by Linda Dahl
“He would come out to Westinghouse school and pick up 4 or 5 girls, driving us at breakneck speed downtown to a famous restaurant called Dearings during our lunch period and get us back to school in time to make our classes, then he’d leave the keys in his car on the street for whoever reached the car first to drive. After school there was always a mad rush trying to get to his specially made car before any of the other girls. Once when I returned Roland’s car, it was really a wreck. He looked at me and said, ‘Don’t worry kid, we’ll get another car.’ Roland and I became quite chummy.”
Mary’s portrait of Mayfield as having an air of sexy but rich-uncle indulgence about him—cigar-smoking, laconic and wise, with pockets full of money—squares with the opinions of others who knew him: Mary’s niece Helen, who knew them both all her life, is positive Mary and Roland’s was a father-daughter relationship. “Maybe it’s Mary needing a father, and he was in fact a father—he had two daughters of his own. I could see Roland becoming Father and Uncle very quickly,” adds Peter O’Brien. “When I knew him in the ’60s and ’70s, he was still very strong and barrel-chested and Mary told me that Roland would say, ‘Nobody touches the kid.’ That’s what he called her, ‘the kid.’ ” Mary and her protector remained friends for life, with Mayfield later coming to visit Mary in her New York apartment, and indulging the quiet passion of his sunset years: fishing. All through her career, he bailed her out when she was stranded on the road (as happened fairly often) and supplied her with cars. “There was repeatedly a new Cadillac during the years I knew her,” recalls Peter O’Brien.
AS MARY APPROACHED her teenage years, she was, in her own words, a “daredevil and a gypsy. And at the age of 12 I looked like 18.” No longer the little piano girl, she sped into adolescence, like her mother and sister before her, with a woman’s rounded body. At the same time she was shy and introverted, intimidated by the wild antics of some of her friends, who were already sexually active. She fell in love. “My first love affair was my cousin Max Sloane [son of the unfortunate man who died on the railroad tracks], who was so very kind to me that I fell in love with him at twelve. He’d often take me on his bike and bring me the nicest gifts. In the summer whenever I’d see him riding towards my house, my little heart would skip a beat. This little puppy love was cut short before anything detrimental could happen. His mother moved her family to Philadelphia.” But a greater danger for her was at the clubs and dancehalls she haunted, and where she became a target of predators. Mary’s description of one foiled rape fails to amuse: “I begged a friend of my stepfather to teach me to drive his very old Cadillac. One day he consented, driving me to an isolated place in Highland Park and tried to attack me. I fought like a wild cat and said, ‘I’ll tell my stepfather!’ which made him come to his senses knowing that my stepfather was very kind, yet vicious about something like that. Being stubborn, I kept going with him to learn to drive, yelling ‘stepfather!’ as a threat until I learned to shift gears and start in first.” Yet his unspecified sexual advances continued. “They became so annoying,” Mary admitted, “that I really wanted to leave home.”
Chapter Three
Hits ’n Bits
1924–1929
“WHEN DID I leave Pittsburgh? Soon as I could,” Mary told Marsha Vick. “My aunt and sister Mamie were the only ones I missed. And when we got stranded on the road, I was afraid to write home for loot—afraid my mother would make me return to Pittsburgh and stay there.” Mary was probably thirteen when she ran away from home to join a “home talent show” that, according to John Williams, went by the name Boise De Legg and His Hottentots. It was one of dozens of such groups, descendants of the tent shows that had traveled rural America since the 1800s, and was just about the meanest employment for an entertainer next to carny shows, their income being nothing more than pickup change.
It was a rude start, a troupe filled with raw beginners, black teenagers eager for the glamour and, they hoped, the fame of show business. About the only good thing that came out of Mary’s time with the Hottentots was a lifelong friendship she formed with dancer Margaret Warren. At eighteen, the more seasoned Warren acted as a kind of surrogate mother to Mary and the other younger girls. They needed it. “The manager of this show gave us something out of a Coke bottle which tasted quite good to me,” wrote Mary. “I began to feel very giggly and drank more of the sweet tasting stuff—I had a complete blackout. I woke up later in Margaret Warren’s room. She was very angry and told me what happened. She had discovered I wasn’t in my room and returned to the theatre with one of the band boys and they caught the manager in the act of misusing one of the girls—and on his way to doing the same to me. He was beaten badly by the musician.”
