Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  As other children came along, her mother’s drinking got worse. In 1927, well after Mary had left home to work in vaudeville, she paid a visit to her mother’s Pittsburgh home during a layover, with her new husband, John Williams. “She was kind of an alcoholic,” Williams recalled of Ginnie, who lived at that time in a rundown house in an alley reminiscent of Edgewood, in Atlanta. “They had music on and Fletcher [Mary’s stepfather] was dancing around in his bare feet, drinking. Sort of a rough gambling kind of guy. Well, Miss Ginnie was nice to me, but they were always tippling, you know. I wasn’t brought up in that atmosphere where your parents were drinking and you might walk in the room and they’re knocked out, but Mary was practically raised up in that. The drinking went on all day. Mary told me that they weren’t hungry or nothing when they were kids, but her mother didn’t pay much attention.”

  Virginia’s situation grew even worse during the Depression. By then a widow who still had young children to raise, she was so poor that, as Mary told a friend, her half-sisters had to go search for coal along the railroad tracks for fuel in the winter. Mary, who often suffered severe financial constraints of her own, sent home money, clothes, whatever she could, for years and years.

  Chapter Two

  The Little Piano Girl of East Liberty

  1915–1924

  WHEN MARY’S FAMILY decided to move from Atlanta up to Pittsburgh toward the end of World War I, they were among many thousands who made similar plans. War was a boon for the industrial North, and for the unskilled, it seemed to offer a limitless supply of jobs. Like other migrant groups, African-Americans were determined to get some of those jobs.

  But they faced stiff competition from the many recent European immigrants, as well as native-born whites. Blacks often discovered that, while there was work to be had, the better jobs were out of bounds for them. “Almost everywhere white labor tended to exclude Negro workers from the unions,” states historian John Hope Franklin flatly. And it would take decades to change that. In the teens of the century, “Smoketown” gave them the dirtiest, hardest work for the least pay.

  Grandpa Andrew Riser found work as a common laborer, as did Mary’s stepfather when he came north a bit later. He had been reluctant to leave Atlanta; a fortuneteller, Mary wrote, warned him to stay put, predicting that he would die up North “smothered by sand.” Years later he perished at a construction site when a dump truck unloaded a ton of gravel on him, burying him alive.

  “On the train to Pittsburgh, we must have looked just awful with all the luggage tied with rope, our phonograph player with the megaphone and all the trunks, etc.,” Mary reminisced. But she found her first train trip thrilling, especially “the noise of the engine and cross ties, like music to my ears.”

  One can only imagine the family’s culture shock at arriving in cold, smoggy Pittsburgh after the hot, small-town ways of Edgewood. An army of smokestacks lined up along the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, belching coal and steel fumes. By noon the sun would have dimmed to premature night, blotted out by thick black smoke. Air pollution was not curbed until the 1960s, and Pittsburgh had one of the highest tuberculosis rates in the nation.

  At first the Risers lived with relatives who had preceded them, Aunt Hattie and her husband, Uncle Joe. Mary was terribly homesick for the Georgia woods where she had played. “There were 11 or 12 of us in the house with no more than four bedrooms,” Mary wrote. Mary remembered a string of addresses for her struggling family: Broad Street and Lemington; Euclid, Wilmington, and Larimer avenues. Eventually, they moved to 6211 Hamilton Avenue, on the cusp of Homewood and East Liberty townships, where they were joined by Fletcher Burley, soon Mary’s stepfather.

  Today the area where Mary grew up is bleak, a typical product of urban renewal, its heart bisected by a highway that slices through what had been a bustling shopping district. Back then, however, East Liberty was a new, vibrant neighborhood, full of woodframe and brick houses, many of them quite commodious. It had shops of every kind, as well as numerous churches, taverns, gambling dens—and brothels. Yet by comparison, Edgewood, with its rigid racial segregation, was stable, while the ethnically fragmented townships and burgs that made up Pittsburgh felt themselves to be under siege. Competition for housing and jobs was so fierce that newcomers sometimes were forced to live in boxcars with breathing holes cut out of the sides, where they paid a nickel a night. Crime flourished, and both whites and established black Pittsburghers blamed it on the surge of black newcomers from the South. Earl Hines, who was five years Mary’s senior and one of her first musical idols, was a Pittsburgher from a solidly working-class family. He recalled that the northern African-Americans complained that southern blacks were disrupting the delicate balance between the races.

