by Linda Dahl
“We went to Memphis, got a little work at the Pink Rose and then we were stranded for about six weeks and my mother fed the entire band,” Williams continued. “To get back to Kansas City we only got one booking, in Hannibal, Missouri—400 miles for a one-night gig! It took us eight hours to drive that and we get into town about two, three in the afternoon. The dance usually started at nine o’clock, and we’re tired. Mary and I are going to lay down and get a little rest. We went to this rooming house where a woman had musicians to stay—in all those towns they had places where show people and bands could stop overnight. No sooner did we get undressed than the landlady comes knocking on the door. ‘Okay, y’all can pay me now.’ Well, I didn’t have nothing to pay her with because we’d been stranded. Except what I called mad money—$2 that I kept in my watch pocket for when things were real desperate. I said, ‘I’ll pay you after the dance tonight.’ And she said, ‘No, I want my money now.’ We’re going back and forth, I’m telling her we’re going to play the dance. She said, ‘You’re going to play the dance but you ain’t going to make no money. Ain’t nobody coming to the dance.’ She made us put on our clothes and get up! I went and got Mary and me some hamburgers with that mad money, then we nodded in the car in front of the place where we were going to play at nine that night. And the rooming-house lady knew what she was talking about: wasn’t but three people at the dance. Every time our promoter hired a band, this other promoter would give a free dance to whites, so there wasn’t no need to come hear us. We didn’t have no money, and for about an hour Andy begged the promoter of our dance to lend us enough money to buy gas so we could drive our cars to Kansas City. He finally lent us enough to fill our tanks.”
It went on like this, off and on, for years. The band would be paid in fried chicken or frogs’ legs instead of cash, or had enough for only one meal a day, often a cheap bowl of stew or soup. They picked the corn out of farmers’ fields at night and roasted it. They even tried to play softball for money (but once only: they weren’t very good). Sometimes they had to push their cars when they ran out of gas. “When Kirk came backstage after a job with his head down,” Mary said, “we’d know he hadn’t been paid. Instead of gettin’ angry or quittin’ or running off, we’d just laugh. I made a little extra money by manicuring the boys’ nails. They paid me a nickel, and I’d take it out of the money they made from cards, which I held for them.”
After a job fell through in Cincinnati late in ’33, players took whatever work they could get on their own. Mary found a job in a roadhouse playing with drummer Ben Thigpen and trumpeter Earl Thompson. And she told John she was really going to quit the band this time: she saw no future for the Clouds. But John talked her out of it. “I’d tell the musicians, ‘One day we’ll make it big.’ ”
The worst was yet to come. Buffalo, New York, 1935: five years into the Depression and no end in sight. Joe Glaser, the agent who represented Louis Armstrong, booked the band into the Vendome Hotel Nightclub, promising to follow up with a date at the Apollo in New York. “But,” said John, “he couldn’t do it, so he dropped us there in Buffalo, in the coldest part of the winter. Andy would give us each 50 cents every day, to eat. His coat was so ragged that the elbows were out. It was hard times, though some people don’t like to remember the bad days. Andy didn’t put no bad things in that book of his he wrote [Twenty Years on Wheels]. Finally we played one dance at a black dancehall, nothing fancy, so we could get enough money together to get out of town.”
Back in Kansas City, Mary and John boarded with his relatives again, while she picked up a bit of work playing for dancing classes again and sharing from the musicians’ humble but communal pot. Despite the continual money problems, Mary said over and over that it was the high point of her life. “I just loved it. I could live that life over once again. Because those that were playing were great musicians.”
And compared to many other cities, Kansas City was in relatively good shape. “Any musician that was broke, there was places you automatically had a job, $2 a night and all you could drink,” John recalled. “You could get a steak dinner for 35 cents, a room for 75 cents a night. So you could live. And you could pick a good woman out of that and they would take care of you all night for sure.” There were dances at the many social clubs, 25-cent music lessons, and places like Piney Brown’s with pots of food and liberal glasses of whatever the musician was drinking.
