by Linda Dahl
This accumulation of musical styles was casual, often indirect, yet Mary had a very orderly, highly analytic mind. “I had to see things for myself,” she said. “I wouldn’t ask questions. I’d take a clock or something apart and put it back together again; I wanted to see how it worked.” Perhaps she inherited this trait from her engineer grandfather. She was blessed with perfect pitch and an unshakeable sense of time, combined with sensitivity, intelligence, and a fierce will to achieve.
While Mary ran free, playing and hearing music, Virginia Burley had her hands full, bearing children. There were six more between 1916 and 1928: Grace, Howard, the twins Geraldine and Gerald, Marge, and Josephine. But Grandpa Riser died in 1920, when Mary was ten. His death and the heart condition that afflicted Fletcher Burley shortly after, curtailing his job as a laborer, drastically reduced the family income. Burley’s gambling take and Miss Ginnie’s laundry work could not meet the demands of this growing family. “That’s the time when Mary would come home with money and her mama and papa would get that to buy food and drink with it. She was half-supporting the family at that young age,” emphasized her husband, John Williams.
After Grandpa Riser died, Mary’s life changed drastically: she left her mother’s house. Decades later, in a letter to Robbie Mickles, a nephew she regarded as a son, Mary explained, “I had to leave home as a child to get away from fear, alcoholism, fights. And I left when I was 12, then again when I was 16. And I thank God for leaving when I did.” Her half-sister Grace, who grew up in those impoverished years, echoed those feelings when she wrote years later: “I was born from a nervous, alcoholic mother. Our mother never gave us a decent home life. We had to go out into the world and live the best we can.” Mary sought to do this by taking shelter with her older sister Mamie, who that year married Hugh Floyd and persuaded him that they should get their own place, which they did, in nearby Winfield Street. By all accounts, they were remarkably mature. Though Mamie was only fourteen or fifteen, she was pregnant with her first child, but she ran her household firmly and steadily. From the age of twelve Mary never again lived full-time with her mother, although the boundaries separating the family households were porous and Virginia Burley continued to assert her authority at times—and not only need but expect Mary’s financial help. In later years, when Mary was a mature woman and an established presence in the music world, she would pay her mother a courtesy call on visits home; but then “it was on to Mamie’s,” as Mary’s niece Helen Floyd recalls. Mamie was the true matriarch, and Mamie brooked no nonsense. Years later, Mary’s then-lover, the great tenor saxophonist Don Byas (who had a drinking problem), was staying with Mary at Mamie’s. He got drunk and, in Helen’s words, “got rough with Mary while drinking. Mom threw him not just out of the house, but down the stairs.” It was Mamie, the sister who remained in Pittsburgh, who hosted family gatherings and fielded the many family crises, and it was she who kept Mary in school in the 1920s. Although Mary’s attendance was haphazard, she worked at her piano playing with discipline and drive while living with the Floyds. “This period of my life was hard work for me,” she wrote. “My brother-in-law Hugh said I’d sit at the piano for hours and hours without food, just drank water, and would practice all day. All the other children would be outside playing hopscotch or something but I’d be sitting at the piano.” Hugh Floyd, who played sax and had his sons play in a marching band, was the second important man in Mary’s life. A lover of music, he enthusiastically supported Mary and escorted her to concerts when she was much too young to go by herself. One was particularly memorable, at a theater on Frankstown Avenue that booked the best black acts. It was there, Mary thought, that she saw the well-known Lovie Austin, a veteran pianist and arranger from Chicago who wrote and conducted music for shows, and backed many artists on early Paramount records. Mary certainly saw Austin—she recalled the event in loving detail—though it was probably a bit later in Chicago, when she was fourteen or fifteen and traveling with various bands, for Austin never left Chicago. “You can imagine my surprise and thrill to see a woman sitting in the pit with four or five other male musicians, with her legs crossed, cigarette in her mouth, playing the show with her left hand and writing music with her right hand for the next act to come on the stage. And was she a master of conducting the music. This scene I never forgot. And later on, when I was with Andy Kirk’s orchestra, I remembered this woman in the pit in Pittsburgh and began imitating her on one-nighters. I thought, ‘I’m going to do that one day,’ and I did.” Shortly before she died, in 1981, in Durham, North Carolina, Mary told Marsha Vick that “being able to write and play at the same time is my proudest accomplishment.”
