webster, Billie Holiday, Art Tatum, and others on the list. Each piece evokes that individual’s traits as well as the dominant traits of the sign of the zodiac he or she was chosen to represent.
Williams had a long-standing interest in the zodiac. At this stage in her life she hungered for spiritual meaning and guidance, but she did not have a sense of religiosity. For her, music was a spiritual medium, a conduit to something outside of herself as well as a vehicle for expressing a sense of the spiritual, if not the divine. She operated in a secular world, that of jazz and show business, yet the jazz world itself was nonetheless characterized by its own expressions of the spirit. Surprisingly, Williams found community in the context of New York nightlife, a world in which sex, drugs, and money were in great supply. But the scene also provided fellowship, warmth, love, and transcendence. She would later write: “Jazz is a spiritual music. It’s the suffering that gives jazz its spiritual dimension.”34 For Williams, black music offered transcendence by directly confronting and acknowledging human suffering. This was the source of its spiritual power, for suffering and our longing for transcendence from it are what join us as humans. She believed black music to be a gift to all humankind because it provided a way through pain and suffering to beauty and joy.
Listening to the Zodiac Suite today, in these post–Kinda Blue times, one may be reminded of Miles Davis’s seminal work. “Cancer,” especially, sounds like the introduction to “So What.” “Cancer” is deeply interior and moody, introspective and dark, but in a soothing, comforting way. It is impressionistic—but classical and modern at the same time. It leaps ahead a decade, previewing the sounds that would dominate the late fifties.
Pianist and educator Billy Taylor praised the suite’s “innovative use of the rhythm section.” Later, Andrew Homzy, writing a set of liner notes for the Vintage Jazz Classics edition of Zodiac Suite, called it “a series of vividly evocative tone poems in the jazz idiom.” The piece is indeed poetic, at times haunting, at other times meditative. Here it is dancelike, there humorous. As with the twelve signs of the zodiac, each movement evokes a different mood and persona. Williams herself was a Taurus. That piece starts off as a quiet and introspective piano solo moved by a series of chords and two-note motifs before the drums join in, seeming to push the melody further over a series of repeated chords. Midway through, the left hand brings in a blues tone before the song returns to the meditative feel of the opening. “Taurus” melds directly into “Gemini,” whose opening choruses echo the sound and energy of Broadway, or perhaps a Stuart Davis painting.
The larger work provided Williams the space to explore classical music and to attempt to bring together classical and jazz idioms. Williams wrote that Zodiac was “the beginning of a real fulfillment of one of my ambitions. As a composer and a musician I have worked all my life to write and develop music that was both original and creative.” Although she found classical musicians—the paper guys—too studied and lacking in the creativity that characterized jazz musicians, she envisioned a group that would bring together black and white, male and female, European classical music and jazz—a truly democratic ensemble.
Williams debuted The Zodiac Suite with Edmond Hall’s chamber orchestra at Town Hall at 123 West 43rd Street on a Sunday afternoon, New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1945. The orchestra included a string section, a flute, a clarinet, a bassoon, and a number of brass instruments. Bassist Al Hall, drummer I. C. Heard, and an unknown opera singer joined the orchestra. Williams’s friend and former lover Ben Webster was featured as well, as were Edmond Hall (clarinet), Henderson Chambers (trombone), and Eddie Barefield (tenor and clarinet). Milt Orent directed the orchestra. At the same concert, Williams also performed some of her most popular jazz and boogie-woogie tunes. The reviewer for the New York Times found the work “rather ambitious” and noted, “The composition was scarcely a jazz piece at all, making its appeal as a more serious work. How successfully, time will tell.” Clearly, Williams had used the opportunity to expand her own vision beyond the parameters of what was conventionally called jazz, though it is highly unlikely she would have made the kinds of distinctions suggested by the reviewer.35
Jazz was still rare in the city’s concert halls. Benny Goodman had performed the first concert by a jazz orchestra in Carnegie Hall in 1938, and Williams performed The Zodiac Suite there in 1946. Though founded by the League for Political Education as a meeting place to provide public education on important political issues, Town Hall quickly emerged as a preferred site for musical performances because of its incredible acoustics. Built by the architect firm McKim, Mead & White in 1919, Town Hall opened on January 12, 1921. It welcomed contralto Marian Anderson in 1935, and it was home to an extraordinary jazz concert on June 22, 1945, featuring Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Don Byas, Al Haig, Curley Russell, and Max Roach. It was one of the venues that was most welcoming to jazz performers.
