Williams had no knowledge of her father, Joseph Scruggs, until years later. As she explained, “I was born out of wedlock, a common thing not only for black people, but also whites in the South.” Eventually, she took the name of her stepfather, and throughout her life she thought of Fletcher Burley as her daddy. Burley nurtured Williams’s musical gift, taught her the blues, and bought her her first player piano. On the player piano she heard and learned from the masters, people like Jelly Roll Morton and James P. Johnson. Before long she became a student of the Atlanta native Jack Howard. Later she said of him, “I like Jack Howard because he played such a strong piano he could break up all the pianos and as a baby I started playing like that. I think I got the masculine quality [of playing] from him.” But for the most part, Williams was a self-taught pianist who learned by listening and playing. She learned to play in a variety of music styles from the player piano, including Harlem stride, boogie-woogie, waltzes, and light opera. She was also aware of the black religious music that permeated her surroundings.12
Unlike Petry and Primus, who grew up far removed from the racism and violence of the South, Williams experienced this prejudice firsthand. Williams certainly did not grow up in a family of middle-class professionals like Petry. She did escape the South. When she was five years old, she and her family joined the first wave of black migration, moving to Pittsburgh in 1915. Nevertheless, some of Williams’s earliest memories were of racial violence. She retained images of lynching and of seeing a man’s head “split open with an ax.”13 In Pittsburgh, white neighbors threw bricks into their windows and harassed her family, who lived with the constant threat of physical abuse. If that were not enough, lighter-skinned blacks were prejudiced against the chocolate brown child as well. Williams’s great-grandfather was nearly white, with blond hair, and her great-grandmother, Matilda, was believed to be part Native American. According to Williams, Matilda, the most powerful figure in the family (especially after the death of her husband), was a color-struck woman who beat her dark-skinned grandchildren more often than she did the lighter ones.
From the moment Williams discovered the piano, she could not be dragged away from it. The music became her refuge from poverty and maternal indifference. In Williams’s memory, her mother was a cool, distant figure who never came to hear her play after she became famous. Her older sister Mamie, four years her senior, acted as her caregiver and confidante. Williams’s younger siblings and her niece Bobbie Ferguson dispute this characterization of Virginia Burley.14 In the beginning of Williams’s life, Virginia was a single mother who had to work two jobs to care for her children. Once in Pittsburgh, though married, Burley continued to work long hours, and she had a number of other children.
In Pittsburgh, Williams earned the nickname “the little piano girl of East Liberty.” She played around town at parties for the city’s elite, for funerals, and at silent films. She was even discovered by neighborhood prostitutes, who paid her to play in the local brothel. So, like Billie Holiday, who started out as an errand girl doing housework, eventually singing for money in Baltimore brothels, Williams found that her talent brought her paying brothel gigs. Unlike Holiday, however, Williams never became one of the working girls. In fact, her stint in the brothel didn’t last long: instructed to peep through a view hole and play for the entire sexual encounter, she quit when one such encounter went on too long.
When she wasn’t playing the piano at home or on her many local gigs, Williams attended Lincoln School, where she excelled in music and mathematics. From Lincoln she went to Westinghouse High School. Westinghouse boasted an array of important former students, pianists all: Ahmad Jamal, Billy Strayhorn, and Erroll Garner among them. Williams attended for only one term. During the summer of her twelfth year, in 1922, Williams joined the tent show “Buzzin’ Harris and His Hits and Bits,” and thus began her time on the black vaudeville circuit. During summer break, Williams’s mother agreed to let her go on tour. By that time, she’d already earned a professional reputation in her hometown; been squired around the city’s nightlife by an uncle figure, Roland Mayfield; and begun to develop into the beautiful young woman she would become. “At the age of 12 I looked like 18,” she later said. Protected by Mayfield and her stepfather, she escaped numerous attempts by men to seduce and even rape her. When the opportunity to join Buzzin’ Harris’s outfit came along, she gladly jumped at it.
