by Linda Dahl
Leonard Feather, who lived above Café Society, was crazy about Hazel Scott and steered her career before Barney Josephson became her personal manager; both coached her in ways Mary would never have stood for. And it would be pale-brown Hazel Scott, not chocolate Mary Lou Williams, who was called to Hollywood, where she played cameo roles emphasizing her sex appeal (most memorable: a scene in Rhapsody in Blue in which she played the piano in a fairy-princess gown while the camera lingered on her creamy decolletage). Avoided in most discussions of Hazel Scott’s quick rise to popularity was the taboo subject of color, or rather caste. “The racism that existed in that world! I don’t just mean the white world, either,” says Peter O’Brien. “That light, half-caste, almost white look was the acceptable, pleasing thing. Hazel was light-skinned. Mary was dark.” Mary was still the undisputed “queen” of the ivories, accepted into the highest ranks of musicianship. But by 1945, it was Hazel Scott who was enjoying its trappings: she carried a trademark red rose wherever she went, had her hands insured by Lloyd’s of London, bought her jewelry from Harry Winston, and that same year, at age twenty-five, married the power broker of black America, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., minister of the powerful Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. (At the wedding, Mary was a bridesmaid and Hazel was given away by Barney Josephson, standing in for her long-deceased father.) Mary and Hazel remained friends, each helping the other later on at difficult junctures in their lives. “Although Mary had been very jealous and hurt by how far Hazel could go,” thinks Peter O’Brien, “I think she didn’t mind it that much because Hazel was a talented musician.”
Mary hoped to get movie deals, throughout the forties, and later a television show, but her plans seldom materialized. Decades later Barney Josephson acknowledged the futility of trying to mold Mary as he’d molded Hazel. “Mary Lou was very self-effacing.… If she’d had the bounce of Hazel Scott, she’d have been bigger than Hazel and gotten all the publicity, because she was a better pianist. Nobody could touch her, man or woman.… That she didn’t emphasize showmanship was the only thing that held Mary back. I know, one afternoon, I tried to show Mary what I wanted her to do. It was a matter of repeating things over and over again to excite people. Mary got mad. I tried to get her to sell what she had by playing to the audience, but Mary wouldn’t sell herself that way.” O’Brien agrees: “She didn’t want the limelight. Mary Lou was not a performer. She would barely speak or take a bow, and she didn’t and couldn’t sing. She just didn’t have the kind of personality that grabs the mike and holds the attention.”
Occasionally, she would break out of her shell. “One night at the Café I made up my mind to try a song,” Mary remembered. “I went out on the floor and began singing ‘You Know, Baby.’ Even the guy in the men’s room came to see what was happening. Word got to Barney at Café Uptown and he came down hoping to dig the next performance. But I had sobered up quite a bit by then and refused to sing again.” Indeed, there are only rare examples of Mary’s mild, pleasant voice on record.
“She was more than just a damn piano player,” O’Brien emphasizes. “She was black, a woman, and an artist. And people often didn’t understand her because of this. Mary knew just how musical she was and how she couldn’t become a star. I don’t know if she understood it, but she knew it. And it hurt.”
ALTHOUGH JOHN HAMMOND had been key in getting Mary into Café Society, and was highly influential as a record producer, Mary was as wary of his interference in her artistic life as she was of Barney Josephson’s. For all her ambition to get a recording contract with a major label—something she wrote about repeatedly in her diary—she chafed in his company, wary of his very fixed opinions about musicians and his insistence that others fall in line. (Nor was she alone in this. “Hammond himself said that it ‘nearly broke Basie’s heart’ when he had to fire a man to take on one of Hammond’s discoveries,” writes James Lincoln Collier. Teddy Wilson, when he was leading his excellent orchestra, reportedly turned down a steady job at the Café before Mary, because, he said, “I would have to take his men, his personnel. He wouldn’t take the men out of my big band.” (Mary knew all of the musicians well.) Like Teddy Wilson, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Benny Goodman later in his career (though Goodman was Hammond’s brother-in-law), Mary withdrew from Hammond’s orbit. All during the forties, when Mary was writing stunning music and Hammond was in charge of jazz production at Columbia, Mary seems to have made no more recordings for him: her last one was a 1939 entry, the swing-era pieces “Little Joe from Chicago” and “Margie,” only recently released for the first time. Though she admired Hammond’s political commitment, including a trip he made down south to support the Scottsboro boys during that famous trial, she later maintained that the best way to be friends with him was not to be around him. However, by the 1970s, John Hammond was once more a keen supporter of Mary’s music and facilitated record dates for her.