At the Floyds’, Mary listened to Fats Waller and James P. Johnson discs on the brand-new Victrola that Hugh bought on time. And as she woodshedded, honing her technique, she remembered how “During the summer when I practiced, people would stop by and listen. Everyone would stop on their porch, and truck drivers would stop.” She began to get more and more gigs—graduation parties, teas, summer picnics. “I began playing little church gigs. And a friend of my mother’s would take me to Castle Shannon and other small cities near Pittsburgh. I was all over the city playing. I became,” she added, “the little piano girl of East Liberty and anytime anybody was having a party or anything they’d say ‘Well, let’s get the little piano girl.’ ”
But despite the fact that the local police, whose station was near her home, were friendly, often walking her home from the streetcar when she returned late at night, they couldn’t solve other problems. Sometimes she wasn’t paid. Another time, “I had to walk home from a Saturday night date in Homestead, Pennsylvania. The manager of the place had run out on the quartet he’d hired, and there was nothing to do but walk. I started about midnight and arrived home, I think, between 10 and 11 on Sunday morning.
“It wasn’t wise for a girl to go out alone at night, and in fact my stepfather took me to most of my gigs after the time I played at a rich man’s house, when that affair turned out to be a stag party with the parents away in Europe and the boys tried to move in on me. They were upstairs getting drunk and I just left. I wouldn’t tell my stepfather because he would have gone back and killed everybody because he was very mean about things like that.” And she remembered a series of other problems with “a very good alto player called Matt Adison who bilked me on all his jobs.”
MARY BEGAN HER schooling at the Lincoln School, now replaced but still boasting the original giant cast-iron bell that summoned the children to class. Nearby is Westinghouse High School, larger now and adorned with bars and locks, which Mary—and later Erroll Garner, Billy Strayhorn, and Ahmad Jamal—attended. A decade and a half after her death, a portrait of Mary was hung inside Westinghouse and a historical marker placed in front of Lincoln in her honor. All this for an alumna who completed only the first term of her sophomore year of high school, a fact Mary was apt to fudge, as when she told Seventeen magazine rather grandly in the late 1940s that after she graduated she “took a position with a dance orchestra.”
When she entered school, at seven or eight, Mary’s musical ability immediately set her apart. As perhaps also did her neglect and poverty. “I went barefooted until I was three or four,” Mary wrote. “In grade school I’d sneak out a pair of Mom’s oxfords and wear them to school with half of my heels sticking out the back. I’d hobble through classes and before going home I’d have to take the shoes off and go home barefooted.” (Later in life, she developed a passion for expensive shoes.) Two young teachers, Miss Itzel and Miss Milholland, took her under their wings. “I was only good in music, mathematics, and maybe one or two other subjects,” Mary recalled, “and most of the time I was found playing the piano, or playing for the kids. Miss Milholland hummed her favorite marches for me to play for the kids to march up long winding stairs to the second floor. I’d improvise too, playing a boogie beat, and the kids would stop and dance on the landing, holding up the first floor line. So Miss Milholland would come to the t
op and discover the hold-up and I was in trouble. She wouldn’t allow me to play until I promised to play it as a march. But she still got me gigs. Miss Milholland did special things for talented black kids. I received instruments from several music stores, and took lessons on violin but was sent home because I played ‘The Sheik of Araby’ on one string. The teacher said I shouldn’t be tampered with, I should teach myself.”
School was Mary’s first contact with the white world—there were no black teachers at Lincoln or Westinghouse then—and she reacted instinctively, lashing out against these representatives of what the adults around her painted as an unjust society. She often told the following story—which varied only in its details: “One day I went to school and grabbed a long ruler and hit my teacher who had always been very nice to me. I distressed her. I said, ‘You white people made slaves out of us.’ She was very upset. She said, ‘Oh, you poor child. I wonder who’s been telling you all these things.’ From that day on she brought me presents every day—little things I liked. She must have told the other teachers because they started to have me to come to their boardinghouse to play for them. I used to return home with a lot of money tied up in my handkerchief.”