In spite of her multiple musical gifts, Williams had not learned to read music, a skill she wouldn’t develop until a few years later, when she wanted to write down the sounds she heard in her head. Andy Kirk, tuba player and bandleader of the Twelve Clouds of Joy, and Johnny Williams, the show’s saxophonist bandleader, helped her to transcribe them. Johnny Williams became her mentor and, eventually, her husband.
Bitten by the show-business bug, Williams eventually joined Andy Kirk’s Twelve Clouds of Joy, an important territory band that toured the Southwest. Territory bands traveled within a designated area, transporting new musical styles along the way. Along with Benny Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra, Andy Kirk’s Twelve Clouds of Joy helped to nationalize the Kansas City sound, a highly rhythmic blues-based style of jazz that first developed in Kansas City, Missouri. Williams traveled extensively with the Kirk band and gained a reputation as an important and gifted musician. In her capacity as soloist and arranger, she soon became known as “The Lady Who Swings the Band.” She’d reached her peak with the Kirk band when she began to set her sights on New York. She also divorced her first husband, and on December 10, 1942, she married the trumpeter Harold “Shorty” Baker. Williams and Baker began an affair when both were working for Kirk, and while Mary Lou was still married to John Williams. By this time, John and Mary Lou were married in name only.
Baker left the Kirk band first, to play with Duke Ellington, and Williams eventually followed him. During this time, Williams wrote arrangements for Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. She wrote the rollicking “Roll ’Em,” a blues-based boogie-woogie tune, for the Goodman orchestra. The tune moves through space and time with a momentum and sense of joy that surely sent dancers soaring. She also arranged a number of tunes for Ellington, including “Trumpet No End” and “Blue Skies.”
Throughout much of their brief time together, Baker was on the road with Ellington. In late 1943 or early 1944, Baker was drafted into the military.15 Williams, desperate for a little stability, found an apartment for them in Harlem, #21 at 63 Hamilton Terrace. But Baker would never live there. Williams, excited about the possibility of a stable gig and eager to create a home for herself and her husband, moved in, but the marriage did not survive the war. Although Williams and Baker never legally divorced, Baker did not share Williams’s life after the move. Nonetheless, the move to New York did bring the much-needed stability to Williams’s life that she had sought. She had been on the road since she was twelve or thirteen years old. Williams lived at Hamilton Terrace throughout her time in New York and maintained the apartment after she left for Europe in 1952. She would continue to live there throughout the rest of her life, keeping it even after moving to Durham, North Carolina, in the 1980s, when she began to teach at Duke University.
Hamilton Terrace is located near 144th and St. Nicholas Avenue, in a neighborhood known as Sugar Hill. Bound by 155th Street to the north, 145th to the south, Edgecombe Avenue to the east, and Amsterdam Avenue to the west, Sugar Hill was home to many of Harlem’s most prosperous and prominent citizens, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Duke Ellington. Describing Sugar Hill in the 1940s, Ann Petry wrote, “There is a moneyed class, which lives largely in and around the section known as the Hill. . . . The Hill suggests that Harlem is simply a pleasant and rather luxurious part of Manhattan.”16 In an essay on Sugar Hill in the New Republic, Langston Hughes explicitly stated what Petry implied. His wasn’t a celebration of black achievement, but an effort to point out the contradictory experiences of Sugar Hill residents, always a minority, and that of other, poorer Harlemites.
Elegant and s
ecured with a doorman, Williams’s building housed her small, sunlit, one-bedroom apartment. She painted the kitchen lemon yellow and furnished the bedroom with two twin-sized Hollywood beds, upholstered in pink. She wrote music and kept up with correspondence in the bedroom. The apartment also had cabinets and files that held her compositions and arrangements as well as important papers and the essays and other writings she published. The heart of the apartment was the small living room, where a small upright Baldwin piano stood. On top of the piano she had placed various knickknacks, vases, and photos. Photographs taken by William P. Gottlieb in 1947 show Williams entertaining musician friends in this apartment. Dizzy Gillespie, Tadd Dameron, Jack Teagarden, and others surround Williams or Hank Jones as they play. Sometimes they are all seated in front of the piano engaged in conversation; at other times, they play cards on a small table that sits near the instrument. Williams had purchased a white rug for the center of the room, and she and her friends often sat there on the floor, listening to records on a portable record player.