AFTER MIDNIGHT ON nights when they were lucky enough to have had a paying gig, the band stashed their uniforms—worsted knickers for the men, a skirt for Mary—and headed off to jam. “We played from 9 to 12 and afterwards all the guys would rush to get to Piney Brown’s club on Twelfth Street. John would drop our carload off and take me home to bathe and put on a cool dress,” she wrote. The session, when she got there, might continue until well after dawn. Tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins was starring in Fletcher Henderson’s band in 1934, while Lester Young and Ben Webster, still unknown, were local heroes. One night, after playing a job with the Clouds, Mary was tired and went home to bed. “The word went round that Hawkins was in the Cherry Blossom”—a Japanese-decorated club “with beautiful little brown-skinned waitresses in kimonos” where high-rollers liked to hang out—she wrote, “and within about half an hour there were Lester Young, Ben Webster, Herschel Evans, Herman Walder, and one or two unknown tenors piling in the club to blow. Hawk [Coleman Hawkins] didn’t know the Kaycee tenormen were so terrific, and he couldn’t get himself together though he played all morning. I happened to be nodding that night, and around 4 A.M., I awoke to hear someone pecking on my screen. I opened the window on Ben Webster. He was saying, ‘Get up, pussycat, we’re jammin’ and all the pianists are tired out now. Hawkins has got his shirt off and is still blowing. You got to come down.’ Sure enough, when we got there Hawkins was in his singlet taking turns with the Kaycee men. It seems he had run into something he didn’t expect. Lester’s style was light and it took him maybe five choruses to warm up. But then he would really blow; then you couldn’t handle him on a cutting session. That was how Hawkins got cut up. The Henderson band was playing in St. Louis that evening, and Ben knew he ought to be on the way. But he kept trying to blow something to beat Ben and Herschel and Lester. When at last he gave up, he got straight in his car and drove to St. Louis. I heard he’d just bought a new Cadillac and that he burnt it out trying to make the job on time.”
Mary hung out at other clubs on Twelfth Street, too. One of her favorites was the Subway, where she’d go to listen to Bill Basie’s rocking, crisply aphoristic piano. “I listened to how a pianist pushed, like Count Basie, and I pushed.” Basie’s witty and thrifty swing style, along with Art Tatum’s, was one more coat of veneer carefully applied to the base coats of James P. Johnson, Earl Hines, Fats Waller. But Basie was also listening to her: “I didn’t hang around [the Subway Club] too often,” he said, “because the Subway also used to be one of Mary Lou Williams’s stopping-off places.… Anytime she was in the neighborhood, I used to find myself another little territory, because Mary Lou was tearing everybody up.” Kansas City pianist Pete Johnson, a great blues-based pianist to whom Mary pays tribute in her “Roll ’Em,” told the story of meeting Mary in about 1930 in Kansas City, when a friend took him over to the rooming house where Mary was living. “When we arrived no one was stirring, so we sat in the living room and my pal suggested that I play a little something on the piano, which I did. This started the roomers to getting up and coming in to listen. I felt pretty good with that audience because I had the reputation of being the best pianist in K.C. then. When I had finished, my friend said: ‘Mary Lou, why don’t you play a little something?’ So a girl sat down at the piano and I thought to myself that it would not be much. Well, when I heard her I told everybody that I had never heard so much piano played by a woman and very few men! I did not feel so big after that. You see, my friend knew just how great Mary Lou was but he wanted to see my reactions under these particular circumstances!” Johnson chose Mary’s 1930 reco
rding of “Nite Life” as one of his three favorites.
Visiting the old sites of such memorable music is now a pretty melancholy business, but in the thirties, Piney Brown’s, the Sunset, the Reno, the Subway, and similar clubs were a kind of after-hours jazz Juilliard. Mary gathered heaps of raw material and began weaving them into new works for the Clouds of Joy. Riffs at late-night jam sessions were generated seemingly without effort or end, spearheaded by greats like the outstanding trumpeter Hot Lips Page, a mellow, supportive ensemble following right along. “An arranger in a band would never be able to write such great arrangements as you’d hear on these sessions,” Mary declared. “We’d jam until the wee hours of the morning, often ending up in somebody’s house and the boys having me play some of my weird harmonies which they called ‘zombie music.’ ” But such experiments were only for the insiders, principally other musicians, not for the paying public.