  For the first time in her short life, Mary had direct experience with racism. “My new home,” she wrote, “was in a section called East Liberty, at least six miles from the downtown section. We lived … between two white families on both sides of us, in fact they were all around us. This was my first encounter with hate and prejudice. Bricks came our way several times. Two blocks from where we lived was Germantown and this was really murder. Playing on the sidewalk in front of the house, with other kids, we’d have to run for our lives when a couple of German ‘gentlemen’ passed, because they always tried to kick the kids in the mouth or beat them up.…” She remembered being chased by a white kid’s mother with a butcher knife, and being snubbed by black neighbors, who “belonged to the Amphibian Society, for Negroes with light skin only. Our neighbor next door had a beautiful little girl with long hair and curls. She was not allowed to play with me and other dark-skinned kids, but my sister whose skin was light could play with her.” Decades later she added drily, “Now, black is beautiful!” And if she also recalled good neighbors, such as an Italian family who gave the Risers gifts of macaroni, olive oil, and the like, racism still cut deep. “ ‘Nigger’? ‘Snowball’? What did these names mean?” she wondered, recalling the taunts. “And, why would a family of blacks discriminate against another because of the color of his skin?” Mary never felt really at home with the caste of lighter-skinned blacks who reigned socially in the cities where she lived and worked later in her life, such as Kansas City, Washington, D.C., New York, and Durham. And even after she became famous and had offers to play in Europe, Mary hesitated—as she confided to her friend Joyce Breach in a letter decades later—reluctant because of her childhood experiences of racial prejudice. She was genuinely surprised, she wrote, at the warm hospitality shown her by whites when she did go overseas.

  It wasn’t long, however, before Mary found she had a way to escape the poverty and ill-feeling in Smoketown: “I began building up a defense against prejudice and hatred and so many other miserable blocks by taking my aching heart away from bad sounds and working hard at music. Looking back, I see that my music acted as a shield, preventing me from being aware of many of the prejudices that must have existed. I was completely wrapped up in my music. Little else mattered to me.” Nearby was a Catholic girls’ school where she often lingered to listen as the girls’ choir practiced. To Mary, their singing was “angelic” and had a deep influence that revealed itself years later when she began to write choral jazz and sacred works.

  Without a piano at home as yet, Mary still found plenty of instruments to play in the homes of neighbors. And once she played for them—waltzes, marches, sentimental ballads, ragtime—she began to make money, as much as fifty cents for requests at the age of seven or eight, very good money indeed at a time when a laborer earned between twelve and fifteen dollars a week. Mary promoted her new career on her own, and on the sly. “None of my family,” she wrote, “knew what I was doing—until I broke my arm.” She had jumped over a box on a dare and fallen heavily on her left arm, and although she was in great pain, she hid for the rest of the day under a bed, afraid (without reason, it turned out) of her mother’s wrath. Her accident, however, had some interesting consequences: “Not seeing me, the neighbors came
to our house and asked why I hadn’t been around to play for them. Not realizing it, my little visits had changed the entire scene.”

  After her arm healed, Mary’s family saw that she could contribute to their income as an entertainer. (If it had not healed, she would have had to end her career as a pianist then and there.) Her very first professional gig was for an undertaker, “a very popular mortician called Peyton Rose, in East Liberty,” as Mary described him. “He didn’t live very far from us. After my first job for him, he would have me back often to play for his guests.” Word of mouth built her reputation quickly. “Offers for me to play dances, society parties, even churches, were now coming in regularly. For most dates I was paid the sum of $1 per hour and they always tipped me at the end of the night.” Handsome wages for a preteen.

