by Linda Dahl
Of the paternal side of Mary’s family almost nothing is known. It was hardly an exaggeration when Mary wrote, “I never knew my father.” In fact, she did meet her father, but till then nothing was ever told her about him. Mary wrote flatly, “I was born out of wedlock, a common thing not only for black people but also for whites in the South.” It was not until she was well out of her teens and a renowned soloist with Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy that Mary learned his identity.
Mary’s half-brother in Atlanta, Willis Scruggs, later vividly recalled introducing his famous half-sister to their father in the late 1930’s; Mary, whose memory for dates was sometimes hazy, was to remember meeting her dad, Joseph Scruggs, much later—in 1953, when she was in Atlanta to get a birth certificate, which she needed in order to obtain a passport so she could work abroad. “We didn’t know anything about what Mary had become,” says Willis Scruggs. “We just thought she was playing piano; but we had no notion she had gone with the big bands. Then an uncle of mine had gone to Pittsburgh and came back to Atlanta in about 1936 or so, and he told us what Mary was doing. And then one day in the summer, there were posters out telling you who’s coming to town among the bands and I saw that Andy Kirk’s band was going to play at a new amusement park just for blacks, on Magnolia and Sunset, an enclosed park with a roller-coaster and Ferris wheel, because otherwise blacks in those days could only go to the big amusement park, Lakewood Fairground, on Labor Day. Well, after I saw this poster of Andy Kirk’s band and Mary’s picture on it, I asked my uncle, ‘Is this the Mary Lou Williams who’s my sister?’ And when he told me it was, I said I was going to see her perform. I remember she was beautifully dressed. The piano was up front and the spotlight was put on her when she was playing solo.
“There were no hotels in those days for blacks and I knew where she’d be: at Scott Sutton’s, which had a restaurant with excellent, home-style food and rooms upstairs. It was considered expensive, it cost $1.50 to $2.00 for a meal. I knew Miss Sutton and she told me Mary was staying there. John Williams, her husband who was with the band, was on the bed asleep when I knocked on the door and introduced myself. He said, ‘She isn’t here; she went downtown to get something at the drugstore.’ I said, ‘I’ll just stand here and wait on her.’ I saw her walk up the street very slowly, very dignified. She was dressed in a little jacket and a dress, and some little heels and she was bareheaded, with her hair parted in a page-boy. She had a neat-looking figure. She always looked good. I said, ‘Mary Lou Williams? Do you remember me? I’m your brother.’ ‘I don’t have a brother,’ she said. ‘Oh, yes, you do. Your daddy is the same man as mine. His name is Joe Scruggs.’ She said, ‘My daddy’s name is Fletcher Burley.’ ‘No, that’s your mother’s husband. That’s not your father. When you get back to Pittsburgh, you ask them about it.’ She said, ‘Where does he live?’ I said, ‘In Edgewood.’ Just then my cousin with a car came by. ‘Come on, I’m going to show you where you were born.’ She said, ‘This I gotta see.’ A smile on her face, in amazement.
“We went out to Edgewood, parked the car by his store and we got out,” continues Willis Scruggs. “He was sitting on the porch area in front with his pants pulled up to his knees cuz it was hot. And we got out the car and walked up toward him. He stood up. I said, ‘Do you know who this is?’ He said no. ‘This is your daughter—Ginny Riser’s daughter, your daughter. This is Mary Lou Williams.’ He said, ‘My daughter?’
“He looked at Mary, and asked her, ‘What did you bring me?’ He thought he was being funny. And she said, ‘Not a goddamn thing, you son-of-a-bitch. What did you bring me, what have you given me all these years?’ That was it. Just like that. The expression on his face! My cousin John Scruggs and I, we just cracked up. That was around 1937 or 1938.”
Then Willis Scruggs took a stunned Mary away from the equally startled Joseph Scruggs and gave her a tour of her childhood neighborhood. “The house was still there where she was born and reared and I showed her the house where I was born. I could stand on my front porch and see into her porch. In those early days, I was in and out of that house; we’d go from house to house. I showed her where her mother and aunts grew up. Then she began to ask questions. She didn’t know about any of this. She went back to Pittsburgh and she questioned her mother and her grandmother and they told her the truth. I imagine she wanted to know why they hadn’t told her before.”
