Morning Glory Read online

  ALSO BY LINDA DAHL

  Stormy Weather:

  The Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen

  Copyright © 1999 by Linda Dahl

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Illustration credits appear on this page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dahl, Linda, 1949–

  Morning glory : a biography of Mary Lou Williams / Linda Dahl.

  p. cm.

  Discography:

  Includes bibliographical references (p. n).

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82452-3

  1. Williams, Mary Lou, 1910–1981 2. Pianists—United States

  Biography. I. Title.

  ML417.W515 D34 2000

  786.2 ′165 ′092—dc21

  [B]

  99-34970

  Random House Web Address: www.randomhouse.com

  v3.1

  For A. J. Vogl

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  1 My Mama Pinned a Rose on Me

  2 The Little Piano Girl of East Liberty

  3 Hits ’n Bits

  4 Nite Life

  5 Walkin’ and Swingin’

  6 Silk Stockings

  7 Why Go On Pretending?

  8 Trumpets No End

  9 Café Society Blues

  10 The Zodiac Suite

  11 Kool

  12 Benny’s Bop

  13 Walkin’ Out the Door

  14 Chez Mary Lou

  15 Praying Through My Fingertips

  16 Black Christ of the Andes

  17 Zoning

  18 Artist-in-Residence

  19 The Mary Lou Williams Foundation

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SOURCES AND NOTES

  A SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

  A SELECTIVE MARY LOU WILLIAMS

  DISCOGRAPHY: 1927 TO PRESENT

  COMPOSITIONS AND ARRANGEMENTS

  BY MARY LOU WILLIAMS

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  Introduction

  She sits a bit forward on the piano bench, her feet away from the pedals marking off tempo while she nods to that sense of balance that combines drive and relaxation. A half smile lights up the high cheekbone nearest the listener. If she is playing with a band there is sometimes a slight inclination of the head in awareness. But the concentration is in the hands; slender, strong fingers reaching unerringly for the note, the chord, the mood.

  —CHARLES EDWARD SMITH

  (his liner notes to Mary Lou Williams and Her All Star Five)

  MARY LOU WILLIAMS’S childhood, like that of Ethel Waters and Billie Holiday, two other great black female musicians of her era, was rough and short. Like Waters and Holiday, she had to earn her own livelihood while still a child, and became a woman before she was ready. Also like them, Mary succeeded against forbidding odds. Yet no matter how much she accomplished, she could not crack the carapace of her parents’ fundamental indifference to the fact of her existence. It was musicians, not family, who nurtured her talent, who shared her life of poor-boy sandwiches, broken-down cars and rooming houses, the many stretches with no pay. But more than anything else, it was Mary’s own innate vision of possibilities, her tremendous grit and empathy, that molded her musical gift. That and later her religious faith kept her going through many hard years—what she called the “muck and the mud” of American show business.

  From the time she was a child, Mary (the name she was born with, the name her family and close friends used) had an innate sense both of the depth of her own talent and of the significance of the African-American musical heritage. Throughout a career that lasted more than half a century, she was careful to save the piles of her reviews and notices, telegrams, photographs, and other memorabilia, all of which found their way into scrapbooks that tell nearly as much about the twentieth century as they do about her own career. And there was the music, of course; she wrote stacks of it. Though a good deal of it was never commercially recorded, she saved some on a collection of private tapes.

  Mary had a funny, even jolly side, but she was an intensely private person, difficult to know well, and she was highly protective of her own (and others’) pain. Seldom did she discuss the hurtful events in her life, and never publicly. Yet she revealed a good deal of her life story in letters and in the small spiral notebooks where she made an attempt at an autobiography. At the bottom of a dusty box of her effects, I found a piece of paper with just these four lines jotted down:

  Jazz created for all people.

  Jazz created through suffering.

  Got beaten everyday.

  And school—Amy Frank.

  Cryptic and clipped—a kind of Rosetta stone to her life—these lines are emblematic of the distinctive, triumphant personal philosophy that Mary forged out of a difficult existence. They contain, I think, the essence of her personal struggle.

  Jazz [was] created for all people.

  With this simple, deeply felt declaration, Mary reveals her instinct and her yearning for universal acceptance and harmony. Moreover, she refuses to bow to any ethnocentrism, any limitations, from any side. Like Duke Ellington—who said that there was good music and there was bad music—she only reluctantly accepted the designation “jazz” for the music that was born of African-Americans.

  Mary sought and fought all her life for equal acceptance of this uniquely American art form within the musical power structure, the European-derived canon of symphonic music. And when in the sixties, after she had been playing professionally for more than forty years, some African-Americans criticized her when she did not jump on the Black Nationalist bandwagon, Mary replied that she did not want to go back to Africa. Yet when she started tapping her foot and bore down on the piano, there was no doubt about Mary’s roots. She was, as Ellington’s oft-quoted assessment of her put it, like “soul on soul.” She and her music were undeniably African-American.