  Occasionally, Mary got work as an accompanist for silent movies at a theater on Broad Street, or filled in at a dance hall for a few dollars. She also found work in more sordid surroundings, as did many another black entertainer who went on to later fame. “The whores in her neighborhood liked her and she said she would play for pay—not much—in the whorehouse,” said her friend Joyce Breach. Added Father Peter O’Brien, “She said there used to be this keyhole or viewing hole or something. She was supposed to play for the ‘duration,’ and one time she got mad—her hands got tired—because the duration went on and on.”

  Mary was running wild. “I was out booking my gigs—my mother didn’t know where I was,” she explained. It is tempting to lay all the blame for the deprivations of Mary’s childhood on her mother. Yet Ginnie Riser was herself consumed by the scramble for survival in an era where charity of any kind scarcely existed, where daily life unfolded in a culture of improvisation, and where middle-class notions—saving for a rainy day, or postponing gratification—made little sense. Children were expected to learn to both fend for themselves and contribute to the family, and Ginnie’s method of ensuring their obedience was old-fashioned and harsh. “Before going to work, she’d say if we got into any mischief, she’d kill us,” Mary wrote. “When a child misbehaved, she got a whuppin’.”

  Yet Ginnie had gotten a break. Mary’s great-uncle by marriage, a “sportsman” named Max Sloane, had staked the Risers to a laundry business. Running it out of their home, they were soon successful enough to employ a half-dozen or so women, supplying local businesses with clean linen. But the business was short-lived, as partying took precedence. Before long, Ginnie was working freelance as a maid and laundress in the white middle-class Squirrel Hill district, work that she did off and on until she became old and ill. (Max Sloane came to a grisly end soon after: when he failed to pay a bad debt, he was drugged, tied to railroad tracks, and run over by a train.)

  There were good times in the family, too. Mamie and Anna Mae (Mary’s aunt, but close enough in age to be like a sister) would put up a sheet for a stage curtain and perform skits and plays, with Mary providing the music. “Anna Mae and Mamie always kept me with them, even when they had their little ‘puppy love’ dates,” wrote Mary of the years when she was seven and eight. “They would take me along, buying me ice cream, cookies and candy and leaving me on the steps of the church to enjoy myself. They’d go away with their friends but I’d still be sitting on the church steps when they returned. And later, when Anna became old enough to work—she was a skilled dressmaker—she’d buy me beautiful dresses and gifts to get me to play for her friends on Sunday, as there was nowhere to go on Sundays in Pittsburgh. If I refused to play she’d whisper in my ear, ‘Take off that dress I bought you.’ ” A few years later, when Mary began to get occasional jobs performing for bridge and tea parties at the homes of wealthy whites, Mamie and Anna Mae “would beg me out of my tips. I would give it to them freely until I needed money for myself to buy a dress or a pair of shoes, then I would hide tips.”

  At the same time, Mary was handing over most of her pay to Ginnie, to feed the growing family. “I was holding down three jobs,” Mary remembered of her preteen years. “I was booked playing churches throughout Pennsylvania and I had other jobs—as a maid, and performing at afternoon teas at $1 an hour, and as helper to a woman who made wigs—that paid $2 per week.” Miss Ginnie apparently needed her financial help despite having remarried again in late 1916. Fletcher Burley was, in Mary’s embellished portrait, “a professional gambler, but a man who worked hard every day and brought his pay packet home to Mom every week. He never gambled with the money he earned. He’d go out then, to Frankstown Avenue to his favorite joint and have a friend put him in the game. He always came home loaded with money and kept cigar boxes full of change—he had a thing about saving change. Fletcher had a very strenuous job, lifting cement blocks. But he was never too tired to help me.”