For once, Ginnie Riser was concerned enough to go after her daughter. “Mother had everybody looking for me. After about two weeks, she found me in Washington, Pennsylvania, about 50 miles from home, and came there, dragging me out by my ear to the train.”
Mary, fearful of the sexual predator who had pursued her in East Liberty, and restless to get back on the road, rebelled against returning home. “I threatened to run away, commit suicide, anything to frighten her and Aunt Anna, who’d come with her. Well, a slap across the face really cooled me. But back home again, I was bored to tears living with Mamie, going to school and playing gigs for afternoon teas and social functions.” In the fall of 1923, she dutifully went back to school, but she had caught the show-business bug.
After school let out for the summer in 1924, though, she got her first real break with a professional show playing a Pittsburgh theater on the black vaudeville circuit, called the Theatre Owners’ Booking Association, or TOBA (“Tough on Black Asses” was what the performers called it). Buzzin’ Harris and His Hits ’n Bits was a raggedy show, to be sure, but a definite step up from the Hottentots. And when, just as in a B movie, the show’s pianist got drunk and took off a few hours before curtain time, the desperate leader of the troupe was ready to grab at any straw. There was no show without a pianist, the glue that held the acts together. So when someone told Harris about Mary, he raced across town to hear her. “Was he ever surprised,” Mary said, “when he drove up in front of my house and the guy with him pointed at me. I was playing a game with the kids on the sidewalk. Buzz was so upset, he almost returned to town, saying, ‘What is this, a joke?’ But he decided to come in the house and listen to me. I began playing and he became so elated that he began humming the entire show to me, which took no time for me to memorize. With my mother’s permission, he took me downtown and once again we rehearsed the show. I played the entire show later that evening from memory, and broke it up. And since it was during the summer vacation, I was able to work the entire week with the show in Pittsburgh. Then he pleaded with my mother to allow me to travel with them for the rest of the summer. A notary was called in and papers were signed because I was underage.”
When she returned to school that September, after playing the small towns around Pittsburgh, Mary was more confused than ever about her future. The summer with Buzzin’ Harris had shown her that the shows were “an animal life. And I liked going back to school very much because I enjoyed my music classes, my loads of friends. But still I was lonely and miserable to travel.” Then, in early December, a crisis at home resolved the question. Suddenly, Fletcher Burley was bedridden, unable to work. The family turned to Mary in earnest now; they were destitute. Her mother wanted her to stay and work in Pittsburgh; her brother-in-law, Hugh Floyd, always conservative, urged her to finish her education and even offered to help support her in college, so that she could become a music teacher—a good, steady job. But Mary had a standing offer to join Harris and his Hits ’n Bits. She’d send home money from the road, she promised, and dangled the wondrous figure of $30 a week in front of Virginia’s eyes. (She seldom if ever came close to that amount, for in the winter of 1925, “cancellation and starvation set in.”) She also recalled making a “hysterical scene” with her mother to get her way. By then, Mary had c
ompleted the first term of her second year at Westinghouse. It was to be the end of her formal education.
Now she joined the “animal life” of the TOBA in earnest, as the Hits ’n Bits traveled a circuit of the smaller cities around Pennsylvania and Ohio, occasionally getting bookings in big cities like Pittsburgh and Detroit. The TOBA had been formed under tough conditions after the turn of the century and endured well into the Depression. Headliners like Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and Ma Rainey received respectable salaries, but even the stars had to put up with poor conditions. “You could go into a theatre and not have a bathroom or anything,” recalled Mary. “It was terrible—you should have seen the dressing rooms.” Yet there was no shortage of would-be entertainers. Very few black acts got jobs on the better-paid, larger, white vaudeville circuits, which maintained strict racial quotas. Mary was one of scores of young black women around the country who avidly competed for jobs on the TOBA—jobs that at least held out the promise of a better life than washing white folks’ laundry or cleaning their houses. But there was one major difference between Mary and the other naïve young girls: her goal was to become a pianist, when most girls with talent dreamed of becoming dancers, actresses, or singers. She was lucky also in that the public accepted female piano players—not the case with most other instruments. (If Mary had been a saxophonist, for instance, she would either have changed the course of jazz history, making it far more open to women players, or she would have become one more footnote.)