Already a veteran in her mid-twenties, she’d learned to “play with everybody and everything,” and to transpose to any key, depending on other players’ preferences or limitations. “If they were looking for somebody who could play in all of them badass keys Hawk was calling for,” said Basie, “Mary Lou was the one to get.”
Not last came the soulfulness of her playing when she was “bearing down,” as essential to the music as the notes themselves in an atmosphere where, as writer Whitney Balliett puts it, “the blues was never tongue in cheek.” But if Mary was consistently capable of tearing it up at the piano, away from that piano she remained shy and retiring. Producer Dave Dexter, who was a teenager when Mary played with the Clouds at Fairyland Park (admission, fifty cents), recalled, “At set’s end Mary Lou quickly retreats to backstage. She’s too shy, too modest, to rap with the dancers jammed around the bandstand.”
After she became an official member of the band in ’31, Andy Kirk continued to transfer Mary’s ideas to paper, a tedious process for both. “In Kansas City, Andy’d come to the house like at 10 in the morning and sit there till 12 at night,” Mary wrote. “I said, ‘I can’t go through this!’ ” But he also had the patience to start from scratch in teaching her the rudiments of music theory. “His simplified version of teaching enabled me to learn fast. He taught me in a way I’ve never forgotten: telling me that there were only three diminished chords, with examples. Lower your third a half tone, he’d say, and this is your minor; raise your fifth a half tone, and this is your augmented chord. This was good for my ear and I watched him with the band. So I learned the key transpositions for the instruments and then I could do it myself.”
“She had a good ear and tried to write down what she heard,” acknowledged Kirk. “If she wasn’t out all night at the jazz clubs in Kansas City, listening and getting ideas, she’d be sitting up at the foot of the bed, legs crossed like an Indian, just writing and writing, while John was sleeping. Sometimes she’d stay up all night working at her arrangements. She’d try one thing, then another, get mad, and start over. As time went on she learned voicing for the different horns from things I showed her from some arrangements I’d bought.”
Mary was never a consistently prolific composer, but had periods of high creativity, including the unrecorded period in the thirties when the band spent so much time hanging out in Kansas City. Claude “Fiddler” Williams, no longer in the band but still living in Kansas City, recalls watching Mary at work on arrangements at Local 627 Musicians Union Hall. She wrote her ideas out on paper without playing them on the piano, which she said slowed her down, and then took the arrangement into rehearsal. There, she said, “I always experimented quite a bit, which caused me to rearrange, because you don’t know what it’s going to sound like.” She could write anywhere—dressing rooms, bathrooms, park benches, the back seats of cars—a useful knack for a traveling composer. “I always liked lying flat on my back on the grass in Paseo Park in Kansas City, looking up at the stars, composing, late at night.” But most of all, she liked to write in bed. Living in cramped quarters, her bed became her desk, indeed her office, containing her sheet music, her sharpened pencils, her ashtray, lighter, and cigarettes, perhaps a plate of food and drink.
In Kansas City, as Andy Kirk pointed out, blacks had their own “everything,” including a well-run union with its goodsized building and a dynamic leader in their president, William Shaw. “We were just about the only Negro union with a charter,” Mary stated. “In other cities the Negro unions were subsidiaries. He [Shaw] always gave fabulous dances at the Paseo Ballroom every year to raise money for the union. It held at least 1,000 people and usually everybody in K.C., Missouri, turned up at the dances at the Paseo. It booked big-name bands: Fletcher Henderson, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, Earl Hines. Even the elite was found at many of the public dances, seated upstairs,” she added, referring to the light-skinned caste, among whom Andy and Mary Kirk socialized. The “elite” was from Kansas City, Missouri. Across the Missouri River in Kansas, Mary noted, the comparable set “was much stricter. They would not go a public dance—only their private dances that our band played for.” Nor would most whites, for if Kansas City was not as rigidly segregated as the South, it was still on the border of North and South.