Jack Teagarden, Dixie Bailey, Mary Lou Williams, Tadd Dameron, Hank Jones, Dizzy Gillespie, and Milt Orent in Mary Lou Williams’s apartment, New York, August 1947. Photo by William P. Gottlieb.
In short, Williams made a home at Hamilton Terrace. Her marriage ended, but she created her own family and community. The apartment became a salon for musicians, writers, painters, journalists, and photographers. The younger musicians, such as Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell, who pioneered the bebop revolution, were especially welcome. They would find the door open, an inviting pot on the stove, and, when she was there, Williams—as mentor, collaborator, and friend. They respected and admired her as an elder in the music world and a model artist.
Williams’s status as a single, childless woman, as well as the stability afforded by her move to New York, helped to stimulate one of her most exciting and productive periods, ushering in a new phase of artistic creativity and political activity. The crowds, the vibrancy, and the excitement of the city found its way into her music. The city’s institutions—its libraries, museums, and performance venues—offered material and inspiration. The marriage of progressive political activism and innovative art forms provided a space for her own creative growth and political maturation to occur. In other words, the city served as an incubator for the further development of her inherent musical gifts, her spiritual sensibilities, and her desire for social justice. It is during this period that we see the beginnings of the spiritual, musical, and activist flowering that would occur in later decades.
Interestingly, at a time in life when most women were creating a home space and nurturing husbands and children, Mary Lou was creating a space that nurtured her own creativity and that of her fellow artists. As a result, she embarked upon a phase of her life characterized by fecund creativity grounded in place and community, as if she had been searching for a way to give back and had discovered a way to better her community and her nation. Her time in New York was not without its difficulties. Williams’s later involvement with gamblers and other denizens of the Harlem night revealed the underside of New York’s glamour, but Williams would use this to fuel her creativity and her humanitarian efforts.
During the 1940s, while writing and arranging music, Williams also wrote prose essays about her music, mentored and taught, recorded a number of albums, and performed throughout the city. On many nights, she took the subway, composing music in her head as the train rattled through the tunnel headed to The Village. “I get my inspiration from modern things,” Williams said, and she counted the subway as one of them. Just as the subway gave Petry images and ideas for her fiction, it delivered musical ideas and sounds to Williams. She would arrive at the club “with the complete arrangement worked out.”17
Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train” is more famous, but Williams penned and recorded her own tribute to the famous subway line: “Eighth Avenue Express,” which she recorded in 1944.18 The choo-choo of the drummer and Williams’s hard left hand drive this highly energetic boogie-woogie blues song. The piece is complete with train stops and announcements beckoning arrival in Harlem.
Williams opened at Café Society sometime in June 1943 to a full house. “My opening, the people were standing upstairs,” she recalled. “Pearl Primus, my favorite dancer, was also in the show,” she later wrote. “I don’t know of any other place quite like it. I must say that Barney was the greatest nightclub owner in the business. He’d give most anybody that was talented a chance to make good by putting them in the club for a long run. If they didn’t become great then they just weren’t good to begin with.”19 Williams, of course, would become great. Years later, in the seventies, Josephson jump-started Williams’s career again when he booked her at The Cookery, a club he opened in the 1970s.
Williams befriended many of the other artists at Café Society, including Primus and Imogene Coca, but her most enduring friendship was with fellow pianist Hazel Scott. Some thought that there was a professional rivalry between the two, but this was far from true. Time magazine even tried to stoke such a rivalry by comparing the two women—without naming Scott, who was known for her glamour, her sexy presentation, her low-cut gowns, and her “swinging the classics” style. The July 26, 1943, issue of Time noted that Mary was “no kitten on the keys.” The reporter went further, writing, “She was not selling a pretty face or a low décolletage, or tricky swinging of Bach or Chopin. She was playing the blues, stomps, and boogie-woogie in the native Afro-American way—an art in which, at 33, she is already a veteran.” Barney Josephson wanted Williams to act more like Scott, but she refused to do so. As it had with Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus, the press often made comparisons between Scott and Williams, noting the former’s coy sexiness and the latter’s artistic seriousness. However, unlike the two dancers, Scott and Williams were devoted friends. When Scott left Café Society Uptown to marry Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Josephson replaced her with Williams.
