by Linda Dahl
But, she added casually, “I was seeking thrills here and there, which was unknown to my husband. My friends and I were daredevils. Mabel Durham and I were quite wild together. John and Allen would say, ‘Please don’t go out tonight, trouble is expected,’ but we’d wait until the guys had gone to work, and down we’d go to the main Negro street to watch the fights and shooting, especially Saturday. This was fun to me. We never realized we could have gotten shot. Once when John came home, he said that quite a few people were killed.”
With so much time on her hands, Mary soon knew the individual strengths and weaknesses of the players in the band. With her quick ear, Claude Williams recalls, she had begun fashioning solos for non-improvising players like tenor saxophonist Lawrence “Slim” Freeman and trumpeter Harry “Big Jim” Lawson. Another musician, probably Andy Kirk, wrote down the ideas she demonstrated on the piano—an approach similar to what Duke Ellington later made famous in big-band jazz.
As the summer dragged on, Mary had a premonition of bad news while making pastries with Mabel Durham in their landlady’s kitchen. “I began crying. Tears fell into the bowl of flour, I was crying so. When John and Mabel and the landlady asked what was troubling me, I just said I wanted to go home to Pittsburgh. They thought this was strange, but a few hours later I received a wire that my stepfather had passed away. Well, John sent me to Pittsburgh.”
Back in East Liberty, a griefstricken Mary rolled up her sleeves, got down on her hands and knees, and cleaned her mother’s dirty house in preparation for the wake. In a diary, she added details about her unhappy relationship with her mother that she later excised from her planned autobiography:
I was very unhappy staying with my mother and family. I had taken care of the family since Stepfather was unable to do work. I stayed there for about a month or so, my mother never thanking me, but always asking for more money.
I was very unhappy staying with her. I wanted to put the smaller kids in private school, away from her. This she wouldn’t listen to. In her warped way of thinking, she felt I was trying to take her kids from her. There were unpleasant scenes and we never got along after this.
I decided to secure work to once again support them. I got a job at the Subway Club for $20 a night—with tips it was sometimes up to $50. Baby Hines was there with her wonderful voice. And I moved in with Mamie, who was very kind and understanding. Hugh and Mamie weren’t doing too good, due to the fact my brother-in-law had spent just about all his money to try and cure his father, who was paralyzed on one side. I bought a new rug, stove, divan, and other things they needed, and everyone was happy.
Then, the Andy Kirk band passed through Pittsburgh on a one-nighter and John insisted I leave with him, which I did, this time graduating to the chauffeur job, often driving 12 hours without resting. The Pla-Mor in Kansas City had decided to bring in a black band as something new, to boost sagging admissions. So we headed to Kansas City.
“WE’D HAD IT real good in Oklahoma,” John Williams explained, “but we ran into trouble with the white union there, a man named Fox, I remember. He tricked us. A lot of the black bands were getting most all the work because they were the jazz bands and could play the music and they were putting the white musicians out of work. The Clouds of Joy had the best jobs—ballroom in the winter, amusement park in the summer—and the white union wanted them. We played for white dances, but one night a week, usually Monday, would be for blacks at the dancehalls. They raised the scale—minimum you had to pay the musicians—but didn’t tell Kirk. Well, that was the night they came afterward to where we were playing and said Kirk had underpaid. We were fined about $1,500 total. We didn’t have that kind of money. No way. And this was segregation days; you didn’t protest. So we had to leave Oklahoma.”
Luckily, the popular Kansas City bandleader George E. Lee had become a good friend of Andy Kirk’s and helped the Clouds put together a string of engagements in Kansas and Missouri to pay off their fine. And a lavish new ballroom had just opened in Kansas City. Called the Pla-Mor, it had a swimming pool that converted to an ice hockey rink in the winter, a bowling alley, a restaurant, and a huge dancehall. Lee thought the Clouds of Joy would go over well there, where there was plenty of work and an appetite for fresh-sounding bands.