  She also saw jazz as a world music, universally accessible. Jazz would be her bridge, her passport, to other people’s worlds. It was African-American music that moved her white teachers and principal to take her from her poor neighborhood to play in Pittsburgh’s citadels of wealth, as later it carried her around the country, around the world. And everywhere she went, she found an audience that responded to the music she played.

  Jazz [was] created through suffering.

  When Mary discovered as a little girl, as gifted children do, that she could live in her head, she found in the world of her people’s music what she could not find in her family: order, grace, a meaning beyond daily struggle. Moreover, she built up a richly mystical interior life (if at times out of balance) through her music. Gaining meaning through suffering was, indeed, a major motif for Mary. It gave incalculable emotional heft and resonance to her playing, especially after her conversion to Catholicism in the mid-1950s, when the Christian tenet of redemption alleviated her own emotional pain and answered a lifetime of searching for meaning. But Mary’s concern was not so much with her own suffering; rather, she focused on the historical impact of suffering on a people—black people in America. As a little girl, she would eavesdrop on conversations of her elders about the cruelties of slavery, the wickedness of racism. She came to understand how the slaves, out of their anguished condition, developed a vital musical communication, combining spirituals and work songs with rhythms that, in Mary’s
words, “reached deep into the inner self, giving expression of sincere joy.” This was her definition of jazz, and she played it that way.

  But even as Mary became convinced from her own experience that one’s “crosses,” as she liked to call her sufferings, can deepen and even ennoble a person’s character, she grew aware that for many people, suffering merely degrades and deadens hope. She became a rescuer, trying to help many desperate people, most of them musicians. At times she was abused for her kindness, and seldom was she able to rehabilitate others. After some years of this, she noted, sadly, that some people were too weak to withstand suffering and come out the other side to redemption. But she never stopped caring.

  Continually tested in the tempering fire, Mary played the strongest music of her life when she was old and in great physical pain. She had mastered the blues, alchemizing the form into boiling restiveness or tender lyricism or resolute triumph. If she had any one message, it was that jazz meant very little indeed if it lacked the emotional resonance that comes from understanding not only the form of the music but where the blues came from. “You ain’t said nothin’,” she played in a song, “ ’til you play the blues.”

  Got beaten everyday.

  Mary left few clues about the cruelty she knew as a child, none so stark as this: Got beaten everyday. Nearly everything worked against her as a young person—her place and time, her class, her race, and her sex. During her early years, child labor was common, often necessary, to feed a family, and many of the harsh childrearing dictates of the brutal slave era had survived. Mary’s was an impoverished southern family, struggling in the cold, smoke-choked air of Pittsburgh, where the family defenses—the demons of drink and indifference—flourished. Mary and her older sister both left home when they were barely in their teens, but their ties to the family remained steadfast and they continued to feel responsible for their younger brothers and sisters. If music became Mary’s refuge, her castle, her life, conditions on the road in the 1920s were often as meager, mean, and violent as at home. Mary wrote only peripherally about beatings and neglect from her mother and from the flawed musician lovers who attracted her with their highly intelligent, sensitive playing, but who could become violent when they drank. But clues are scattered in her diaries and in snapshots where her shy, beautiful, smiling face is shadowed by pain. Though she accepted it, kept quiet about it, physical violence cast a long shadow across her life.

  And school—Amy Frank.

  A careful separation, this, between the private violence of family, and the public. Mary’s family, one of thousands of southern black families that poured into the industrial North seeking a better life, were feared and resented by other recent poor immigrants. In Germantown, where Mary’s family, the Risers, moved, the neighborhood was composed mostly of Poles, Italians, and Germans. Amy Frank was a white youngster from Germantown, a schoolmate at the red-brick Lincoln School who bullied eight-year-old Mary, just arrived in a cheap cotton shift and her mother’s narrow black Oxfords. Rocks were thrown, followed by taunts, hair-pulling, shoving, slaps. As if that were not enough, the light-skinned blacks who lived nearby ostracized her: with her satiny dark brown skin color, Mary was judged too dark for the café au lait children to play with.

  But Mary had a special gift. A child prodigy, she could play back by ear on the piano nearly anything she heard and obligingly performed the pop tunes of the day whenever she was asked. Soon, she was welcome as the “little piano girl of East Liberty” at the parlor pianos in all the houses around the neighborhood, taming Amy Frank and the rest as she took requests, and climbing into chauffeured cars to be taken to entertain the wealthy at bridge parties in their hillside mansions above the smoke and slums of the city. It was the first of many dragons she would slay in her life with her beautiful music.

  Chapter One

  My Mama Pinned a Rose on Me

  1910–1916

  My mama pinned a rose on me,

  She pinned it where everybody could see …

  Everybody is talking about the way I do.

  I’m gonna leave this hard-luck town,

  I’m gonna leave before the sun goes down,

  Everybody is talking about the way I do.