After graduating from eighth grade at Lincoln in December of 1923, Mary enrolled at Westinghouse High for the winter term of 1924. Her school entrance certificate is the first official document attesting to her existence, although it has Mary’s name and birthday slightly in error: she is called Mary Lou Freda Burley instead of Mary Lou Elfrieda, and her birth date is listed as June 8, 1909. Again at Westinghouse, Mary’s musical talent caught the attention of her teachers, and the principal, a Mrs. Leopole, took her to hear new kinds of music, such as opera, and gave her opportunities to test herself against new audiences (at the University of Pittsburgh she played for professors and students, as Earl Hines had done). And it was probably through her teachers that Mary began to play at afternoon teas for the Mellons and the Olivers, two of the wealthiest families not just in Pittsburgh but in the nation. (Mary’s aunts from the Riser side, Mamie and Minnie, were domestic servants to the Andrew Mellons.) Mary was suitably impressed by the grandeur, recalling one such event: “A very rich lady who was a relative of the Mellons sent her chauffeur looking for colored talent to entertain at a dinner party. I picked up a girlfriend of mine who did the Charleston very well and Sonny who was featured with the ‘Three Cobs.’ He drove us to this wealthy lady’s house and told us to wait at the entrance. Inside, I was led to a piano, where a beautiful, silver-haired lady asked what I charged. ‘Dollar an hour,’ I replied, ‘my standard fee.’ ” How the lady must have smiled at that as she withdrew to an adjacent room to play bridge, drink tea, and listen as Mary entertained from her repertoire of pop tunes “for an hour or two.” She was given an envelope with a check, thanked, then driven home by the chauffeur. When she opened the envelope at home, Mary found a check for a hundred dollars. “I earned $100! My mother almost fainted. She wanted to know if the lady drank. She called the people to see if they had made a mistake. The entire household stayed up until the bank opened the next morning.”
If Mary had completed high school, she would have had Mrs. Jane Patton Alexander as her music teacher—the same Mrs. Alexander who drilled Billy Strayhorn in music theory and harmony like a sergeant a decade and a half later. But she left after only a term and a half to go out on the road with a show, and so she never really got a musical foundation; indeed, she never learned to read a note of music. “I couldn’t play Rachmaninoff and those things. I had to improvise on it. I couldn’t play it the way the music was,” Mary later explained. It was a limitation she struggled with. “I always felt I’d never be a great reader because of my ear sounds,” she wrote. “Even then I knew if someone made a mistake in a composition I didn’t know, and I was able to call chords as fast as they were played.” She had to call on her “ear sounds” at her first really important job between freshman and sophomore years, when she was hired to play a picnic dance with the local musicians’ union for the Amphibians, “a big local society of class-conscious half-whites who would engage the best entertainment they could find. I was too young to be in the musicians’ union, but the president of the colored subsidiary local insisted on taking me along to play with his twelve-piece band. We played such songs as ‘Dardanella,’ ‘Royal Garden Blues,’ and an orchestration of the popular tune, the ‘Doll Dance.’ ” The problem was, Mary didn’t know the tune. “That is when I really learned how to use my ears. I probably was a fraction behind each note they played, and after the first chorus, I knew the melody and what notes would follow. When the leader called other arrangements, I would get the piano part and would play and look as if I was reading. I think my ESP carried me through a great deal. I was pretending I could read.” In fact, it would be about five more years before Mary finally learned how to read music—because she wanted to write it.
Mary’s autodidactic approach to music study led her at times to stereotype both jazz and classical music. Because it was already written down, she at times implied that classical music simply had to be mechanically mastered, while jazz, on the other hand, had to be constantly created. But this view merely compared jazz at its best with classical music at its worst. In fact, a true artist works for freshness and immediacy at every performance, and what passes for improvisation in jazz is very often a skillful reworking of familiar riffs and patterns, while the classical musician mines known works for hidden technical and emotional nuggets—not so very different in the end, perhaps. And for all Mary’s later ardent defense of jazz over classical music—”Why would I want to play something somebody else has written?”—she benefited by listening closely to such modern composers as Gershwin, Hindemith, and Schoenberg. Even in jazz, her first role model when it came to writing was the conservatory-trained big-band arranger Don Redman.
