Bop had opened Williams up to new possibilities in her own music. Having innovated in and then grown tired of swing and boogie-woogie, she found a new creative space in the arena of bop. “The music was so beautiful it just gave you a sight of a new picture happening in jazz. It had such a beautiful feeling. It didn’t take me very long to get on to it or create in my own way,” she wrote.
As Williams began to write her thoughts down in a more systematic way, she fleshed out this notion of musical development as it applied to black American music, insisting upon a connection between the earliest and the most modern forms. She wanted to impart a sense of history and purpose to modern jazz; she was also concerned that black Americans, and black American musicians, in particular, were in danger of losing—or, worse still, throwing away—their musical heritage. Even in the essay, a narrative of progress, Williams was situating “jazz” in the context of “modern music” and placing it alongside other highly regarded art forms: “When it has reached this so-called ‘peak,’” she wrote, “it is really only the beginning, for then we build the new ideas on top of the old. This is not only progress in music, for the same is true for all forms of art including painting, sculpture, architecture, and even the theater.”
Williams ended the essay with an expansive and inviting notion of the music she performed. “Modern music,” she wrote, “is not only limited to small groups of musicians.” She cited the Carnegie Hall Concert of 1946, where the New York Pops symphony orchestra played her music, as an example. She also stated her commitment to playing in as many venues, such as universities, as possible. One gets the sense that Williams, while always convinced of the magnitude, value, and complexity of black music, finally saw herself as one of that music’s missionaries, ushering it into the halls of respectability.
Still, ensuring jazz’s permanence and protecting its legacy proved to be an uphill battle. A recording ban—which prevented musicians from recording for eleven months starting in January 1948—as well as the closing of clubs on 52nd Street, amounted to a severe blow to the New York jazz scene. Many of the clubs were turned into strip joints. Time magazine bemoaned the change, writing, “Along New York’s Swing Lande, where nightclubs in sorry brownstones crowd each other like bums on a breadline, an era was all but over. Swing was still there, but it was more hips than horns. Barrelhouse had declined. Burlesque was back.”51
Unable to record and having difficulty finding work in the city, Williams got a job providing arrangements for Benny Goodman’s orchestra and eventually replaced Teddy Wilson, at his suggestion, when he left the band. However, the arrangement didn’t last. Goodman could be difficult to work with, and he remained a little hostile to the new music. Williams, who by now was incorporating many bebop ideas into her writing, bumped heads with him. They did, however, record a few sides before parting ways.
Williams would spend the remainder of the decade composing and recording her own music. She received a commission from the director of a choir in her hometown of Pittsburgh in 1948 and enthusiastically took up the offer. Pittsburgh provided a change of pace and scenery and helped to revitalize her. Williams would often spend time with family, and she also made time to write. One composition, “Elijah Under the Juniper Tree,” set to the poetry of Ray Monty Carr, provided Williams with the opportunity to experiment in a number of directions. With “Elijah,” she wrote for voice, a first for her. The religious themes were new for her as well. With this piece she planted the seed that would flower years later in her Masses.
Back in New York, Williams’s agent, Joe Glaser, continued to try to find bookings for her, but things were not working out. When Williams returned, she found that her beloved apartment had been burglarized, yet another indication of Harlem’s desperation. Her records were gone, as were her gowns and her jewelry. In the words of writer Claude McKay, Sugar Hill had become “vinegar sour.” Williams had become victim to the crime she had hoped to alleviate. Apart from a brief and successful stint at the Vanguard, Williams was unable to find work in the kinds of venues she wanted. Her surroundings had changed for the worse. In need of money and in poor health, Williams became despondent, exhausted, and depressed. In another blow, Moe Asch, her beloved record producer, went bankrupt in 1948.
Williams eventually signed with King Records, but it was not a good relationship. She wanted to record more experimental, bebop work as well as more solo work. King, in contrast, wanted commercial recordings. The company encouraged her to record swing music and do an organ album that would attract rhythm and blues audiences. Ultimately, the company refused to record her but would not release her from the contract. Williams sought the assistance of the American Federation of Musicians and was eventually released—but not without consequences: she always felt other recording companies saw her as a troublemaker.
Finally, Williams signed on with Circle Records, with whom she recorded solos as well as several of her bebop compositions and her experiments with bongos. The latter albums were released, but the solo material, which was to have been released as Midnight at Mary Lou’s, would not appear until 2006, over fifty-five years after it had originally been recorded. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Father Peter O’Brien, a Jesuit priest and director of the Mary Lou Williams Foundation, all of the Circle material, including the solo medleys, is now available as Mary Lou Williams: The Circle Recordings. The work anticipates the solo concert Williams performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland in 1978. Here, in 1951, we hear the artist at her best—and her most personal. It is like listening to a sonic autobiography. The choice of material, the phrasing, and the chords all create a rich, deep, soulful listening experience. Lacking in pretense or sentimentality, the performance is intimate, but also an extraordinary display of Williams’s genius at the instrument. The artist at forty, a woman who had already made major contributions to American music, here plays her history with an eye on the future. “Why,” written by Consuela Lee, aunt of filmmaker Spike Lee, is especially beautiful. What’s more, the performance also contains a history of black music, and as such is a sonic interpretation of American history. The music of the enslaved—the spirituals—branches out and is influenced by and influences American popular music. The medley starts with bars of music inspired by African American spirituals before turning to George Gershwin’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” from the opera Porgy and Bess, which was itself inspired by black folk music. Then Williams turns to standards, recognizable popular songs over which jazz improvisers composed their own unique solos. All of these elements become vehicles for Williams’s own improvisation, her personal history of jazz. The medley evolves into a music that captures the particular history of an individual, allowing her room for creativity and individual expression, yet it is also a music that contains the tragic and hopeful history of a people and a nation.