“We didn’t even know what a plum we’d picked off the 1929 Boom Tree when we rolled into Kansas City on that hot June day, the first out-of-town colored band to play the Pla-Mor,” wrote Andy Kirk. The city had a border-state mentality, not quite northern, nor quite southern. Mary was pleased that she could again sit wherever she wanted on the bus, but segregation still marked most aspects of daily life. The separate black and white musicians’ unions, for example, were not to merge until 1970. (The black musicians’ union hall, a brick building at 1823 Highland Avenue, still stands.)
What pleased Mary most was the music, which had evolved a great deal since her interlude a few years before. “Music everywhere in the Negro section of town,” she exulted, “and 50 or more cabarets rocking on 12th and 18th Streets” (though others, such as Claude Williams, reckoned there were at most a dozen). There were certainly scores of fine players in Kansas City. Some, like George and his sister Julia Lee, remained local stars, while others, like Charlie Parker and Ben Webster, achieved jazz immortality. The rich musical flavor of the era is reflected in a newspaper ad from December 1929 promoting a veritable banquet of bands in a “battle” sponsored by Local 627—bands led by Bennie Moten, Andy Kirk, George Lee, Walter Page, George Williams, and Paul Banks.
John and Mary stayed at first again with his hospitable Aunt Babe and Uncle Quincy Williams. Mary earned some change playing for their daughter Mabel’s dancing classes. “I also taught her routines I knew, for I was a pretty good tap dancer myself,” she added. But a great deal of her time was spent out on the town, soaking up “Kansas City Swing,” which had a profound impact on her playing and writing. She admired Julia Lee, one of several excellent women pianists based in Kansas City. And she loved the Blue Devils, who would provide the nucleus for the Count Basie Orchestra, observing that “They were sensational with Page doubling on bass and bass saxophone. Page’s group had great men like Jimmy Rushing, ‘Hot Lips’ Page, Buster Smith on clarinet. These three later joined Bennie Moten’s band. A show had come to K.C. and Count Basie was with the show. He liked K.C. so much he decided to stay.” She further recalled: “There was Harlan Leonard with crazy Herman Walder on tenor, and Jay McShann, a real crazy stylist on piano, and his orchestra. Jay McShann took on an alto player, young Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker in knee pants, too young to play with a band. Often musicians would catch him peeping in the door of dates. When he was a little older, he and beautiful Mary Kirk, a pianist, had a gig together with a very good drummer whose name I’ve forgotten. The boys and I would stop by to hear them play and we never knew what Charlie was saying, it was so way out. But it sounded good. Also, there was Jap Allen with young Ben Webster. Pete Johnson and Joe Turner were shouting the blues at the Sunset, on 12th Street. Alphonse Trent’s band was often in town.” Even the school bands were great, she added. “Maybe they played out of tune but they could really swing.”
There was lots of work but not much money for the musicians; bands at the black clubs often got paid in sandwiches and beer, and counted themselves lucky at that. But the relaxed atmosphere gave musicians the time to work out ideas. “Nobody ever got homesick for New York when they visited K.C. Kansas City boasted of everything New York had, including the best musicians. And their famous barbecue, chili and crawdads were the end. There were the races, and swimming, and beautiful Swope Park and the zoo, jam sessions all the time and big dances such as the annual union dance. If you were without funds, people would make you a loan without you asking for it, would look at you and tell if you were hungry and put things right.”
Meanwhile, Mary was still on her dollar-a-day budget, supplemented by pickup work at parties, accompanying dance classes, and teaching piano lessons. But she made the rounds,
with her pals Mabel Durham and Othie Harrington. “I remember once that I did not even have a dress to wear and the woman where I was living took the curtains off her window—a pongee material—and made me a dress. Whenever I did receive money, I’d share it with Mabel and Othie.”
What she liked best was going to the jam sessions after the paying gigs ended, around midnight. Neither the ensuing Great Depression nor Prohibition kept those good times from rolling. “No other city in the world was quite like Kansas City,” says journalist and record producer Dave Dexter, a native. “Musicians and singers came into the Jackson County town of 400,000 like cattle—in droves. For under the wide-open yet iron rule of Democratic political czar Thomas J. Pendergast there were no closing hours for saloons and nightclubs. Prostitution flourished day and night in the open. There were jobs available for entertainers of every type.” As for the stock market crash? Said Andy Kirk, “In Kansas City it was like a pin dropping; the blast of jazz and blues drowned it out. People were crowding the clubs and ballrooms as usual.”
