Mary Lou Williams was a child prodigy who could pick out tunes on a piano at age 2, began performing publicly at age 7, and was playing professionally full time at age 15. Her biggest musical influence was Lovie Austin.

At age 13 she played with Duke Ellington and his early small band, the Washingtonians. One morning at three o’clock, she was playing with McKinney’s Cotton Pickers at Harlem’s Rhythm Club. Louis Armstrong entered the room and paused to listen to her. Williams shyly told what happened: “Louis picked me up and kissed me.”

When Mary Lou Williams was 19 she was leading her own band in the US midwest. She then joined Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy serving as its arranger and composer. She provided Kirk with such songs as “Froggy Bottom”, “Walkin’ and Swingin'”, “Little Joe from Chicago”, “Roll ‘Em” and “Mary’s Idea”. You’ll hear the latter today.

Williams was the arranger and pianist for recordings in Kansas City (1929) Chicago (1930), and New York City (1930). During a trip to Chicago, she recorded “Drag ‘Em” and “Night Life” as piano solos.

She used the name “Mary Lou” at the suggestion of Jack Kapp at Brunswick Records. The records sold briskly, raising Williams to national prominence.

Soon after the recording session she became Kirk’s permanent second pianist, playing solo gigs and working as a freelance arranger for Earl Hines, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey.

In 1937, she produced In the Groove (Brunswick), a collaboration with Dick Wilson and Benny Goodman.

Goodman asked her to write a blues song for his band. The result was “Roll ‘Em”, a boogie-woogie piece based on the blues, which followed her successful “Camel Hop”, named for Goodman’s radio show sponsor, Camel cigarettes. Goodman tried to put Williams under contract to write for him exclusively, but she refused, preferring to freelance instead

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In 1942, Williams left the Twelve Clouds of Joy. She was formed a six-piece ensemble that included Art Blakey on drums.

Williams joined the Duke Ellington Ochestra and arranged several tunes for him, including “Trumpet No End” (1946), her version of “Blue Skies” by Irving Berlin.

Williams accepted a job at the Café Society Downtown in Nrew York City, started a weekly radio show called Mary Lou Williams’s Piano Workshop on WNEW and began mentoring and collaborating with younger bebop musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk.

In 1945, she composed the bebop hit “In the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee” for Gillespie. “During this period Monk and the kids would come to my apartment every morning around four or pick me up at the Café after I’d finished my last show, and we’d play and swap ideas until noon or later”, Williams recalled in Melody Maker.

That same year she also composed the classical-influenced Zodiac Suite, in which each of the twelve parts corresponded to a sign of the zodiac, and were accordingly dedicated to several of her musical colleagues, including Billie Holiday, and Art Tatum.

In 1952, Williams accepted an offer to perform in England and ended up staying in Europe for two years. Williams was mentally and physically drained.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXj12U88VbQ

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She became a Catholic in 1954 and dropped out of music until being persuaded by clerics to exercise her musical gift.

Father Peter O’Brien, a Catholic priest, became her close friend and manager in the 1960s. Dizzy Gillespie also introduced her to Pittsburgh’s Bishop John Wright. O’Brien helped her found new venues for jazz performance at a time when no more than two clubs in Manhattan offered jazz full-time. In addition to club work, she played colleges, formed her own record label and publishing companies, founded the Pittsburgh Jazz Festival (with the bishop’s help), and made television appearances.

Bishop Wright let her teach at Seton High School on the city’s North Side. It was there that she wrote her first Mass, called The Pittsburgh Mass. Williams eventually became the first jazz composer commissioned by the church to compose liturgical music in the jazz idiom.

Following her hiatus, her first piece was a Mass she wrote and performed named Black Christ of the Andes, based around a hymn in honor of the Peruvian saint Martin de Porres, two other short works, Anima Christi and Praise the Lord. It was first performed in November 1962 at St. Francis Xavier Church in Manhattan.

Throughout the 1960s, her composing concentrated on sacred music, hymns, and Masses. One of the Masses, Music for Peace. was choreographed by Alvin Ailey and performed by the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater as Mary Lou’s Mass in 1971. About the work, Ailey commented, “If there can be a Bernstein Mass, a Mozart Mass, a Bach Mass, why can’t there be Mary Lou’s Mass?” Williams performed the revision of Mary Lou’s Mass, her most acclaimed work, on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971. She made a guest appearance on Sesame Street in 1975.

Williams put much effort into working with youth choirs to perform her works, including “Mary Lou’s Mass” at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City in April 1975 before a gathering of over three thousand. It marked the first time a jazz musician had played at the church.

She set up a charitable organization and opened thrift stores in Harlem, directing the proceeds, along with ten percent of her own earnings, to musicians in need. As a 1964 Time article explained, “Mary Lou thinks of herself as a ‘soul’ player — a way of saying that she never strays far from melody and the blues, but deals sparingly in gospel harmony and rhythm. ‘I am praying through my fingers when I play,’ she says. ‘I get that good “soul sound”, and I try to touch people’s spirits.'” She performed at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1965, with a jazz festival group.

Throughout the 1970s, her career flourished, including numerous albums, including as solo pianist and commentator on the recorded The History of Jazz. She returned to the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1971. She could also be seen playing nightly in Greenwich Village at The Cookery, a new club run by her old boss from her Café Society days, Barney Josephson. That engagement too, was recorded.

She had a two-piano performance with avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor at Carnegie Hall on April 17, 1977. Despite onstage tensions between Williams and Taylor, their performance was released on an live album titled Embraced.

Williams instructed school children on jazz. She then accepted an appointment at Duke University as artist-in-residence (from 1977 to 1981), teaching the History of Jazz with Father O’Brien and directing the Duke Jazz Ensemble. With a light teaching schedule, she also did many concert and festival appearances, conducted clinics with youth, and in 1978 performed at the White House for President Jimmy Carter. She participated in Benny Goodman’s 40th-anniversary Carnegie Hall concert in 1978.

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