Through Williams’s music, places of architectural and acoustic wonder, the concert halls, were transformed into spaces where traditions met, conversed, and sometimes collided; they were spaces where paper men met improvisational genius. Places like Café Society and Williams’s Sugar Hill apartment brought together integrated groups of musicians and integrated audiences that challenged convention and tradition. This urge to challenge traditional sounds, spaces, and communities was reflected in the broader desires of progressive artists and activists, especially in Harlem. They remade the city in their own image, and they imagined and sought to bring into being their own version of a beloved community.
The acetates of the Town Hall performance were stolen and not recovered until more than forty-five years later. Williams’s friend Timmie Rosenkrantz would eventually release the recording of the Carnegie Hall performance in Europe, but the recording of the live performance of the Zodiac Suite would not be available for decades in the United States.36
Moses “Moe” Asch recorded and released the studio version of Zodiac in 1945. Shortly after arriving in New York, Williams began to record for Asch, and she continued to do so during her most productive periods. Williams always admired and respected Asch. She noted, “The poor guy never quite made it financially because he was too nice to musicians.” Williams was grateful to Asch for a number of reasons: “He submitted my music to all the New York libraries, he paid me for recording musicians I had heard in Pittsburgh,” she explained. “Sessions for Asch brought me more royalties than I’ve had from any other record company, and gave me the freedom to create.”37
Even after recording it, Williams continued to recompose and revise The Zodiac Suite. In addition, other artists performed portions of it. Williams’s fellow Café Society performer and friend Pearl Primus choreographed and performed parts of it, and would continue to do so throughout the decade. Talley Beatty and Katherine Dunham also choreographed dances to portions of Zodiac. Williams dedicated “Scorpio” to Dunham, Imogene Coca, and Ethel Waters, whom she called “my friends the sexpots.” Gray Weingarten arranged for Williams to perform parts of the suite in Syracuse at a benefit for the NAACP. Dizzy Gillespie recorded three movements in 1957, arranging them for big band.
Following the whirlwind surrounding The Zodiac Suite, Williams took a much-needed break. The rush of writing, the anxiety and excitement about the performance, the nightly gigs at Café Society, the benefits, and all the recording sessions had contributed to her emotional and physical exhaustion. She requested a leave from the club; Josephson agreed, gave her a beautiful watch as a token of his gratitude and admiration, and let her go. Ordinarily, she would have gone home to Pittsburgh; seen her nieces, nephews, and sisters; enjoyed homemade cooking; and maybe sat in with local musicians. Unable to muster the energy this time, she stayed in New York. More specifically, she stayed in Harlem. She’d been so busy, she hadn’t really gotten to know her neighborhood; it had been a place to eat and sleep, meet with other musicians, and workshop her music. At most, she would go to Minton’s on 118th Street. The newspapers claimed that 118th Street was the most dangerous street in the city because of the crime, but Williams hadn’t found that to be true. The people who hung out there got to know her, loved her, and treated her with courtesy and respect. The food at Minton’s was good—a man named Lindsay Steele used to cook wonderful meals and then come out and sing during intermission.
Because of these experiences, Williams greatly looked forward to knowing the neighborhood more intimately. Like most musicians, she was a night person. She walked the streets of Harlem after the sun went down, when good, hardworking people were at home with their families. Ever the generous one, always wanting to help, and believing she could save people’s lives, she became an easy mark. “I must have gone all over Harlem in about 4 weeks from Lenox to 7th and 8th Avenues [and]from Hamilton Heights to 135th and below.”38
Postwar Harlem was a transformed place. It lacked the optimism that had characterized it during the war, and the neighborhood never recovered from the riots. Rows of abandoned, boarded-up buildings invited criminal activity. As the defense industry began to shut down and men returned from the war, many people who had found work in the defense industry and other forms of manufacturing now found themselves without work. The garment factories that had lined East Harlem in earlier times had closed and moved outside the city, leaving in their wake high rates of unemployment. Gangs and heroin had begun to dominate street life.