With Hits ’n Bits, Mary learned performance lessons that would last a lifetime. “I was trained to play with everyone and play everything,” she said, and she learned humor, timing, instant recovery, and how to play under all conditions. She was, then, an entertainer, and she was proud to be. It was still an age of blackface comedy, of gags and pratfalls. Popular musicians performed tricks: they played instruments behind their backs, or with their feet. They crossed their eyes and mugged for the audience, as in Josephine Baker’s preParis routine. Mary joined in with gusto. As she described her act: “Spreading a sheet over the keys, I did a version of ‘Milenberg Joys’ mostly with my elbows, winding up by taking a break while spinning around on the piano stool.” And, she added, she did “many comical things with my toes, fists and elbows.” Her clowning, her versatility and fast ear, her strong touch and rhythmic ability, made her a crowd-pleaser right away.
Yet even then, she felt the pull to put aside gimmicky antics and play good music. Hits ’n Bits was in Chicago in the winter of 1925. There Mary ran into Earl Hines, whom she knew from Pittsburgh and who had joined Louis Armstrong in Chicago. He squired her to the Sunset cabaret to hear King Oliver, and at the Vendome Theater introduced Mary to Armstrong and pianist Ford “Buck” Washington. Armstrong, of course, was a sensation, but being a pianist, Mary was also fascinated by Washington, a terrific stride player who recorded with Armstrong in 1927 and on into the mid-thirties (though now he is remembered as half of the famous vaudeville team of Buck and Bubbles). Washington was to show her some great runs, including his own most prized one, which he warned her to play backwards so that Art Tatum, when he heard it, would not be able to “steal” it. (Tatum, Mary added, quickly figured out “Buck’s run” and used it thereafter in his repertoire.) Everything Washington played, said Mary, was “unusual,” a compliment.
Aside from such high spots as meeting Armstrong and Washington, life on the road was as rough as ever. Even though Mary’s friend Margaret Warren had also joined the troupe of Hits ’n Bits, she could protect her only so far. Men and women often paired, as John Williams later explained it, for reasons that were as much practical as romantic: salaries were small and erratic, and sharing expenses became a necessity. And for a single woman, finding a steady man helped protect her from constant advances by others. Mary quickly formed a liaison with the leader of the combo that played for Hits ’n Bits, trumpeter Shirley Clay.
Violence was commonplace, and Mary’s sometimes curiously offhand remarks reflect the attitude that violence between men and women was inevitable. When, for example, Buzzin’ Harris developed “big eyes” for Mary’s Aunt Anna Mae, his wife, Arletta, found out and pulled a knife on him, Mary wrote. She added, “He had to give his wife two black eyes, to straighten her out. It was certainly comical seeing him following a cow trying to get some manure to put on her eyes to clear them,” she finished merrily.
MARY HAD BEEN with Hits ’n Bits for only a few weeks when John Overton Williams, the man who would become her first husband, joined the troupe in Ohio, near Christmastime. Williams told his story at the age of ninety, one year before he died in Columbus, Ohio; his memories of his beginnings as a young vaudeville musician were crystal clear:
“I was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 13, 1905. I went to school with W. C. Handy’s son—he lived down the street, on Saxon Street. My father, Thomas Williams, was a deacon in the church and sang in the choir, so they had me baptized at 10. But kids almost had to do that at that time. They had the moaners’ bench where they had revivals, a week or two weeks, and different kids would come up and confess that they had religion. I was the last one, ’cause I didn’t have no religion. But I didn’t want my parents to look bad.