Of the several males Mary remembered with affection from her childhood, her grandfather Riser was the first, a quiet, sober man who liked to build things. Had he been born white, he might have been an engineer; he had the rather dry, sober personality, intelligence and love of tinkering suited to such a profession. As it was, he worked as a laborer. Although at times he was overwhelmed by the carryings-on of his womenfolk, it was he who “kept them in line,” as his granddaughter Mamie told her own children later. He also was the only grown-up who seemed to pay any attention to the children in the household. “He built a train for the neighborhood kids, with a real boiler,” wrote Mary. Sometimes he took Mary on walks; they’d go watch the trains and talk. He gave her her first nickname, “Messy,” which she used in the title of her first composition, “Messa Stomp,” and he liked to hand out candy to the neighborhood children. Andrew Riser also tried to save money, for he dreamed of owning real estate, but his wife and daughters would invariably find the box where he hid it and take what they wanted.
After the family finally settled in one house in Pittsburgh, Mary recalled that her grandfather, defeated in his plans to acquire real estate, simply withdrew from the cacophony around him. He “built himself a little apartment in the basement, where he lived,” she wrote.
THERE WAS A song from Mary’s childhood, a pretty little old-fashioned blues called “My Mama Pinned a Rose on Me,” that Mary loved to play, infusing it with the luminous mystery of early memory, that “light” from the mind that makes ordinary little houses seem like great mansions, a stand of trees a deep, dark forest. “Mama Pinned a Rose” is a modest song, but to Mary it was one of the most beautiful she’d ever heard, and she played it (and occasionally sang the lyric) tenderly, all her life. Yet it had nothing to do with her mother, but rather her stepfather Fletcher Burley, a feckless, life-loving man who did his little stepdaughter the great and rare service of paying her serious attention. It was he who taught her the value of the blues, she said.
It was fortunate Mary had him to listen to her, because she got precious little attention from her mother. Virginia Burley, née Riser, and often called “Miss Ginnie” or “Miss Jenny” for short, was to have eight children by several different fathers. “You grew up like a weed. We don’t know where you came from or who you are,” Mary recalled a cruel relative telling her after the family had moved to Pittsburgh. “Those children raised themselves,” confirms Mary’s closest niece, Helen Floyd. All the more reason that Mary clung to the few golden moments of her childhood, polishing and embellishing them in the telling and retelling. Hers was a childhood shorn of innocence and freedom from care. “When you’re poor, you grow up fast,” she said simply.
The hard facts about her first years are scarce, and the family history, compiled orally—largely by Mary’s cousin Geraldine Stokes Williams—remains incomplete. Even Mary’s surname changed with a casualness conferred by the often makeshift quality of a family that had to struggle to stitch together a life. “I’ve had a lot of names,” she said once in her matter-of-fact way. “I was born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs, and later I was Mary Lou Winn and Mary Lou Burley, after stepfathers. I don’t know where the Lou came from.”
She added, “As I went along, I guess if one father made me angry, I’d switch to another’s name. Joe Scruggs was my real father, from Atlanta. But I loved [Fletcher] Burley. Anyway, everybody knew me as ‘the little piano girl.’ The names didn’t matter.”
Mary always gave her birthday as May 8, 1910, but no doctor attended her birth at home in Edgewood, and there was no birth certificate, so that the actual date remains—as with
many rural blacks and whites of that era—an approximation. Also, according to Willis Scruggs, who remained in Atlanta and became a schoolteacher, many poor people “fudged” birth dates of children because of the high infant mortality rates. “I think her birthday may have been a few years earlier. You see, in the early days in the black community, blacks were not permitted to get life insurance until the child was at least three years old. When a child was born the insurance agent would come around and write a life insurance policy and change the age, make it age three or four, because the insurance company would not pay if it wasn’t that way. The only real way that our parents kept up with dates was to write it in the Bible. When the child was born, they’d write it in the front of the Bible.” No Bible with family records has survived, and even if one did, people have been known to fudge birthday entries in the Good Book too.