WHITE MUSICIANS, THROUGH their own subculture, tried to circumvent segregation. Mary recalled that in the twenties in Pittsburgh, “Actor Dick Powell, who led a band before getting beat up in the movies, sent taxis for me so that I could play for his band during their breaks at the Inwright Theatre.” In Kansas City, “Jack Teagarden and Paul Whiteman used to drop down to hear me. Glen Gray’s musicians never seemed to miss us when they were in town and they made something of a point of getting me to play for them and with them.”
Mary’s relationships with white musicians were not only friendly, they could become quite intimate, and sometimes romantic, as apparently happened with Jack Teagarden, who was in and out of Kansas City with Ben Pollack’s band. Mary had become friendly with three light-skinned “glamour girls” with money to spend, who were crazy about jazz—and jazz musicians, like the tall, good-looking, sexy Teagarden. But he had eyes for Mary. “Right away we felt like friends. We visited most of the speaks downtown. One in particular fascinated me. It was decorated to resemble the inside of a penitentiary, even with bars all over the place. The waiters wore striped uniforms like the convicts down south. Later on that evening, I played for the boys, after which they focused their attention on me (being musicians), forgetting about the glamour girls. Jack, not having his trombone, got up and sang ‘I gotta right to sing the blues,’ which was the end. He never got fresh or embarrassing, he was the nicest. I think we were in love yet afraid to say or do anything about it. Just felt good being together. Of course it was all very flattering, especially when he asked if I’d marry him, but we dismissed that very lightly. What my girlfriends didn’t know was how easy it was for two musicians to fall in love: music has its own charm. I think of Jack as a charming fine person. And I didn’t hear of the glamour girls after that.”
MARY HAD LEARNED very early in her life to compartmentalize her personal life. Even music, the essence of her being, she kept to herself unless she was around musicians. Her niece Helen Floyd recalls of Mary’s visits to her house, “If you didn’t know she was a musician, you’d never suspect it. She didn’t sit down and play, even if there was a piano. She’d do crossword puzzles, play games, cards.… She’d lay up in the bed and think. Sometimes she’d write music in the bed. But she’d never talk about it, play it.”
Family was in a box of its own. During the scuffling years of the mid-1930s, she didn’t have money to wire home to the children, and her correspondence clearly shows the guilt she felt for “abandoning” them to stay on the road instead of settling in Pittsburgh and working, say, as a music teacher or local performer. (How illogical is guilt to the one not suffering it!) But few people knew the concerns she had for the children, the depth of the problems at home.
Her marriage was boxed separately from love, and neither was a very tidy bin. She and Jo
hn fought as usual about money. But Mary also badly wanted children. “She pleaded with me, but I said no. Not the kind of life we had, traveling every day and we were so young,” recalled John Williams. “My mother would be raising up my child and I would hardly know it? No. I didn’t want that.” But without his knowledge, Mary stopped using protection; though when time had passed and she had failed to get pregnant, she went to a clinic in the neighborhood, where, John said (for she tearfully confessed the whole thing to him later), she was told she had “some kind of female problem, like a tipped womb and had to be ‘fixed up’ to have a baby.” (A tipped, or retroverted, womb in and of itself need not be an impediment to pregnancy or delivery, however. And years later, Mary did in fact get pregnant.)
By 1933 Mary no longer troubled to disguise her liaisons from her husband. John Williams, sounding amused (at a remove of more than fifty years), recalled, “I caught Mary in bed three times with men.” She countered, “I never kept anything from John. He knew everything anyway. I had told him I didn’t love him. In fact I didn’t love anyone for long.” She shied away from the ultra-casual sex scenes easily available to musicians, but she got around. “I did the pickin’ and I only had one boyfriend at a time,” she said meaningfully. Not quite true that John knew everything: he did not know about a heated clandestine affair she was conducting with a married bandmate, Johnny Harrington—John’s best friend and the husband of Mary’s girlfriend, Othie.