Williams found Harlem at night both fascinating and frightening: fascinating because it was frightening. “I had never in my life been in such a terrible environment with people who roamed the streets looking for someone to devour. . . . It was fascinating watching one race of people live off of the other. I wondered why with all their shrewd brains, they never ventured downtown.”39 By different races, she meant those who preyed and those who were preyed upon. Malcolm Little, then serving time in federal prison in Massachusetts, would later concur. Only months before, he, too, had walked these same streets, and he had been part of that “race of people” who preyed upon others.
Like an anthropologist or sociologist, an observer but not an objective one, Williams walked. “The new experiences began to mean a great deal to me,” she later wrote. “I considered myself a guinea pig in finding out answers to certain downtown gossip concerning Harlem. I had read several books on the subject and thought the authors ridiculous or biased. Yet I can say it can be quite a hell hole if one is weak enough to go for all that happens here.” This was the Harlem of Ann Petry’s novel The Street and her article “Harlem.” For both Petry and Williams, Harlem had become a ghetto. Williams had an extensive library and informed herself through reading and observation. She had lost any romantic sense of Harlem and had become aware of its underside. At the same time, her world was expanding significantly beyond the small, close-knit circle of musicians who constituted her family.40
Without the protection of her musician brothers, and distancing herself from her girlfriends, Williams let her naive curiosity get the best of her. She had successfully avoided the substances that plagued her friends, yet another habit, just as expensive, if not more so, awaited her: gambling. On the road between sets and gigs, she had always enjoyed the occasional card game with other musicians as a way to pass the time. The soirees at 63 Hamilton Terrace often included an occasional game of poker or tonk, but she had never been involved in any serious game where the stakes were high.
That would change when, one night, an acquaintance took her to a card game in one of Harlem’s after-hours spots. Williams lost $150, but she was having a ball. On her nightly strolls, she encountered the elite and the denizens of the night, all of whom were hooked on gambling. “I was introduced to the cream of the crop . . . nice teachers, apartment owners, housewives who’d come to the game with $5.00, others who if they lost, would pull out $200–300 more. The first game I played there were more than ‘a few doctors’ as well.” At the gambling table she met the full cross-section of Harlem. “I remember the first big game I went to I was a nervous wreck for days, after hearing all the loud mouth jive and big talk. Everyone talking at the same time. It took some time to get used to this.” Williams, the sensitive artist, was both stimulated and overwhelmed by her surroundings.41
Harlem supplied her with plenty of opportunities to pursue her new interest. “My name was ringing all over Harlem as the poker chump,” she later wrote. Although Williams lost more and more money, she justified it by telling herself that her opponents needed the money more than she did, “to keep their rent going and other necessities.” Soon her friends and her two half-brothers, Jerry and Howard (who were living with her following stints in the army), expressed concern and alarm. But she paid no heed to them, later saying, “I continued to stay up working nights and gambling, never getting any rest until I had a breakdown [and] went to a doctor.”42
She kept playing; she kept losing. The more she lost, the more she withdrew from her savings account. She withdrew so regularly, in fact, that federal authorities thought she was being blackmailed. “I must have stopped counting at $7,000,” she wrote.43 Some games would last as long as four days nonstop. There was constant stimulation. She emerged from them into the rose-colored dawn, dazed, but thrilled nonetheless. She also became involved with a new man, Lindsay Steele from Minton’s. Steele was the first of Williams’s lovers who was not an artist; he was a numbers banker. He also seemed to have offered her some protection in her new environment, though he didn’t help her stop gambling.
After weeks of roaming the streets, hitting the after-hours spots, and sitting in on card games the way she used to sit in with musicians, Williams came to a conclusion about the city. “New York is a town [where] if one takes a vacation or relaxes and tries to be normal and nice something happens. To explore New York means certain death. One has to be tough and on the alert.”44 Williams began to experience New York as a place that was unsafe and unwelcoming to those who lacked the toughness required by life in the city. Suddenly, the city she loved, the city that had been a source of inspiration, became a place of “certain death,” both literal and spiritual.