“But it was okay with them when I went out on the road. I’d been making gigs when I’d go back to Memphis each summer from Kansas City, where I was going to school. My father never made over $11 a week. He was a porter in a small printing office. That was his highest salary. When I would make $2 or $3 a night on these gigs of mine, well, that set alright with them. Now, in order to get a C-melody horn I wanted, I had to promise my mother, Parthenia—Polly, as she was called—that I was going to play in church, because by playing for dancing, we were supposed to be doing the devil’s work. But when I started making that $2 and $3 and bringing it home, they forgot about that religion. I was putting more food on the table.
“I failed in school in the eighth grade. I got in with the bad boys and I would be at the Palace Theater in Memphis—I would play hookey and slip and go to the show every day. I wanted to see William S. Hart and Mary Pickford and all. This made my mother cry and cry and I felt so bad. So my mother said I could go to Kansas City and live with a favorite aunt, Aunt Eliza Marshall, who people called ‘Babe,’ and my cousin Mabel and go to school. This was 1920, and Ben Webster was a classmate there. I wasn’t thinking about music. But in 1921, I heard one of my friend’s brothers play a baritone sax. I’d had about eight piano lessons when I was younger, till my friends kidded me that I was a sissy and I quit. But I could read music. And I heard it. Radio was the new thing, you could make you a crystal set real easily. I heard the Coon Sanders band then [a popular white dance band] there in Kansas City, that was about 1920. I liked that band.
“I never had a music teacher. In elementary school, they taught us a little. Then, in Kansas City, when I was going to school and living with my aunt, I told my mother I wanted a saxophone for Christmas. It arrived early in January of 1922 and then I taught myself. I asked questions after I found out where to put my fingers for C and D, and I went down to the music store and bought a beginner’s book. I would ask different saxophone players like Jack Washington in Kansas City, the baritone player that ended up playing with Count Basie’s band. And a guy that lived down the street from me that was playing professionally would show me different things. My aunt in Kansas City had a player piano. I used to pump it and play by ear with some of those songs. I started gigging in Kansas City with Paul Banks’s band, in 1922. I substituted for a guy and Banks put me in the union right away. I played C-melody sax at that time, but I liked the sound of the baritone, and I happened to see an ad in the paper in Memphis that summer that they had this baritone in some little town in Tennessee. I think they wanted $50 or $60 for it. And I sent him the money and he sent me the baritone. I think I was the first to play baritone on the stage at the time. (Later I found out in order to play with the big bands, I’d have to get an alto, so late in ’22, I got one.) There was something
you called slap-tongue and flutter-tongue that was popular in the twenties, where you make it pop, and of course the baritone would pop louder. I caused a couple of guys to buy baritones later, in around ’24 and ’25, after that. But the baritone was just a little novelty on the side, ’cause there wasn’t no special part for it. I just had it along. They hadn’t added baritone to bands at that time—they didn’t have big bands. Well, baritone is now in all big bands. My last six years of playing, I played only baritone in Earl Hines’s band.
“Joining Harris’s Hits ’n Bits was the first time I started traveling, at age nineteen. I was recommended by a saxophone player that was from St. Joe, Missouri, who was already with the show, so they sent me a wire to Memphis and asked me if I would join the show. And I said yes. It was on a Sunday I went to join the Hits ’n Bits. My mother put me on the train in Memphis. We were right up next to the engines—the trains were segregated, of course, then—and she gave me $6. ’Course that was a lot of money then. Well, they used to have guys they called ‘butch’: the butch sold magazines and fruit and stuff on the trains. Here I was, a young kid, and the butch introduced me to a blackjack game, and by the time we got to Cincinnati, a twelve-hour trip—we arrived at nine at night—he’d taken all of my money. Here I am, flat. All I got is the address where I’m going, so he gave me a nickel since at that time, transportation was a nickel. And he told me what streetcar to catch and that’s how I arrived in Cincinnati on that Sunday night. There was an act that was closing that night and one of the guys, a comic named Sidney, asked, ‘Kid, you’re joining the show that opens tomorrow?’ I said ‘Yeah.’ ‘Have you had anything to eat?’ And he fed me. The next morning before they left they showed me where the theater was and that’s when I first met Buzzin’ Harris and Mary and everybody. That was around the middle of December of 1924. I remember because we played that one week there and the second week we played in Columbus and it was Christmas week.
