Mary Lou Williams was a self-taught pianist, composer and arranger who grew up in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh.
Born in Atlanta, Ga. in 1910, her family moved here when she was 4. By the age of 7, she entertained prominent Pittsburgh families.
In a career that spanned decades, Williams performed with Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Andy Kirk, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey and Benny Goodman. Mr. Ellington once described her as “soul on soul.”
Williams wrote 350 compositions, made more than 100 records and was instrumental in developing the “Kansas City Swing.” Among her influences were Pittsburgh jazz pianists Earl Hines, Errol Garner and Charles Bell.
By the time she was a teen-ager, she was touring with the black vaudeville Syncopators band, which included saxophone player John Williams, who was from Memphis, Tenn.
They married in the late 1920s but later divorced.
From 1929 to 1941, she played with Andy Kirk and his Clouds of Joy band. Hits she composed for the band included “Walking and Swinging,” “Froggy Bottom,” “Lotta Sax Appeal,” “Steppin’ Pretty,” and “Little Joe from Chicago.”
In 1936, she wrote “Camel Hop” for swing clarinetist Benny Goodman and he used it as the theme song for his radio show, “Camel Caravan of the Air,” sponsored by Camel cigarettes.
In the 1940s, she moved to New York City, where she had a four-year engagement at New York’s Cafe Society Uptown and Downtown. Also during that decade, Williams composed “The Zodiac Suite,” which was inspired by the twelve astrological signs. She scored three sections of it for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and appeared as a soloist with the musicians in Carnegie Hall.
Williams became a Catholic in 1956, and for about three years, she did not perform. In 1957, a priest wooed her back to the piano and she performed with Dizzy Gillespie at the Newport Jazz Festival.
A deeply spiritual woman, she also wrote three jazz masses and once told an interviewer: “There’s not enough prayer any more. That’s why we need jazz. It’s something from the mind, to the heart, to the fingertips.”
In the late 1950s, she opened her New York home to such well-known jazz musicians as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Tadd Dameron, Art Blakey and Kenny Dorham.
In 1962, she became the first jazz artist to form her own record company. Two years later, with the help of jazz impresario George Wein, Williams launched Pittsburgh’s first jazz festival, which was held at the Civic Arena. From 1977 to 1981, she was an artist in residence at Duke University’s music department.
Despite her death in 1981 at the age of 71, Williams’ music has continued to influence a new generation of composers and musicians. Since 1996, the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival has been held at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in our nation’s capital.