In these solos, Williams is a mature artist, capable of swinging but also of playing deeply introspective music. One can hear her Harlem stride background as well as her bop present, her strong left hand and each individual finger of the right hand as she caresses the keys. There is no doubt that she is in command of her genius and her instrument. She was still without a lucrative recording deal with a major label. She was both tired and restless. But she was the consummate artist.
For some time, Glaser had been encouraging Williams to tour Europe. Now, as she found it more difficult to find work, and was facing financial difficulties, the idea was becoming attractive. As early as 1947, Williams began to consider his idea. Many of her good friends were there, especially in Paris. Jazz singer Inez Cavanaugh was living there and seemed quite happy, in spite of being unable to find black hair-care products. Williams would pack care packages and send them overseas. For these Cavanaugh was grateful, writing, “Make[s] a cullud girl happy just to see a jar of Dixie Peach.”
On November 28, 1952, Williams attended a bon voyage celebration in her honor. The guests included jazz innovators Oscar Pettiford and Erroll Gardner. The next day s
he set sail on the Queen Mary, headed for Europe, where she planned to stay nine days. As it turned out, she would not return to New York for two years.
During her time in Europe, Williams suffered what some call a nervous breakdown. It might also have been a spiritual crisis, “a dark night of the soul.” Finding solace in Catholicism, Williams abandoned music temporarily, only to return to it at the encouragement of her spiritual mentors. In the years that followed, she devoted much of her life to addressing human suffering, especially what she witnessed in Harlem, and to exploring the deeply spiritual dimensions of the music called “jazz.” To Williams, these two projects—one humanitarian and the other aesthetic—were one.
EPILOGUE
New York beckoned, and they came. They gave it sound and substance, word and music, dance and meaning. In turn, it gave them inspiration, a community, and an audience. It contributed to each one’s already strong sense of self. It gave them the world. At the end of their careers, all three were honored by the city and its institutions.
But there was something unique about the 1940s. Perhaps it was a combination of the times and the women. A woman in her twenties and thirties is usually a vessel for life—most often bearing and rearing children. But sometimes, the creativity, brilliance, and energy required of mothering are available for other areas of a woman’s life, particularly for creative and intellectual women. Their imagination is fertile; their stamina and concentration strong. Petry, Primus, and Williams were certainly not the only creative women living in New York, or even in Harlem. The city was teeming with them, though few acquired the fame and stature of these three.
All three experienced high points of creativity and celebrity during the early part of the decade. By decade’s end, their stars had faded a little as the venues and organizations that had supported them closed or were transformed. Cultural tastes changed. The neighborhood they loved fell on hard times, and the nation they hoped to shape was still flawed. Women who had filled factories and offices during the war were asked to return home. The end of the decade saw the emergence of the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the “urban renewal” that followed in the wake of the Housing Act of 1949. Each of these developments would alter the contexts in which these women lived.
Harlem Nocturne. Alice Neel. 1952. Courtesy of Estate of Alice Neel.
Painter Alice Neel, another Harlem-based artist and a contemporary of Primus, Petry, and Williams, portrayed this sense of change, closure, and nightfall in a painting entitled Harlem Nocturne (1952). Two high-rise apartment buildings sit on a barren landscape. Enclosed by a metal link fence and parallel to a lone, leafless tree, the buildings could be any of the modern apartment buildings one finds in Manhattan, but they most resemble the high-rise housing projects that began to sprout in poor neighborhoods. The buildings look institutional. Obvious in their absence are people. Like the leaves on the trees, they are gone from the streets. Perhaps they are inside the brightly lit apartments, but we see no evidence of them in the windows. Harlem Nocturne is not only Harlem at night, but Harlem after slum clearance, blight removal, and urban renewal. Harlem after “an epoch’s sun declines.”1 This is the Harlem about which Petry wrote in her last article on the area; it is the Harlem that Mary Lou Williams walked prior to her departure for Europe.
Fortunately, the story does not end here, or rather, the end marks another beginning. Harlem experienced many new births, progressive politics did not die, and politically engaged artists would continue to answer their calling. So, too, does the sun rise again on the brilliant women of Harlem Nocturne.