MARY SOON BECAME a player to watch on the after-hours scene, and what a formidable school that must have been in classrooms like Piney Brown’s and the Sunset. Instead of having to contend with highly compressed solos and arrangements of the “10 cents a dance” format, musicians had the luxury of time to “tell a story” on their instruments. And with her terrific musical memory, acute harmonic sense, perfect pitch, assured rhythmic sense, and abundance of ideas, Mary flourished. “It was the first time we had ever seen a girl cat who could carve the local boys,” remarked Harlan Leonard, an excellent local bandleader.
Kansas City was Mary’s coming of age as a musician and as a woman. She had found her intellectual peers and was challenged and stimulated to develop a formidable technique in the inherent lyricism of the blues form that shaped the sessions. Kansas City in the thirties was her Paris, her Harvard, her Haight-Ashbury, a free and easy communal atmosphere. As Mary put it, “If you don’t play well, then all of them will sound bad.” Everybody’s art bloomed under these conditions.
“In K.C. there was so much love around.… There was never that distinction between classes or that complexion madness I had found in Pittsburgh. The elite socialized with the middle class. They would attend our dances and any of the other dances if the music was good, yet they had their sorority things going also. But among musicians especially, there was no throat cutting or deceit. Those who were not making it always got help from capable musicians. Count Basie and I had a thing going, teaching young kids music. Often he’d send me pupils and vice versa. At one time we must have had over 30 kids between the two of us, teaching them.”
Although she socialized from time to time with white musicians—Jack Teagarden, in town with Ben Pollack’s band, squired her to his gig at the Muehlebach, the big white hotel in downtown Kansas City, “an exclusive white spot where Negroes weren’t ordinarily allowed,” as Mary put it—the creative center of jazz was uptown. “My attention was focused where the giants were, and that was 18th and Vine or 12th Street,” she said firmly.
IN THE FALL of 1929, producer Jack Kapp of Brunswick/Vocalion Records came to Kansas City from Chicago. Victor, its rival, had signed Bennie Moten’s band, and Kapp wanted to sign on the best of the rest of the jumping bands in town. With him was Dick Voynow, a former pianist with the Wolverines and now his recording engineer.
Serendipity gave Mary the piano chair for the date. Wrote Andy Kirk, “They auditioned us at the Pla-Mor and four other bands at other spots. That audition turned out to be a real ‘sleeper.’ We were all set up and ready except for Marion Jackson, our pianist. Nobody seemed to know where he was. Things were getting tense,” Kirk went on. “We’d have to start soon or blow it. John Williams said, ‘How about getting Prelude?’ Prelude was our name for his wife, Mary Lou.
“When John first came on the band he had asked me to hear Mary play.… I did and agreed that she was a fine pianist, but we already had one that met our requirements. And we were making a lot of road trips and I always thought doing one-nighters would be hard on a woman. But this was an emergency. I told John, okay. When Mary Lou came in and sat down at the piano to audition with us, no one had the wildest idea she’d be a big factor in our landing an excellent two-year recording contract, or wilder yet, that she would make jazz history.”
“When I arrived at the audition,” Mary wrote, “I played everything the band played as if I had been with them all along, this surprising them greatly. They gave me solos to play and Kapp must have liked them because he set a date to record the band the following week at radio station KMBC in Kansas City.… Andy said later because I made the audition he thought it no more than fair that I record with them.”
On the strength, then, of a last-minute, ad-lib performance, Mary was included in the Clouds of Joy recording debut over several days in November of 1929. And Kapp liked what he heard at that recording session so much that he signed an exclusive contract with the band. This was Mary’s doing. As soon as the record date had been set—for a week from the audition—she approached Kirk. “Andy knew that I had ideas,” she wrote. “I was writing all along but I couldn’t write it down. I’d give them ideas during rehearsal. Maybe they wanted to play a song like ‘Singing in the Rain’ and I’d say, ‘Well, listen to this.’ Andy would take it down real fast.” For the recording date, she dictated at a furious pace. “Never have I written so many things so quickly in my entire career, about 20 things, including ‘Cloudy’ and ‘Corky.’ ” (Although Kirk maintained that he wrote part of “Corky,” most sources give sole composer credit to Mary.)