And yet, she didn’t retreat. She pulled back from the gambling, but unlike many of her friends and other members of the middle class, she refused to leave Harlem, and she continued to be observant of and sensitive to her surroundings. After the riots, many of the upper middle class left as surrounding neighborhoods opened up to them. St. Albans, Queens, became the preferred dwelling place of the jazz elite. A middle-class community located just a few miles from JFK Airport, it is now the center of Queens’s African American community. Jazz musicians began to move to large homes, especially those located in the Addisleigh Park neighborhood. Lena, Pops, Duke, and even Lady Day moved there. Williams’s beloved Dizzy found his way to the outer borough. Count Basie moved there in 1946, and shortly afterward, Ella followed. Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and Williams wouldn’t leave. Even during its lowest points, Harlem maintained a middle-class presence, and these three were part of it.
One day, a young boy who lived on Williams’s floor was shot and killed in a gang war. Young boys between the ages of eight and fifteen were particularly vulnerable to gang membership and gang violence. In 1946, the nine-year-old Claude Brown, who would go on to write the memoir Manchild in the Promised Land, was recruited into a Harlem gang. On the other side of town, in Spanish Harlem, where a growing population of Puerto Rican immigrants and their children lived, nineteen-year-old Piri Thomas, who later became the author of Down These Mean Streets, also a memoir, was already a veteran of street battles. So prominent would gang life become that in 1948 Life magazine ran a photo essay about a young gang leader named Red Jackson. The photographer, Gordon Parks, followed Jackson for months, befriending him, gaining his trust, and photographing him in ways that showed both his toughness and his vulnerability. Through the Life story, people across America got a glimpse of the violence that black urban dwellers already knew by experience. It was during this period that a growing discourse on juvenile delinquents emerged.
After the death of her young neighbor, Williams decided to devote herself to doing something for young people and for her community—that is what Harlem had become for her. Its residents were “her people.” At first her efforts were philanthropic. “I decided to help with the situation,” she explained, “through getting donations from people to build playgrounds, recreation rooms, etc.”
But as early as the spring of 1946, Williams expressed an interest in doing the work herself. She began to reach out to public schools, seeking to work with young people there. In a letter dated June 8, 1946, she wrote to a school principal, “Unfortunately until now I have been unable to accept these invitations[,] many of which came from the ‘trouble areas’ so understandably in need of guidance. . . . I’ve been most unhappy at not having the time[;] if your office would approve the plan and arrange a schedule, I should be very, very happy to do two concerts weekly from now until the end of the present semester, at no charge naturally.” If her earlier involvement in political and civic activity occurred at the prompting of Barney Josephson, Teddy Wilson, or John Hammond, in 1946, especially after having witnessed the conditions of the black poor firsthand, Williams set out on her own campaign. She did not limit her efforts to Harlem. On June 17, she wrote to the principal of Arts High School in Newark, New Jersey, explaining, “Playing jazz concerts for school audiences is one of the projects closest to my heart and knowing of your interest too, I am taking your suggestions and support in encouraging the board of education to approve and sponsor these programs.”45
As the seasons changed, Williams continued to be concerned about Harlem and to think of ways to help alleviate the suffering she saw there, but she also turned her attention to the racial situation on a national level. In spite of some courtroom gains, Jim Crow still ruled the day, especially in the South. Her friends Hazel Scott and Katherine Dunham made headlines by refusing to play before segregated audiences. Pearl Primus had gone to the South two years earlier to witness in person the degradation blacks experienced there, and the trip had transformed her art. Inspired, in part, by the political tenor of the times, Williams decided to directly challenge segregation: she came up with a plan to form a racially integrated all-female band that would present a concert in the city of her birth, Atlanta. It is surprising that she chose to form an all-female band, given that she considered them novelties—she had often resisted any efforts to characterize her as a “woman” player. Perhaps she was inspired by the success of great bands like the International Sweethearts of Rhythm. More likely, she didn’t want to risk an interracial co-ed band. Women were less threatening to segregationists.