The house in Atlanta where Mary Scruggs was born, with the assistance of a local midwife, was a “shotgun” cottage, that ubiquitous, simple, long and narrow timberframe dwelling in the South. “If you fired through the front door,” Mary explained, “the shot passed through all the rooms and out into the backyard, likely ending up in the privy.”
She lived her very first years on a dirt lane the people of Edgewood called Gotsipling Street. So separate was this black pocket of Atlanta that to Franklin Garrett, Atlanta’s preeminent historian, the name must have been “Gospero,” rather than the unfamiliar (to him) Gotsipling. Edgewood was essentially a dirt track lined with wooden shotgun cottages and shacks. But it was also a real village.
Mary was teenaged Ginnie Riser’s second child to be born in Atlanta. Her first, Mamie Winn, was about four years older than Mary, and her closest companion all through her life. The two girls grew up together, shifting about with various relatives, first in Georgia, later in Pennsylvania. Willis Scruggs supplies a clear picture of the childhood neighborhood. “Mary lived in a house that was about four or five rooms. They washed clothes for a living. People who didn’t work in private homes or factories, they washed and ironed in their backyard. They’d pick up the dirty clothes from the homes of the whites, bring ’em back to the house, and wash them and scrub them and drop them into a big black pot that was setting on a fire. Where Mary lived, it was built like a barbecue and they’d boil the clothes, then take them and rinse them, hang them on the clothesline.”
Mary’s parents were probably both born in the little community of Edgewood in the generation after slavery. Virginia Riser, who died in the early 1970s, was probably born in the early 1890s, to Anna Jane and Andrew Riser (“Nanny” and “Grandpa” to Mary), both light-skinned people. Anna Jane had a half-white mother and a white father, and Andrew was, Mary wrote, “short and whitish looking.” But Virginia, like Mary after her, was a warm brown, which lowered her status somewhat in the family; nevertheless, she had dainty little feet and a pretty, heart-shaped face, which Mary inherited. Indeed, she was something of a local belle, or at least a fun-loving girl who attracted men, with her love of music (she played the organ a bit), and willingness to loosen up with a few drinks. In old family snapshots there is a pettish set to Miss Ginnie’s mouth, and her small hands are crossed tensely on her lap. With only drudgery to look forward to, Miss Ginnie rebelled by becoming what Mary called “a party girl.” When she and Anna Jane brought out the jugs on a Friday afternoon, after the washing was done for the week, Grandpa Riser, a teetotaler, seethed on the sidelines. Family members concur that Virginia was not much good at the physical or emotional side of mothering. (Vain about her looks, Virginia later insisted that her grandchildren call her Miss Ginnie rather than Grandma.)
EVEN SO, MISS GINNIE became for Mary a mythic first influence at the keyboard. As poor as she was, Mary’s mother had access to a reed organ (also called a harmonium) at the storefront Beulah Baptist Church nearby, where her father held the respected post of deacon. Playing an instrument was a hugely important source of pleasure and entertainment at a time when not even Victrolas were widespread, and Virginia often played and danced for donations—after church, a cloth draped over the altar. Music lessons were inexpensive, and, according to both Mary and Willis Scruggs, Virginia took some instruction. But not surprisingly, given her indifference to her children, she never taught them to read even a note of music. Instead, Mary relied solely on her ear. Later, she came to place enormous importance on her ear training and it became part of her credo that real jazz—improvisation with feeling—could not be systematically taught. Nor is it too much to say that in Mary’s mind, at a fundamental level, playing music and improvising were synonymous.