“I don’t think she could have conformed to his idea of what the music was supposed to be like,” thinks Peter O’Brien. “He would have wanted to continue to record her only if she kept playing like the Mary Lou of ’36 and ’38. Here was a really intelligent person, a creative artist who did not produce on demand, but from inside herself. But this was not allowed black women in that period.” However, it is possible that Hammond was the executive producer for a date Mary did for Mercury in 1948—two recently discovered, very good bop arrangements she made of “Just You, Just Me” and “Just an Idea,” her own composition. Mary recalled later that there had been some “unpleasantness” on that date, cutting short the project, and the two tunes languished in the record company vaults for fifty years. (Happily, they have finally been issued.)
For a good deal of her career, though certainly in the 1940s, music critics seemed uneasy about how to categorize a black female jazz composer. A review in Time magazine when Mary first played Café Society in June 1943 is larded with a patronizing attitude (not the less objectionable because it is unconscious), headlining Mary as a “Kitten on the Keys,” and describing her as a “sinewy young Negro woman playing the solid, unpretentious, flesh & bone kind of jazz piano that is expected from such vigorous Negro masters.” This about a woman who was producing highly sophisticated versions of Ellington, Gershwin, and her own richly harmonic pieces! Another review of Mary at Café Society merely called her the “plain unassuming girl who plays a solid boogie-woogie.”
Although Mary waited in vain for a major label to sign her on, in 1944 she began a unique and very productive association with the record producer Moses (Moe) Asch, who presided over his own small, idiosyncratic record company. Over the years, he went on to produce a huge and far-flung group of recordings for his labels, Asch, Disc, then Folkways (today Smithsonian Folkways). After beginning a career recording Jewish folk material, Asch became a jazz and then a folk enthusiast and recorded, besides Mary, Art Tatum, Erroll Garner, Lead Belly, Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and many others. Moe Asch gave Mary carte blanche for the next several years. “Anytime she wanted to record all she had to do was call him,” recalls Johnnie Garry. Asch would see that everything was set up, turn on the recording equipment—and leave the room. “He never told a musician how to record or what to do,” Mary said admiringly. “If you burped, he’d record that.” For this she loved Moe Asch. It was almost like having her own record company without the financial and administrative headaches. Also important, Asch was well ahead of his time in terms of his overall presentation of the material. “He provided his albums with background notes, cover notes, lyrics to the music; records that were superbly packaged,” noted a connoisseur of early record cover art.
The downside of Asch’s laissez-faire approach was that everything was done on the cheap. Distribution of the records was limited, nothing was spent on advertising, and the inferior materials he used to make his records doomed them to wear out quickly. Certainly his musicians didn’t get rich working for Asch; Mary had to ask repeatedly for her money. But Asch, f
or all his economies, often simply didn’t have it to give. “The poor guy,” Mary wrote, “never quite made it financially because he was too nice to musicians, paying their price even if he had to sleep out in the rain. He’d always treat musicians to big steak dinners and drinks. Some deserved this but many did not.” And, she admitted, “We ruined a couple of sessions being too high.”
By 1948, in fact, Moe Asch was bankrupt, and Mary was out of a record company. Regrouping, Asch decided to avoid competition with the major labels producing jazz and turned to folk music exclusively. Nevertheless, the volume of her recording for Asch from 1944 to 1946 meant that she received more royalties over the years from Asch than from any other record company during her lifetime. “Moe Asch was the only one who would record me in the forties,” she told Peter O’Brien. She was hardly exaggerating.