What she did shun instinctively was the sometimes drily analytical approach of the Academy in Western classical music, its distrust of intuition, and, especially, and deeply, its refusal largely to take seriously African-American music-making. She knew, perhaps from the very beginning, that the Academy was an arena where she would never be accepted. There was, of course, very little future for black pianists in traditional white Western classical venues. Earl Hines had begun classical training and gave concerts to Pittsburgh’s elite in 1916. But as Hines observed, “They gave me $10 and a box of handkerchiefs for a concert and said, ‘He’s great.’ I had to learn 60 or 70 pages of music for a concert and work like a dog for 10 bucks, some linen and a few kind words. It didn’t look like a hell of a living, so at 16 I cut out.”
MARY CONTINUED TO pursue her musical education in her own way. When she was eleven and twelve, she went to Saturday afternoon dances at the Arcadia Ballroom in East Liberty, where singer Lois Deppe appeared with his band, which included the young Earl Hines. Despite the gang fights that cleared the place, Mary had a fine time, absorbing both the pop tunes the band played, like “Milenberg Joys,” “Congaine,” and “Isabelle” (which she later recorded), and Hines’s sensational piano style, in particular his way of playing octaves so as to be heard above the band.
Mary herself was gaining a reputation among musicians. “Bands coming into Pittsburgh for one-nighters would drive to my house and take me on their gigs. If I was playing wrong, they’d show me. I was just like one of the boys,” she wrote. She heard tunes arranged then by Don Redman, a major influence. Redman was known for his economy of ideas and his writing of “choirs” for the reed and brass sections of Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra. Todd Rhodes, the pianist with the Synco Jazz Band/Cottonpickers, “used to take me out jamming and on one date let me sit in with the band. Some nights we jammed all the way from East Liberty down to Wylie Avenue, then a notorious section of town held in dread by so-called decent people. We always wound up in the Subway on Wylie—where Louise Mann and Baby Hines, Earl’s first wife, sang—a hole in the ground to which the cream of the crop came to enjoy the finest in the way o
f entertainment. For me it was a paradise.”
The district known as the Hill, which black Pittsburghers called with pride “Little Harlem,” was an important stop on the vaudeville circuit. Pittsburgh itself became an important town for the black community nationwide, with a powerful newspaper, the Courier. (Excluded from the normal white distribution systems, the Courier organized a network of black railroad porters to get the paper out all over the country, thus keeping Pittsburgh in the forefront of news about black America.) Like East Liberty, several miles away, the Hill had changed dramatically in the course of a few years, shifting from a patchwork of Jewish, Italian, Polish, and Hungarian enclaves to a flourishing black community where whites came mostly to purchase vice and entertainment. The center of things was thriving Wylie Avenue.
Pittsburgh proved a fertile ground for musicians. Among pianists, besides Mary and Hines, the city produced Billy Strayhorn, Erroll Garner, Ahmad Jamal, Horace Parlan, and Shirley Scott. Young Maxine Sullivan got her start as a singer there, as did Billy Eckstine and Dakota Staton (and for a time, Lena Horne lived on the Hill), as well as players such as Art Blakey, Kenny Clarke, Ray Brown, Stanley and Tommy Turrentine, Roy Eldridge, George Benson, and Jimmy Ponder. But black musicians are seldom cited in histories of Pittsburgh; in one serious work, there’s not a single mention, while, on the other hand, Stephen Foster’s birthplace is a Pittsburgh landmark.
AROUND THE HILL and East Liberty dancehalls, Mary was squired at times by her third important father-figure, whose involvement in her life is a bit more shadowy than Fletcher Burley’s or Hugh Floyd’s. Roland Mayfield, a sporting man with a stake in a gambling club, was “the Black prince of East Liberty,” wrote Mary, adding that her mother “trusted” him to squire her daughter around at night. “In order to hear Earl Hines often I formed the friendship of Roland Mayfield,” Mary explained, adding perhaps disingenuously, “I would introduce him to girls who were beautiful; they had to have long hair. Mayfield was fearless; he would stop brawls at the dances. I met him when I was 12. He was so rich that my girlfriends from Westinghouse and I would sit on the floor and count his money. He never thought of putting his money in the bank. He always carried it and many diamond rings in his pockets. He taught me to drive a car. And I’d go out by myself a lot and he’d get in his car and pick me up and bring me home. He would always pick me up or give me anything that I needed.