Harmonically and rhythmically, she was way ahead of the pack, just as she’d been in her tiny solos two years before with the Syncopators. But she still had much to learn. When she dictated her first composition to Kirk, for instance, called “Messa Stomp,” it was carefully plotted, building from a cheerful stroll to a jaunty strut, with the approach to horn voicings she’d admired in Don Redman’s work. But much of it, initially, was unplayable—beyond the range of half the instruments. “But the boys,” Mary wrote, “gave me a chance and each time I did better, until I found myself doing five and six arrangements per week. Later on, I learned more theory from people like the great Don Redman, Edgar Sampson, Milton Orent and Will Bradley.”
Between November 7 and 11, 1929, the band recorded eight tunes, five of them written by Mary or originating with her: “Messa Stomp,” “Corky Stomp,” “Cloudy,” “Froggy Bottom,” and “Lotta Sax Appeal.” When Mary collaborated—with John or Andy at that time—she contributed the creative meat of the voicings for the reeds and brass, as in “Cloudy” and “Froggy Bottom.” It is impossible to disentangle claims of authorship for many past jazz compositions; jazz was such a collaborative and informally processed music. Though internal evidence strongly suggests that the works cited are Mary’s, she sometimes ceded cocomposer credit, often only to keep the peace. One example: on the second, much-reworked “Froggy Bottom,” recorded in the late 1930s, John Williams received cocomposer credit, though Mary—who had conceived and worked out the new arrangement—maintained later that the song was “hers.” She almost certainly wrote the majority, if not all, of the voicings for the band’s tunes at that time. Of the remaining three tunes, the uncredited “Somepin’ Slow & Low” may well be Mary’s arrangement. “Somepin’ ” has a rather ambitious, long, lilting melody line and 4-bar solos, including a good one for trombonist Durham, and one for Mary, whose sophisticated rhythmic breaks and harmonic innovations distinguish her. On “Lotta Sax Appeal,” a sprightly, upbeat blues, John Williams sometimes took full composer credit, but at times shared it with Mary.
As for her playing, it was supple and dazzling, “richly chordal” and “astonishingly self-assured,” to use Gunther Schuller’s phrase. Along with drummer Crack McNeil, she helped to balance the rather heavy, plodding effect of Kirk’s tuba. She had a sparkling and confident, still Hinesian manner, but, as tunes like “Cloudy” show, she was
already heading into the early swing era. (Confusingly, as with “Froggy Bottom,” the “Cloudy” recorded a few years later was quite a different piece.) On November 11, when the band recorded her co-credited “Froggy Bottom” and “Corky Stomp,” Mary gets into one of her most pleasing grooves, a relaxed, lilting blues. She got the idea for “Froggy Bottom” when she passed through a little town in her travels, a town where, she said fancifully, folks “just sank down to the bottom of things, like frogs in a pool, leading a carefree life, just eating ham ‘n cabbage.” There is a gracefulness to her playing of this, one of her all-time favorites, that is a hallmark of Mary’s style.
But despite Mary’s appeal to Kapp and the musicians in the band, despite her astonishing output for the recordings, and despite her own efforts—”She was so determined to play that piano, I began calling her ‘the pest,’ ” said Andy Kirk—Mary was replaced again by Marion Jackson as the band pianist.
Again, it was Jack Kapp who gave her a chance to record with the Clouds. In the spring of 1930, he telegraphed them to come up to Chicago, where Brunswick was located, to make more records, and they left Mary behind. But Kapp didn’t want them without Mary. “He told Andy that the band didn’t sound the same and he didn’t want to record it without me,” wrote Mary. Send for her, he told Kirk.
But in the meantime, while she was home on her own, she was undergoing some sordid and brutal experiences, as Mary detailed in a diary entry. It speaks volumes about both her marriage and her habitual secretiveness that she wrote with such detailed candor, while never revealing to anyone else what had happened to her: