by Linda Dahl
“This was on the TOBA. The TOBA was just comedy and chorus girls and your blues singers, with anywhere from fifteen to twenty people in the show. You’d have week stands, and you’d go from one city to another.
“Buzzin’ Harris did this funny kind of step. It wasn’t nothing, just buzzin’ off the stage. He’d be in a crouch and do this dance where he made his exit. Well, it really wasn’t no dance at all—it wasn’t no act at all. You came out and did a number, a feature, and then the band did some music and he’d buzz off the stage. Nothing.
“There wasn’t no band pianists that were women. I’d made this trip and here was this little girl—she was only fourteen at the time—playing piano. When they had the first rehearsal, I was very disgusted when I saw it was a girl. I’d played with women piano players and they’d be just tinkling. Women really couldn’t handle it at the time—I’m not lying. And it wasn’t popular for them to be doing it in the first place. Because at that time, in the teens and twenties, musicians were kind of ruffians—drinking and hanging out and staying out all night. Society people called them hired hands. We’d go to entertain the society people, but they’d look down on us. There was no thought of a girl like Mary ever playing with a band.
“But there she was and I said, ‘Oh my goodness, I come up here and I got to be fooling with this little girl.’ Mary was already playing for this show when I joined. Well, then she hit on the piano and I’d never heard nothing like that in my life. Terrific. She outplayed any piano player I’d ever played with. She played note for note anything that she heard, Earl Hines, Jelly Roll Morton, and heavy like a man, not light piano. At fourteen.”
It was not love at first sight for these two. Mary was involved with Clay, and John quickly hooked up with Margaret Warren. But when Clay left the band soon after the New Year, Harris appointed John Williams leader. “I had the qualities needed. I was playing a lot of horn for the time, baritone and alto saxophones, and I kind of excited them. And, they didn’t have no better with nobody else.
“I quit Margaret and started going with Mary in a month or two. But Margaret was so crazy about Mary and admired me and my playing and all, so that it was all right, because I’m a take-charge person and she knew that Mary really needed to have a male to take care of her, look out for her. It was never no deep love or nothing like that. It was always like baby sister–big brother. That’s the way it was.”
“John had eyes for me,” Mary wrote in her version, “but I was too busy with my music to pay attention to him or anyone. Love was secondary to me. My music was always first. I didn’t love him,” she said. “He’d get in the bed and I’d get up and go play music. Margaret liked John very much and she told me so. I said it was okay by me, but when he began showering her with nice gifts, I changed my mind. That was his psychology, to try and make me look his way. He never gave up. My mother and relatives trusted me with him and I finally turned to him. Then, too, I felt I would not be made to return home. So, latching on to John helped me to continue with the show.” The shapely dancer Margaret Warren, who eventually returned to Pittsburgh, where she settled down to have a family, remained a firm friend to both Mary and John.
“Mary and I started a romance pretty soon,” affirmed John. “It was around about February or March in 1925 that she and I started shacking together to cut expenses and we did that until we married in ’26. You’d pick your favorite and shack up. By us being in music and me being the leader and the glamour boy and the new one, well, it threw us together. It really wasn’t no love, but I was lucky enough to have a real good brain and I was a father image to her. How much does a girl know, traveling around at fourteen, fifteen years old? And she was awful quiet, didn’t smoke at that time, or drink. She was never a drinker.
“Mary had ideas even then, but she wasn’t writing yet. We used to copy stuff off of records—like Red Nichols and His Five Pennies. But it was hard to survive. There were twelve to fifteen of us in the show, and sometimes the whole take wasn’t but $500, and there was no pay when you didn’t work.” The troupe became desperate for bookings. “We even worked with a carnival,” Mary wrote, “the lowest of the low. These roustabouts, they are terrible. Our group stayed more or less to themselves. No one ever molested the girls or me except if they wanted to be molested. I learned about a ‘poor boy’ sandwich: sardines and onion inside of a loaf of bread. You allow this to soak a couple of hours and it would be good for all day. But most of the time we just did not eat.” Although she always referred to this period as a “terrible life,” she would add that, “nothing bothered me because music was my food. And there was so much love among musicians in those days.”
Among those musicians was the late trumpeter Adolphus “Doc” Cheatham, who joined the Syncopators in Nashville in the spring of 1925 for a brief spell and became a friend. Cheatham was in the pit band of the Bijou Theatre where Hits ’n Bits was booked for a week. “I was playing saxophone at that time,” Cheatham recalled. “John Williams needed another horn and approached me, and I joined that band as a saxophone player. From Nashville, we went to St. Louis, Chicago, Newark. All black audiences. All the owners were white.
“Mary was very good-looking,” continued Cheatham. “I was attracted to her. Everybody in that band was attracted to Mary Lou. Mary wasn’t yet married to John, but her relationship with John was very obvious; they were always together. John was slender, tall, very dark-complexioned. A good player. Leader of the group. He was protective of her. Like her guardian or something. She and John were very close for quite a while and no one could get between them. I think that kind of got on her nerves after a while—like training her, always right there. She wasn’t ready for marriage. Music—that was her life. She was happy, lived a great life.
“Then, we were playing in the pit in St. Louis, where I had an uncle, and he came down and took me out of the show, took me back to Nashville. So I was just there with that Buzzin’ Harris troupe for about six or eight weeks.”
“Doc Cheatham left the show,” Mary confirmed in her memoir, “but the rest of us stuck it out until the show broke up.”
“EVERYBODY LIKED JOHN WILLIAMS,” wrote Mary of the man who would be her husband for the next decade and a half. “He was a very sensible young man. He knew how to maneuver out of trouble with his glib tongue. A real born leader and a controller of dissension. He would have made a great psychiatrist.” In early band pictures his gaze is level, staring the world straight in the eye, with a slightly brash but charming smile but without pugnacity—the look of a shrewd conciliator. From Mary’s point of view he was an invaluable buffer, practical where she was off in the clouds. And he was a good promoter for Mary, who was shy and usually hung back. John, like her later manager, Father Peter O’Brien, pushed her—sometimes literally—into the limelight, knowing that once she was parked at the piano bench and her fingers hit those keys, she would be transformed. “He seemed so proud of me musically and kept me on the scene, showing me off to other musicians the way my stepfather and brother-in-law did,” she wrote.
But he was also tough on her, as O’Brien also would be, in a different way. “My husband would say, ‘If you don’t play you’re going to get a beating.’ He used to take me around and he’d make me play with all of the top musicians. I think that each time he had to threaten to hit me. I was scared each time. ‘Get up and play,’ he said. I said, ‘Oh no,’ and I started crying. He says, ‘You’d better play.’ So I sat down and played with them.” When Marsha Vick asked her at the end of her life if it was true that her husband really had knocked her off the piano bench once when he was annoyed with her playing, Mary readily confirmed it. “Yes. I’ve been beat up. And they used to take food from me because they knew I played better on an empty stomach.” “You certainly didn’t enjoy that!” her friend responded, appalled. But Mary answered, “No, but it was good for me. I played better.” Although John Williams, it should be said, adamantly denied striking her, Mary elsewhere repeated her accusation that he did
so.
IT WAS AN era when not only children were spanked and routinely beaten, but the “childlike” female as well. As part of their “training,” Mary said, chorus girls often were beaten. “You come out with a black eye if you don’t do it right,” Mary recalled of her first years with the Clouds of Joy after 1929. But it was worth it, she added: “I could expand with that band.”
It will come as no surprise, then, to learn that Mary was later involved with a number of men who were physically abusive: often brilliant, sensitive musicians who were known as “bad drinkers”—including longtime lovers Ben Webster and Don Byas, and her second husband, Shorty Baker. This was the dark side of the romance of the jazz life.
Mary was not an easy young woman to be around, always off in her own world and painfully shy. She stuttered, sometimes so badly that musicians told her “not to talk, just play.” And she continued to have what she called “nervous fits” where she saw ghosts and spirits—just as she had done as a small child. “Someone was always with me at night,” she wrote, “not only because of strange people, but because they knew I could still see spirits and they were afraid I’d panic.”
Her “nervousness” wasn’t helped by her constant worry about the small brothers and sisters she had left behind and whom she’d pledged to support, but could not. That her failure to do so consumed her with guilt is clear from her letters to friends later. But she was the typical child of an alcoholic, carrying her burdens in secret. John knew little of her private worries, and as the paymaster as well as the band’s leader, kept a tight rein on the small income they made. So Mary turned deeper into her music. “There was always music in my head,” she wrote. “Half the time I could not hear a conversation. There was no room for vicious or bad sounds. Music compensated for all bad sounds.” This pattern continued into her later life. Whenever reality became too much for her, Peter O’Brien asserts about the Mary he knew from the 1960s on, “she would become dysfunctional and have to escape into her music.”
IN 1925, UNDER John’s leadership, the band—usually called the Syncopators, or sometimes the Syncojazzers—contained six members. As Mary remembered, they were: “A tenor player called Martin, who was a friend and schoolmate of Coleman Hawkins from St. Joseph, Missouri [replaced first by Sylvester Briscoe, a trombonist, then Bradley Bullet]; Shirley Clay, from St. Louis, who was already blowing good trumpet—we used to call him ‘Hoggy’ [replaced by Doc Cheatham, then Henry McCoy]; drummer Edward Temple, a showman, but also a solid, subtle rhythm player; and Jo Williams, out of Kansas City, a banjoist and guitarist. He played none of the minstrel kind of music but crazy guitar chords,” Mary emphasized of this player who became a very close friend. (Jo and John Williams between them covered the then common tuba part.)
During her tenure with the Syncopators, Mary had an epiphany crucial to her future as a musician. Her idol as a performer in the troupe was the trombonist Sylvester Briscoe. “He did a feature on ‘Tiger Rag,’ ” Mary reminisced, “playing with his foot, and the last chorus he’d put both hands in back of him, his mouth on the mouthpiece with his head bobbing up and down, and the slide on the floor, doing a Charleston—and he was so sensational they had to take his act out, because no one could follow him.” He inspired Mary to work harder on perfecting her act of playing with her elbows and feet. It won her raves. “Then one night, as I was leaving the stage, an older musician grabbed me and said, ‘Hey, little girl, I heard some good chords in about two things you played. You should stick to playing good music and cut out the clowning.’ ” Immediately, she understood the truth of what he said, and she dropped the gimmicks. In fact, she became known as a “plain” performer, who spoke little and gave her attention to her instrument on stage. She may have begun as a flat-out entertainer, but even in the twenties Mary was on her way to becoming a serious musician.
“HITS ’N BITS folded in late 1925,” recalled John Williams. “We were in Kansas City, the last date we played. We couldn’t get any more bookings. Our show wasn’t all that good, anyway.” In fact, the era of the old-fashioned traveling shows, with what Mary called its bandanna music, was drawing to a close. Vaudeville, black and white, appealed increasingly to urban tastes.
Out of work, most of the Syncopators hung around Kansas City. John and Mary found a room with his Aunt Babe, but it wasn’t long before they got the kind of break they dreamed of. “Seymour and Jeanette was an act in vaudeville, and they were playing Kansas City at the Pantages Theater for a week, during this time,” recalled John. “We heard that Seymour and Jeanette were in the market for a jazz band. It had become popular then to get you a five-or six-piece jazz band with your act. That meant something flashy—like a drummer who could throw his sticks around.”