Williams wanted to plan the concert for 1947; however, as is to be expected, she met with a great deal of resistance. Such a show would have been illegal in Georgia. Williams certainly knew this, but she persisted. In September 1946 she began corresponding with the Georgia governor, Ellis Arnall. She also enlisted the support of prominent individuals, asking them to send letters and telegrams to the governor in support of her efforts. Writing from Hyde Park on September 12, Eleanor Roosevelt suggested that Williams get in touch with novelist Lillian Smith. “She knows Georgia, she is sympathetic and could give you better advice than I could,” Roosevelt wrote.46 Lillian Smith was the white southern author of the antilynching novel Strange Fruit. Williams wrote to Smith, and to Walter Winchell, Orson Welles, and others as well. Winchell, who by now was assisting J. Edgar Hoover in his efforts to bring down Barney Josephson—and who later would have a terrible run-in with Josephine Baker—nonetheless did write to Governor Arnall at Williams’s request. (In 1951, Baker was refused service at the Stork Club because of her race. On her way out, she yelled at Winchell, a frequent patron and booster of the establishment, because he did not come to her defense. In turn, he began to accuse her, in print, of having both fascist and communist sympathies.) Boxer Joe Louis telegraphed Williams, writing, “I am sending a telegram to Governor Arnall at your request. I hope this meets with success.”47
On September 23, Williams received the governor’s reply. He wrote, “I do not desire to get involved in the controversy your request would precipitate.” Not to be deterred, Williams persisted, writing to Bill Nunn, managing editor of the Pittsburgh Courier. On October 1, Nunn promised to “get on this thing immediately and do everything in my power to help you out.” He contacted Benjamin Mays, the distinguished president of Morehouse College, who served as mentor and model to generations of Morehouse men, including Martin Luther King Jr. In a November 1946 letter, Mays wrote to Nunn explaining the tense racial situation and the delicate balance of race relations in Atlanta at the time (see Appendix B). According to Mays, “It would be virtually impossible and certainly unwise right now for us to plan in Atlanta the kind of program Miss Williams suggested.”48
Nunn forwarded this reply to Williams, and she kept it in a file of correspondence regarding her efforts until her death more than thirty years later. Williams must have been disappointed that her efforts were met with such disapproval. Surely, the experience seemed to demonstrate the difference between the progressive interracial circles in which she traveled and the strict limitations of life in the South. Those limitations were evident in both the continued commitment to racial segregation on the part of southern whites and the careful strategy taken by well-respected blacks. Williams’s approach is somewhat telling: she did not first contact southern black leaders and request their assistance in her plan. Instead, she went to northerners in positions of power and influence, perhaps recognizing that the southern black leadership would be less likely to act in such a direct manner.
In addition to these more organized efforts to use her art to address major social issues of the day—Jim Crow and the growing rate of “juvenile delinquency”—Williams continued her own individual efforts to alleviate suffering. Gray Weingarten recalls going with Williams on expeditions of mercy to care and cook for sick musicians. She would try to set up a rehab clinic in her own apartment, bringing strung-out musicians into her home to help them kick their habits. Convinced of the healing power of music, she played it for these addicts and encouraged them to play through their cravings. “Any body who was sick or broke or out of food, she would say ‘Gray, you gotta come help me,’” Weingarten remembers. According to Weingarten, they visited one musician and did fourteen loads of laundry in an effort to clean and organize his space. “There was no dryer, so she sent me to get rope and we strung it throughout the apartment in order to hang the wet clothing.”49
During this period, Williams was drawn to a variety of forms of divination practices, many of which could be found in Harlem. Some were pure scams, while others were linked to long-standing spiritual practices, such as Hoo Doo, Voo Doo, and Santeria. “Before she got religion we did all kinds of crazy things,” noted Weingarten, including visiting fortunetellers. This constant seeking hints at Williams’s longing for a sense of spiritual direction and purpose. She visited diviners to seek guidance and solace. She played and composed music as a way of expressing her spiritual striving and to heal those who listened. And she engaged in personal acts of caregiving and charity, as well as larger, more political efforts, as a way of bettering her fellow human beings and her nation.
Six months into her break from Café Society, and having lost or given away a substantial part of her savings, Williams started performing again. The jazz world was beginning to undergo significant changes. As bebop replaced swing, uptown venues that had catered to dancers began to close. The new modern jazz, whose birth Williams had witnessed and nurtured, began to be identified with young men. Because of her age and her gender, she was no longer seen as an innovator by those who booked the clubs. And so she hit the road, leaving New York more and more often for work.