The 1950s found Pearl Primus engaged in a variety of activities, personal and professional. She married twice, first to Yael Woll and then to Percival Borde, her collaborator and soul mate. She also gave birth to a son, Onwin. In 1959, she received a master’s degree in education from New York University, and that same year she was named director of a new performing arts center in Liberia. Although her passport had been revoked in 1952, it was eventually returned, and she spent much of her time traveling throughout Africa and Europe. At the behest of the Liberian government, she choreographed Fanga, which would become one of her best-known dances. In 1978, she earned her PhD in dance education from New York University, received the Dance Pioneer Award from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and incorporated her Pearl Primus Dance Language Institute. Shortly thereafter, she became a professor of ethnic studies, artist in residence, and the first chair of the Five College Dance Department, organized under the Five College Consortium among Mount Holyoke, Amherst, Hampshire, and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In 1988, the American Dance Festival restaged her choreography for Black Tradition in American Modern Dance, a program seeking to preserve black dance. In 1991, President George H. W. Bush honored her with the National Medal of the Arts. The following year, the Kennedy Center held a Pearl Primus 50th Anniversary Concert.
Dance was the vehicle through which Primus expressed her intellectual and political commitments. Africa became central to these commitments as well as to Primus’s growing sense of spirituality. Her devotion to the history and cultures of the continent never wavered. At the time of her death in 1994, the New York Times reported, “Her belief that there was material for dance in the everyday lives of black people—and her strong personality and early success—had a profound influence on several generations of black choreographers and dancers, among them Donald McKayle and Alvin Ailey.”2 McKayle and Ailey are not the only heirs of Primus’s legacy. It lives on in the work of Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and her company, Urban Bush Women, and in the work of Primus’s niece, Andara Koumba Rahman-Ndiaye, and her company, Drumsong African Ballet Theater (ABT). These two women and their respective companies continue two distinct but related components of Primus’s artistic, intellectual, and political project. Dancer, singer, drummer, choreographer, and teacher, Rahman-Ndiaye, working in collaboration with her husband, Obara Wali Rahman-Ndiaye, founder and director of Drumsong, continues the work of her aunt by presenting the dance, history, and culture of Senegambia. Her intergenerational company features dancers, drummers, and singers young and old, male and female. Together they constitute an African-centered, spiritually driven community devoted to honoring the cultures of Africa and the diaspora. Zollar has choreographed two beautiful pieces inspired by Primus’s own choreography as well as her journals and interviews, “Walking with Pearl . . . Africa Diaries” and “Walking with Pearl . . . Southern Diaries.” Zollar may be one of the most energetic and consistent of Primus’s artistic heirs. She has not only choreographed works inspired by Primus, but is also building upon some of her earlier social and political commitments.
After moving back to Old Saybrook, Ann Petry gave birth to a daughter, Elisabeth, in January 1949. She published two more novels after The Street: A Country Place in 1947, and The Narrows in 1953. The Narrows would be Petry’s last novel, but she continued to publish short stories and children’s books. For the most part she remained out of the public eye, though she continued to be a participating member of her community. She continued to have faith in the democratic process as she remained actively involved in her town’s politics, serving on its Republican Town Committee and running for and winning a seat on the school board.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a bevy of young black women writers began to publish highly original works of fiction: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, Gloria Naylor, and others would help to change the face of American literature. When Naylor, author of The Women of Brewster Place, was asked about her influences, she named Petry foremost among them. Petry offered an alternative to Zora Neale Hurston’s “evocations” of black folk culture and to Richard Wright’s masculinist urbanism. Petry hated the constant comparisons between herself and Richard Wright, but that may have been one price of renewed recognition. When establishing or creating a tradition, critics must identify the ways that books and authors speak to each other.
When Deborah McDowell, an important black fem
inist critic, founded and began to edit the Black Women Writers series for Beacon Press, she selected The Street to be part of the series. Although academic critics were the primary reasons for the renewal of interest in Petry’s work, Petry did not like academic criticism, believing it created a barrier between reader and text. She found most academic criticism “uninteresting.” Nonetheless, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, she and her work received more and more attention from critics. In 1996, in recognition of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Street, literary critic and biographer Arnold Rampersad hosted a reading at New York’s Town Hall, where the acclaimed actress Alfre Woodard read selections from the novel. By the time of Petry’s death in 1997, this novel was appearing on college syllabi, Petry’s fiction had been republished in new editions, and she had received numerous honorary degrees. In 1992, Trinity College hosted a daylong symposium and celebration in her honor. In 1997, her New York Times obituary noted that Petry “took a single stretch of Harlem and brought it vividly and disturbingly to life in her acclaimed 1946 novel, ‘The Street.’”3
Mary Lou Williams returned to New York and to Harlem in December 1954. She found a church home in Our Lady of Lourdes Roman Catholic Church on 142nd Street. Dizzy Gillespie introduced her to Father John Crowley, who encouraged her to return to music as a vehicle for prayer and healing, both for herself and for others. Father Anthony S. Woods and a young priest named Father Peter O’Brien also served as her spiritual mentors. O’Brien became her manager as well. Williams was baptized into the Catholic faith on May 7, 1957, by Father Woods and confirmed the following June. She returned to performing, and she founded the Bel Canto Foundation, which helped jazz musicians with substance abuse problems by assisting with their rehabilitation. Williams also opened a number of thrift stores in Harlem and used the funds she collected to help musicians.
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