In 1944 alone, she produced a total of twenty-five sides for Asch on his Disc label. On the first session that winter, she recorded solos of three favorites she had recently arranged for Ellington, and again for Harold Baker with her short-lived combo—”Blue Skies,” “Caravan,” and “Yesterdays,” charming examples of Mary at the peak of her swing playing (though unreleased until half a century later). In March, she recorded with Café Society’s house band, including the fine trumpeter Frankie Newton, arrangements with creamy voicings and mellow harmonies, including an original, “Satchel Mouth Baby” (later called “Pretty Eyed Baby”), and “Yesterday’s Kisses” with clarinetist Edmond Hall. In April, she recorded more solos, including of her own “Mary’s Boogie” and “Drag ’Em” (a.k.a. “New Drag ’Em Blues”), and her fine arrangement of “St. Louis Blues” called “Handy Eyes.”
Back in the studio that summer, with a septet that included Don Byas on tenor, Dick Vance on trumpet, Vic Dickenson on trombone, Claude Greene on clarinet, and her preferred rhythm players from Café Society, Al Lucas on bass and Jack Parker on drums, Mary recorded her swing-style bouquet to the photographer Gjon Mili (“Gjon Mili Jam Session”) and a co-composition with Don Byas (“Man O’Mine,” which quite possibly was also titled “My Last Affair”). And again she reworked a favorite in “Stardust,” taking two quite different approaches, one a languid piano feature, the other by ensemble.
In July, Mary rested, but in August she was back in the studio as a trio with bassist Al Hall and trumpeter Bill Coleman—with novel arrangements of six standards. The interplay between the musicians was hand-in-glove; after he heard that August date and the one that followed in December, Dizzy Gillespie wanted her to do a similar record with him (it didn’t happen). Mary’s muse was in an impish mood that summer. The music was full of high spirits, even near-slapstick at times: for example, in “Russian Lullaby,” Bill Coleman shouts “Oh heave ho!” before Mary launches into a brilliant spring cleaning of the tune. On “Persian Rug” (where, for some reason, Al Hall is made to play at the top of his bass in what is apparently a cuckoo-clock imitation), the melody is cleverly interwoven with “It Ain’t Necessarily So” and ends with a laughing trumpet. Mary’s composition “You Know, Baby” is a droll send-up of sexiness and the popular boogie-woogie style that bored her, a tune complete with air kisses and grunts. But it is “Night and Day” that best displays her wit. A piano introduction that sets the melody straight on its head is followed by a mellow trumpet reading of the melody, a quick bass solo, and a trio reading, before again turning the melody upside down. “Night and Day” ends with a rumba rhythm and a last “ha ha, ha ha” from Coleman’s merry trumpet. Many years later, a reviewer judged these records, and Mary’s solos in particular, to be “full of joys—brilliant flourishes and treble calligraphies in ‘Blue Skies’ and ‘Persian Rug,’ sardonic boogie in ‘You Know, Baby’ … [and a] readiness to vary the mood by changes of tempo that bespeaks an artistic approach to arrangement and a bold challenge to the functional image of jazz to which few could rise in those days.”
But it was a very different musical kettle of fish in December. Or rather, kettles. The first was “The Minute Man,” a weak excuse for a patriotic song on which Josh White sang flat and Mary dutifully laid down chords, with yet another version of “Froggy Bottom” thrown in on the B side. (She had produced another overtly political tune the previous August, “The Ballot Box Boogie in the Time of Franklin D,” in support of FDR’s reelection.) The important musical business came a few days later, when Mary made her only recording with Coleman Hawkins on tenor saxophone (Bill Coleman was on trumpet again, along with Eddie Robinson on bass and Denzil Best on drums, Joe Evans on alto sax, and Claude Greene on clarinet on “Song in My Soul” and “This and That,” Greene’s tune). Mary, Bill Coleman, and Coleman Hawkins were three of a minority of prominent swing-era musicians who had begun to explore the then revolutionary musical challenges to the status quo, the new music that came to be called bop. Mary’s “Song in My Soul” was a new and sophisticated blues lament, beautifully played by Mary (though it could be heard in a better arrangement the following year on her radio program, with a vocal added, sung by the young, Billie Holiday–ish Sylvia Sims). Despite its unfortunate title, “Carcinoma” (formerly called “Cancer,” for the sign in the zodiac) was lovely, “a slow, insinuating riff opus with a delightful atmosphere,” as reviewer Barry Ulanov described it in Metronome.