For Williams, Hazel Scott was a beloved younger sister. Scott, in turn, adored Williams and referred to her as a “Saint.” Scott had access to greater opportunity than Williams did and was the more famous of the two, but she would later fall upon hard times. In 1950, Scott became the star of the first television program hosted by a black woman. The fifteen-minute show first aired on July 3, 1950. But later that month her name appeared in the Red Channels, the notorious anti-Communist publication that led to the blacklisting of a number of entertainers. Although Scott denied the charges, her show lost its sponsors; it was canceled in September. Scott’s political problems were exacerbated by personal ones. In later years, after having separated from Powell, she moved to Paris. She recalled receiving checks and money orders from Williams, who may have been suffering her own financial difficulties. Williams was even maid of honor at Scott’s second wedding. The two women loved and respected each other profoundly and had a lifelong friendship.20
At Café Society, Williams did three shows nightly, at 8:30 P.M., midnight, and 2:30 A.M. The 8:30 audience included parents and children. But as the evening grew late, the audience would change as well. Williams recalled: “Our 8:00 show was packed with dad, mother and smaller children. . . . After 8 females were not allowed without an escort. . . . It was really like being in a big family. . . . The clientele consisted of the elite yet even the poorest was welcome whenever they came to see their favorite artist.”21
She described Café Society as a community, almost a family: “On Sunday nights we had a little party, just the staff and a few musicians. Hazel Scott, Thelma Carpenter, Billy Strayhorn, Aaron Bridges and Lena Horne and friends would come by and we’d have the most enjoyable time.”22 In between sets, Williams would sometimes sit with her close friend Gray Weingarten, a college student at Syracuse, in Weingarten’s car. Sometimes she would join other musicians and the club’s emcee, Johnnie Gary, at the backstage door for a game of cards and a smoke.
On any given night at Café Society one might have found the art
ist David Stone Martin sitting in the audience, listening to and looking at the brilliant, beautiful pianist. Martin wrote notes to Williams on postcards depicting the club’s famous murals; sometimes he jotted down something on napkins as well. The two became very good friends; if his passionate letters to her are any indication, they became lovers as well. In her writings, Williams referred to him only as her good friend: “I met a very talented artist named David Stone Martin who today is very well known in the jazz world. I asked him to do an illustration cover for me for one of my albums. . . . We became quite chummy.”23 She may have been reluctant to acknowledge their romance because Stone was married at the time of their involvement. Williams helped to start Martin’s career; he produced many fine line drawings for jazz album covers throughout the 1940s and 1950s. His aesthetic concept helped to shape the mood through which the music would be heard.
Whether they were friends or a couple, when they were together in public Williams and Martin were subjected to the same prejudice and attacks that other interracial couples had to endure. Williams sometimes met Martin at his Village studio, and they took long walks through the winding streets of that legendary neighborhood. Once they were harassed by a group of young white men who disapproved of them. The confrontation became violent, and though David tried to fend them off, the men seem to have gotten the better of him. In spite of its long history of political progressivism, the Village was not always welcoming to black people or to interracial couples. Richard Wright’s biographer Hazel Rowley noted that because there were several violent incidents in the Village, where Italian gangs assaulted interracial couples in the spring of 1944, Wright never allowed his wife to take his arm or hold his hand in the street. When Wright and his wife Ellen, who was of Polish Jewish descent, decided to buy a home in the Village, they had to have a white surrogate act in their behalf. The real-estate agents, banks, and neighbors would not have welcomed a black resident. They set up a corporation, “the Richelieu Company,” to purchase the home.24
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