But the top-ranked dancing duo, one of a few dozen black acts playing big-time white vaudeville, didn’t want a band just for the sake of prestige. Though he was only twenty-seven and at the top of his career, Seymour James was plagued by increasing shortness of breath and pain due to an enlarged heart. Told by doctors to quit dancing, he chose instead to shorten his own performance, thus making room in the act for a band.
“My drummer,” continued John, “told them, ‘We got a band, and the show is breaking up. I’ll find John and we’ll make an audition for you.’ ” “Before the band played,” Mary wrote, “Seymour and Jeanette came on the stage and greeted us. I was sitting at the piano quietly. Seymour said to John, ‘Get that girl off the stand and let’s start the rehearsal.’ John’s answer was “Okay,” and he stomped off the tempo we were going to play. Was Seymour surprised to hear me play! Now, I was playing a real Fats Waller style. He began to say how great I was, but what will our manager say about a girl being with the act? We’ll have to put pants on her.’ During this period a woman was not really allowed to be in with a group of men or anything.” In fact, Seymour’s wife, the other half of the team, often wore top hat and tails (as did, a bit later, Josephine Baker and Marlene Dietrich). At the audition, John Williams, to his credit, insisted they let Mary dress as a woman, arguing that having a female musician would be a big draw—and he was proved right. The ensemble of musicians was dressed impeccably, like collegians from the era, with Mary for all the world a sweet-faced coed in matching cardigan and skirt.
After the audition in Kansas City, the dancers told John they’d send for the Syncopators once they got to Chicago. “We thought they were kidding,” John recalled, “but in no time, less than a month, they sent us tickets! We went to Chicago and played around the area for a few months, to break in the act. They were on big-time vaudeville, the Keith and Orpheum, so we had to be polished, get the rusty parts out. They uniformed us, they taught us stage manners, how to bow and smile and act onstage. We had the talent. They didn’t have to do nothing to our music. They were crazy about our sound.”
The Syncopators had arrived in Chicago broke, but anticipating good times. “I was supposed to get $50 or $75 a week—this was like $500 in those days. I just couldn’t believe my ears,” Mary reminisced.
She was right to doubt her good fortune. “John loved gambling, shooting craps. He kept my $75 a week and gave me a dollar a day to eat with,” wrote Mary. “That was not enough during that era. Seymour and Jeanette were disturbed about it all because at times I didn’t have proper clothing and food. Jeanette spoke to me about my appearance and told me I looked like a ragamuffin.” She began to hide her earnings from John, often to send money home to Pittsburgh.
From Chicago, the troupe went by train to the promised land: New York. If they were a hit there, they could count on good bookings all over the country. “It was in 1926 on Easter Sunday when they brought us into New York,” John recounted. “I remember Seymour and Jeanette had a Packard car and a chauffeur and drove us all around. The first place they took us after they got us a room and we rested and all, was down to Fifth Avenue so we could see the parade—those guys with the pinstripe pants. That was the first time we were in New York, both me and Mary. And she didn’t go o
ut much; she was a little homebody, liked to stay in most of the time. We stayed in private homes. The act played Yonkers, and Loew’s Eighty-first Street Theater, and Hackensack, and all over. We used to get the ferry over to New Jersey. Atlantic City. They were slipping us into big-time.”
At Loew’s Theater, Mary got her first big-time review, which she pasted into the first of the many scrapbooks that preserve her notices. “Special mention,” read the unsigned clip, “to the young lady pianist with the band.” Seymour and Jeanette and their Syncopators were on the same bill with Fanny Brice, famous for her Baby Snooks act.
Living in Harlem that summer of 1926, Mary had great music practically at her doorstep and plenty of time on her hands to enjoy it. “All the big vaudeville acts at that time worked forty-two weeks a year, but summertime you didn’t work,” explained John Williams. “And we had forty-two weeks fixed on the Pantages and Keith circuit starting that fall. We didn’t have no steady salary during the summer. We would play a week or a split week somewhere—three or four days on. But then, we didn’t need much.”