But the pièce de résistance of that session was Mary’s arrangement of “Lady Be Good,” in which the melody is disguised. Here is the first concrete evidence of Mary’s shift from swing to the new style of jazz—the rather boppish figures with their “modern” oddness of turns and shifts in phrasing and even in her voicings. “Lady Be Good” signaled her deepening involvement in a more demanding, more sophisticated brand of jazz.
IT WAS PROBABLY no coincidence that the music sparkled so much on the Asch recordings in ’44, for Mary was involved in a new love affair. Until she settled in New York and began to perform at Café Society, Mary had lived and loved in a largely self-contained black world in which whites existed, for the most part, only as exotics, criminals, or authority figures—cops, theater owners, managers, agents, record producers: white males who controlled a musician’s destiny. Some white musicians, natural bohemians like Mary and her friends, had slipped through the fence of race and racism to become her friends, colleagues, or admirers, but they were exceptions.
Then came Café Society, the epicenter of a new exchange between blacks and whites. Mary made friends with men and women from all kinds of backgrounds she had never really known before. And there was David Stone Martin—DSM, as he signed his paintings. Very tall, very thin, with blond hair and a big fluffy mustache, he was a night owl, a drinker, an iconoclast, a gifted artist with a social conscience who instinctively related deeply to jazz and musicians. With a studio a few blocks from Café Society, he soon became a habitué of the club—and fell in love with Mary. He was probably her first white lover, at a time when interracial love affairs were unusual, even in places like Greenwich Village. Just as unusual, he was probably her first nonmusician lover.
But they had a great deal in common. Both were child prodigies—he had shown unmistakable talent at the drawing board as a little boy. And for both, art was a passport—he from Chicago, the son of a Presbyterian minister. They were about the same age (he was three years younger), and both were committed to the reality of equality for all Americans. Both had also gone hungry for their art. The older artist Ben Shahn had fanned Martin’s passion for social realism; later, he was lucky to get work painting murals on power houses for the TVA, and on public buildings for the WPA, in Chicago, during the Great Depression.
It was not long after that Martin took his first wife, Thelma (he would have three), and two young sons and moved to the East Coast to work as an artist, drawing distinctive, heavy black-ink portraits for Life and later for the covers of Time before photographs became standard. While Martin’s family was ensconced in Roosevelt, New Jersey, he also kept for himself his Village studio. There, he and Mary kept their rendezvous after her Café Society work
ended in the wee small hours.
Mary’s love life was no less entangled than his. Even as her husband, Harold Baker, entertained his former fiancée down south on weekend passes from the army base where he was stationed, Mary had taken up with tenor saxophonist Herschel Evans, according to bassist John Williams, who knew her well. But David Stone Martin was attractive on several counts. He courted her attentively at the Café, he had a quick, mordant sense of humor. Crucially, too, he listened to music almost the way a musician would and he knew what it meant to her. And he also intrigued her as an artist in a completely different medium. They became good friends right away. “He had an apartment close by in the Village and he rented a piano for me to play or write music while he painted,” Mary wrote primly. During the day, they would sometimes meet in Central Park for lunch, Mary wearing the dress and heels that were at that time de rigueur.
A public liaison between a white man and a black woman was still taboo. And for all its social and political progressiveness, even Greenwich Village could be quite an unwelcome place for blacks. A young Sarah Vaughan, just starting her career, was roughed up by street thugs after a performance at the Café one night. Nor was the club itself always safe. “We had plenty of southern soldiers come in there, and plenty good fist fights in that place,” reminisces Johnnie Garry. “A guy once dropped a champagne bucket of water on Mary—he was nuts, drunk. We took care of him.”
Mary and Martin were set upon, too. As Mary wrote, “One night we left the club to go to the next block to get some spaghetti, and three soldiers—Southerners—got mad when they saw him with me and started jumping on him. Poor David—he couldn’t defend himself too well, but afterwards he laughed.”