  Clearly, Mary adored this “light tannish man with sandy brown hair, what one would call a Georgia brown during those days,” Mary wrote. He was the first man who gave her the attention she had long craved. He prized Mary’s ability as a pianist and treated her as his little girl. She had found, she felt, a father at last, and a romantic one at that, a bon vivant—but a man with a dangerous temper when crossed. “When angered, he had a habit of spitting just once. When this happened, everybody moved out.” Once, family legend has it, Fletcher Burley stopped off for a drink at a nearby tavern, and was called “a name” by the white bartender who refused to serve him. Enraged, he ran home for his gun. Ginnie and Nanny begged him not to go back. But he did, and shot the man in the arm. Somehow, he managed to get off in court. “His kind heart must have saved him,” Mary reasoned. At night, Fletcher Burley would trade his laborer’s overalls for the fine suit and vest he wore when he conducted his real business: gambling. “And he sometimes took me with him at nights—to bring him luck, he said. He bought himself an extra large coat and would put me underneath and sneak me into one of his gambling joints, most of which had an upright piano against one wall. The game was generally ‘skin’—the Georgia skin game—and the players would all be men, for women weren’t allowed in these places. I was kind of smuggled in and before the cards began I used to play a few things on the piano. Inside he’d stop the game, throw a dollar in his hat and say, ‘I want everybody to put some money in this hat for my little girl to play for you.’ The money would roll in.” The take would be substantial in an era when fifty cents would buy you a place to sleep or food for a day: twenty or thirty dollars! “Outside again, he’d say ‘Give me the dollar back I put into the hat to start your tips.’ ”

  Burley went to the great expense of buying a player piano (Mary thought he’d paid $1,000, which seems improbable) and gave it “pride of place,” in Mary’s phrase, in their parlor. The player piano was a clever machine. It could function like a regular piano, but also, in that era before Victrolas—the first record players—were widely available, allowed people to “hear” the work of well-known pianists by “playing” their piano rolls. Such an addition to the modest Burley home drew neighbors—one could hear Jelly Roll Morton or James P. Johnson right there in the parlor.

  Not yet in her teens, Mary fell under the influence of both those masters and especially loved Morton’s “The Pearls.” (Interestingly, Duke Ellington said he learned the work of the great early masters the same way, by slowing down the piano rolls and committing them to memory; and Fats Waller studied James P. Johnson’s piano-roll solos.) But she listened in person to another Atlanta emigré, hard-stomping Jack Howard, who “ragged.” It was from him that Mary discovered “broken tenths,” a two-key reach beyond the octave especially useful for the small span of a little girl’s hands. Howard took Mary under his wing, coaching her in various tricks of the trade, emphasizing the importance of a strong left hand and showing her how to stretch the web between her fingers. He was a loud and a “full” player, Mary said, playing so heavy he “smashed” the keys. “He told me always to play the left hand louder than the right because that’s where the beat and the feeling was,” Mary recalled. “It’s just like a drum keeping a steady beat. I think,
” she added, “I got the masculine quality of playing from him.”

  As ragtime experts David Jasen and Trebor Jay Tichenor point out, “None of the original pianists played ragtime the way it was written. They played their own style.… No two pianists ever played syncopated numbers alike.” From the teens of the century, brilliant black pianists were playing popular rags, putting their inimitable stamp on them and often committing them to piano rolls: Luckey Roberts in Philadelphia, James P. Johnson in New Jersey, Eubie Blake in Baltimore, Willie “The Lion” Smith in New York, and players like Jack Howard, who never became known beyond their hometowns; and they all emphasized syncopation and speed of execution. Their compositions were written for professional pianists to play, but quite different from the ragtime of Scott Joplin, which Mary viewed as a type of European music that precluded improvisation, explaining, “You don’t get the feeling and the sounds when everything’s on paper.” So when Mary recorded Joplin in her prime years, she did it her way.

  As a precocious player who at first relied completely on her ear, Mary learned mostly by imitating—Jack Howard at first, and then the masterful Fats Waller. But above all, she learned by playing. Late in life, when her friend Marsha Vick asked her who had taught her to play, she could honestly answer, “Nobody.” She just “never left the piano.”

  BUT RAGTIME WAS not the only style she was acquiring. “I learned to play a few classical tunes, by pressing my fingers down with the keys of the player piano. My grandfather always wanted to hear the classics, and he gave me money to play them.” There were Irish ballads, waltzes, light opera, too. And then there was the foundation: the blues. “Fletcher taught me the first blues I ever knew by singing them over to me,” Mary wrote. When he was flush, she could remember him paying her as much as “$15 and $20 to play the blues and boogie-woogie.”