Williams continued to record and began to take on more students. At times, Julliard students made their way uptown, but Williams was very picky about the classically trained musicians with whom she would work. She did continue to serve as friend and mentor to younger musicians, however, and she began to publish her thoughts on and theories about the role of modern music. In November 1947 she published a short but important essay entitled “Music and Progress” that appeared in the Jazz Record. She explained, “Once a composer or a musician stops being aware of what is going on around him his music also stops.”
The essay, which appears to be advice to younger musicians, contains a seed of the pedagogical stance she would develop in later years: “If we are to make progress in modern music, or, if you prefer, jazz, we must be willing and able to open our minds to new ideas and developments. If we decide that a new trend is real music we must work with that new trend and develop it to its peak of perfection.” This statement underscores Williams’s own practice. She helped to develop swing, boogie-woogie, and bop. She embraced newer musical innovations as they developed. If those who ran the business side of the music no longer thought of her as an innovator, musicians knew otherwise. Duke Ellington famously noted: “Mary Lou Williams is perpetually contemporary.”50
Bop had opened Williams up to new possibilities in her own music. Having innovated in and then grown tired of swing and boogie-woogie, she found a new creative space in the arena of bop. “The music was so beautiful it just gave you a sight of a new picture happening in jazz. It had such a beautiful feeling. It didn’t take me very long to get on to it or create in my own way,” she wrote.
As Williams began to write her thoughts down in a more systematic way, she fleshed out this notion of musical development as it applied to black American music, insisting upon a connection between the earliest and the most modern forms. She wanted to impart a sense of history and purpose to modern jazz; she was also concerned that black Americans, and black American musicians, in particular, were in danger of losing—or, worse still, throwing away—their musical heritage. Even in the essay, a narrative of progress, Williams was situating “jazz” in the context of “modern music” and placing it alongside other highly regarded art forms: “When it has reached this so-called ‘peak,’” she wrote, “it is really only the beginning, for then we build the new ideas on top of the old. This is not only progress in music, for the same is true for all forms of art including painting, sculpture, architecture, and even the theater.”
Williams ended the essay with an expansive and inviting notion of the music she performed. “Modern music,” she wrote, “is not only limited to small groups of musicians.” She cited the Carnegie Hall Concert of 1946, where the New York Pops symphony orchestra played her music, as an example. She also stated her commitment to playing in as many venues, such as universities, as possible. One gets the sense that Williams, while always convinced of the magnitude, value, and complexity of black music, finally saw herself as one of that music’s missionaries, ushering it into the halls of respectability.
Still, ensuring jazz’s permanence and protecting its legacy proved to be an uphill battle. A recording ban—which prevented musicians from recording for eleven months starting in January 1948—as well as the closing of clubs on 52nd Street, amounted to a severe blow to the New York jazz scene. Many of the clubs were turned into strip joints. Time magazine bemoaned the change, writing, “Along New York’s Swing Lande, where nightclubs in sorry brownstones crowd each other like bums on a breadline, an era was all but over. Swing was still there, but it was more hips than horns. Barrelhouse had declined. Burlesque was back.”51
Unable to record and having difficulty finding work in the city, Williams got a job providing arrangements for Benny Goodman’s orchestra and eventually replaced Teddy Wilson, at his suggestion, when he left the band. However, the arrangement didn’t last. Goodman could be difficult to work with, and he remained a little hostile to the new music. Williams, who by now was incorporating many bebop ideas into her writing, bumped heads with him. They did, however, record a few sides before parting ways.
Williams would spend the remainder of the decade composing and recording her own music. She received a commission from the director of a choir in her hometown of Pittsburgh in 1948 and enthusiastically took up the offer. Pittsburgh provided a change of pace and scenery and helped to revitalize her. Williams would often spend time with family, and she also made time to write. One composition, “Elijah Under the Juniper Tree,” set to the poetry of Ray Monty Carr, provided Williams with the opportunity to experiment in a number of directions. With “Elijah,” she wrote for voice, a first for her. The religious themes were new for her as well. With this piece she planted the seed that would flower years later in her Masses.