  MARY WAS MARKED from birth with a sign of significance in African-American culture, a sign that indicated special powers, especially a tendency toward “second sight.” She writes in her memoir, “The midwife told my mother that I was born with a veil over my eyes and for her to save this veil and dry it out and she could tell when I was sick and all that.” (This is the caul, a portion of the membrane that sometimes covers a fetus’s head at birth.) “My mother,” Mary concludes, “was frightened.” Yet Mary did fulfill the omen of the “veil”: she soon was drawn to the supernatural, seeing ghosts and having visions and premonitions. As a girl, and even as a young woman, she would sometimes become so agitated at her fearful hallucinations (of cows and dogs) that those around her would resort to tying her to the bed.

  Displaying psychic powers was not seen as deviant behavior in African-American folk culture, at home with root doctors and conjure men, but it did set her apart. Combined with her natural nervousness and supersensitivity as a child prodigy—she began playing the piano at about the age of four—it helped to stamp her as something of an outsider. “Everybody was afraid to be around me because I was seeing so many weird things,” Mary said. “My mother said at an early age I was seeing spirits. I used to hear so many stories about spooks and ghosts. 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. She said that one day we were walking in a field and I saw a little white dog which grew into a cow. I often wondered about other kids, their imagination,” Mary continued. “Because I’ve gone through life like that, seeing various things.”

  Jazz musicians, who must be incredibly focused to improvise, are, as a group, highly intuitive and what Mary called her “seeing” was to become very useful to her as a player. “At one time I could hear a musician playing and could hear the note he was going to make next,” she said. “It was just that fast, just like telling someone’s fortune; it may have something to do with the fastness of the mind and hearing. Some people lose their minds,” she cautioned of this ability. “But I think it’s useful in your music. You can’t control it. You see these things when you’re not even expecting them.”

  MARY WAS BORN in Atlanta, Georgia, and spent approximately the first five years of her life there before moving to Pittsburgh—no one in her family can now recall the exact date, but she probably emigrated by train with her mother, sister, and possibly other relatives in 1915. She wrote a good deal about her childhood and her mother, Virginia Burley, much of it after she had come to terms with that problematic figure. But the loneliness of the neglected child and her repressed needs manage to seep through the narrative.

  I was born during a superstitious era. Some say our house was built on top of a sunken cemetery in Atlanta. But the house looked more sunken than the cemetery. It was a wooden frame house near swampy woods, one of the most cheerful and charitable houses, ’cept for the regular weekend drinking sprees and even this was not harmful. My mother and my grandmother were the only drinkers. Their drinking was understandable, due to the fact all week long they were washing and ironing for white people. My poor mother was known for her beauty and her tiny little feet, almost became a hunchback carrying their clothes on her back. So when the weekend came they lost themselves in drink, inviting their friends to the house. The only drag to them was my grandfather.

  Family history was vague even in Mary’s day, although the mixing of races—African, Caucasian, Native American—could be clearly seen in the skin tones, features, and hair of generations of Parkers and Risers, Mary’s maternal elders. Indeed, the blending of black, white, and red was the first thing Mary wrote about in describing her relatives. “My great-grandparents’ complexions were very fair. My great-grandfather’s hair was blond. He wore it
down to his shoulders like a pioneer. My great-grandmother was part Indian (Cherokee, I think), and she had straight black hair.” Her sister Mamie, four years her elder, told her daughter Helen that she could recall a tepee in the backyard of her Georgia home, set up by Matilda Parker, their great-grandmother.

  The light-skinned, straight-haired Matilda Parker had been raised as a black slave, and the cruelties of slavery scarred her memories. “As a young kid, I’d sneak under the bed,” Mary wrote, “and listen to their conversation and I learned a great deal about the past. They never allowed the kids to sit in on conversations when they had company. I used to hear them tell stories about how badly they were treated,” she added in an interview. “Both my great-grandparents told stories about how the slave-owners on the two different farms on which they were raised used to put them in the sun to parch their skin black to escape guilt and the neighbors’ talk. It was a question of easing guilty consciences.”

  Matilda Parker, called “Mama” by all, was the family matriarch. Widowed soon after the family arrived in Pittsburgh in the second decade of the twentieth century, she moved among the homes of her children up north like visiting royalty. She had a regally irascible temper, stoked by the homebrew she liked to drink. “She was spoiled by all her daughters in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia,” says a grandchild, Geraldine Stokes. She would stay with one until a fight erupted, then sweep off to the train station, a sign around her neck to ensure that she got off at the right stop, for as was not uncommon in that age, Matilda was illiterate. “She was a very prejudiced woman: if you were light, you were all right. But if you were dark-skinned, she tended to beat you far more often,” adds Geraldine Stokes, herself a dark-skinned woman.

  Many of Mary’s male ancestors were either unknown, unacknowledged, or simply untraceable, their identities supplied by family gossip. Matilda Parker, for example, took her name from the people who owned her, and was supposed to have been fathered by one of the males in that family. But it was Mary’s grandmother, Anna Jane, light-skinned like her mother though she was, who married the mixed-race Andrew Riser, in vehement reaction against what she viewed as the enforced miscegenation of her elders. It was Anna Jane also who agitated to get the family out of Georgia, clean away from the painful past.