Later in her life Mary had a strong tendency to burnish her mother’s memory. She certainly seems to have done so when it came to Virginia’s musical ability, often saying that “books” (by which she meant the rote learning of exercises such as those from Czerny’s popular series) had “destroyed” her mother’s ear so that Virginia couldn’t improvise. “My mother wouldn’t allow a teacher near me,” Mary would go on. “She played by ear [at first], then went to a teacher, and ended up not playing at all, just reading music.” Except for Miss Ginnie, hardly anybody in Mary’s immediate family seems to have played a musical instrument. The one exception was Mamie’s husband, Hugh Floyd, who played the popular music of the day on the saxophone. But they all enjoyed listening. Grandpa Riser was partial to the classics, Fletcher Burley to ragtime and the blues. Noticeably absent was church music—hymns, spirituals, gospel. But Mary did learn about the importance of music in the slaves’ hard lives when she listened to the grown-ups talk at night. “The old folks said that the slaves were taken to church on Sundays by their owners and were taught the psalms from which they began creating their own sounds, leading to the creation of spirituals, the base of black music. Whenever a slave was abused or beaten, he’d return to the cotton field or his work, creating a new song and the others would join in singing together.” In Edgewood, Mary may have heard some hymns at the tiny storefront Baptist church, but once the Riser clan moved to Pittsburgh, they seem to have fallen away from churchgoing.
What is clear is that Mary was able to teach herself an astonishing amount of musical technique by watching and listening, and the fact that her mother was the first person to hear her play the piano was crucial. Mary’s most cherished memory was of Virginia’s discovery of her daughter’s incredible talent. In a scene that Mary described many times with obvious relish (and embellishment), Mary is sitting on her mother’s lap at the little harmonium (sometimes she is age three, sometimes four) while Virginia is playing. Without warning, Mary reaches up to the keys with her baby hands and plays back, note for note, what she has just heard her mother play. “I must have frightened her so that she dropped me then and there, and I started to cry,” Mary wrote. “It must have really shaken my mother. She actually dropped me and ran out to get the neighbors to listen to me.”
Again, as with the birth sign of the caul, Mary was marked as different. “I never left the piano after that. Always played. Nothing else interested me.” “My half-brother would come over to play with me,” she added in another reminiscence, “but I’d be busy at the piano. Sometimes I’d stop and go out and play with him a little while, and then come back in to the piano, getting my own sounds, and I’ve been doing that all my life.… I didn’t know what I was doing … but the piano played for my fingers. If somebody hummed something, I played it.” Today, Willis Scruggs remembers: “It was an organ you pump with two big pedals”—for despite Mary’s reference to a piano, it was the organ-like harmonium—”but because Mary was so short, her legs didn’t reach the pedals. So she’d say to me, ‘Willis, pump the organ,’ and I’d get down there two or three minutes with my hands, and I’d pump those two big pedals with my hands on my knees until I said I was tired. I was just a little kid of about three or four, so Mary had to be four or five. She was old enough to be playing.”
Even when Mary became a star player in a popular black swing band in the thirties, no one in the family can
remember Ginnie ever going to hear her play. Nor did her mother come to New York to hear her daughter play after Mary had established herself there in the forties. The estrangement between daughter and mother cut deep, recall many friends, and Mary was to struggle for many years to forgive her mother. “What did Mary and I have in common?” muses Gray Weingarten, a well-to-do white woman who became a close friend of Mary’s in the 1940s. “Well, for one thing we both hated our mothers.” Says Bernice Daniels, another longtime close friend, “You ask about her mother. Well, I don’t like to say. Well, she called her mother names, bad names. ‘Dirty old whore,’ things like that. And she hated her father too.” Only rarely did Mary choose to get down to specifics. At the end of her life, when she was terminally ill and bedridden, she had long conversations with a new friend, Marsha Vick, who kept a diary. When Vick remarked, “Your family must have loved you when you were little,” Mary, she remembers, responded bluntly, “No, they didn’t give me any space. They used to spit in my mouth when I was sick, paid no attention to me.” “To make ends meet,” Mary adds in her memoir, “along with taking in laundry, Mom would also work for a few private families, leaving me in the care of a baby-sitter. Thank God when Mamie was old enough to look out for me. My baby-sitter, as I remember, was young but not very nice. She never fed me, made me chew tobacco and swallow the juice and got great kicks out of tickling me until I almost had a spasm. This impaired my speech and for years I stuttered very badly.”
“The kids,” Mary’s niece Helen recalls her mother, Mamie, telling her, “had to fend for themselves.” Mary wrote, “I was trying to help with the housework, washing and ironing, just a busy little body and a nose picker from birth. Once while trying to iron, I burnt my arm very badly and the scar is still with me.” It was one of several accidents she suffered while unsupervised.