Back in New York, Williams’s agent, Joe Glaser, continued to try to find bookings for her, but things were not working out. When Williams returned, she found that her beloved apartment had been burglarized, yet another indication of Harlem’s desperation. Her records were gone, as were her gowns and her jewelry. In the words of writer Claude McKay, Sugar Hill had become “vinegar sour.” Williams had become victim to the crime she had hoped to alleviate. Apart from a brief and successful stint at the Vanguard, Williams was unable to find work in the kinds of venues she wanted. Her surroundings had changed for the worse. In need of money and in poor health, Williams became despondent, exhausted, and depressed. In another blow, Moe Asch, her beloved record producer, went bankrupt in 1948.
Williams eventually signed with King Records, but it was not a good relationship. She wanted to record more experimental, bebop work as well as more solo work. King, in contrast, wanted commercial recordings. The company encouraged her to record swing music and do an organ album that would attract rhythm and blues audiences. Ultimately, the company refused to record her but would not release her from the contract. Williams sought the assistance of the American Federation of Musicians and was eventually released—but not without consequences: she always felt other recording companies saw her as a troublemaker.
Finally, Williams signed on with Circle Records, with whom she recorded solos as well as several of her bebop compositions and her experiments with bongos. The latter albums were released, but the solo material, which was to have been released as Midnight at Mary Lou’s, would not appear until 2006, over fifty-five years after it had originally been recorded. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Father Peter O’Brien, a Jesuit priest and director of the Mary Lou Williams Foundation, all of the Circle material, including the solo medleys, is now available as Mary Lou Williams: The Circle Recordings. The work anticipates the solo concert Williams performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland in 1978. Here, in 1951, we hear the artist at her best—and her most personal. It is like listening to a sonic autobiography. The choice of material, the phrasing, and the chords all create a rich, deep, soulful listening experience. Lacking in pretense or sentimentality, the performance is intimate, but also an extraordinary display of Williams’s genius at the instrument. The artist at forty, a woman who had already made major contributions to American music, here plays her history with an eye on the future. “Why,” written by Consuela Lee, aunt of filmmaker Spike Lee, is especially beautiful. What’s more, the performance also contains a history of black music, and as such is a sonic interpretation of American history. The music of the enslaved—the spirituals—branches out and is influenced by and influences American popular music. The medley starts with bars of music inspired by African American spirituals before turning to George Gershwin’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” from the opera Porgy and Bess, which was itself inspired by black folk music. Then Williams turns to standards, recognizable popular songs over which jazz improvisers composed their own unique solos. All of these elements become vehicles for Williams’s own improvisation, her personal history of jazz. The medley evolves into a music that captures the particular history of an individual, allowing her room for creativity and individual expression, yet it is also a music that contains the tragic and hopeful history of a people and a nation.
In these solos, Williams is a mature artist, capable of swinging but also of playing deeply introspective music. One can hear her Harlem stride background as well as her bop present, her strong left hand and each individual finger of the right hand as she caresses the keys. There is no doubt that she is in command of her genius and her instrument. She was still without a lucrative recording deal with a major label. She was both tired and restless. But she was the consummate artist.
For some time, Glaser had been encouraging Williams to tour Europe. Now, as she found it more difficult to find work, and was facing financial difficulties, the idea was becoming attractive. As early as 1947, Williams began to consider his idea. Many of her good friends were there, especially in Paris. Jazz singer Inez Cavanaugh was living there and seemed quite happy, in spite of being unable to find black hair-care products. Williams would pack care packages and send them overseas. For these Cavanaugh was grateful, writing, “Make[s] a cullud girl happy just to see a jar of Dixie Peach.”
On November 28, 1952, Williams attended a bon voyage celebration in her honor. The guests included jazz innovators Oscar Pettiford and Erroll Gardner. The next day she set sail on the Queen Mary, headed for Europe, where she planned to stay nine days. As it turned out, she would not return to New York for two years.
During her time in Europe, Williams suffered what some call a nervous breakdown. It might also have been a spiritual crisis, “a dark night of the soul.” Finding solace in Catholicism, Williams abandoned music temporarily, only to return to it at the encouragement of her spiritual mentors. In the years that followed, she devoted much of her life to addressing human suffering, especially what she witnessed in Harlem, and to exploring the deeply spiritual dimensions of the music called “jazz.” To Williams, these two projects—one humanitarian and the other aesthetic—were one.