by Linda Dahl
Mabel and I were out being daredevils and met a man. He was abnormal sexually. He expressed a desire to do something abnormal to the both of us. I took Mabel aside and told her that this would be good to experience, and we agreed. Not saying anything to anyone, we went to his room and after having some wine to give ourselves courage (neither one of us drank!) we relaxed with our clothes on, except for our panties which we later took off. Well, I’ve never been so frightened in all my life. The guy was a maniac and we couldn’t stop him. He held us and the only way I could get rid of him was to kick him in the head. After this ordeal, we could barely walk. I began thinking of all the tales people had told us about other women who ended up in a hospital after being chewed up. We ran home.
Sadly, as Mary’s medical records reported many years later, her body bore evidence of “trauma to the uterus”—an abdominal scar—that Mary dated to 1930, when she had this unsavory and violent encounter. Permanent damage to the uterus due to rough sex, or hard blows or kicks, is not, doctors say, terribly uncommon.
But there was more to come. When, the following day, Mary received the telegram from Kirk, summoning her to Chicago right away to record with the band, she continued her chilling narrative.
The next night I caught a train, sitting most of the time on one hip. Before the train reached St. Louis, where I had to change trains, I was awakened by someone doing the same thing. I screamed and looked around, but it was the conductor. I was the only passenger on the train and the lights were very dim. I had to fight like mad. I wasn’t fit for anything when I arrived in Chicago that morning, but I went straight to the studio to record.
It is truly incredible that, despite what sounds like two episodes of sexual brutality in two days, coupled with the aftermath of emotional distress, fatigue, and physical pain, Mary was able to produce two shining solos. But she did. The band was not ready to start when she arrived, so Kapp decided to start the tape rolling with a piano feature. Apparently Mary did not even know she was being recorded; she simply followed Kapp’s instructions to play something. “So I sat down and played,” wrote Mary. “I had been in the habit of making up my own things when asked to play. Out of this training and the way I was feeling the beat, came the two originals, ‘Nite Life’ and ‘Drag ’Em.’ ” Both were very good three-minute blues that established her as a musician worthy of serious attention among discerning critics. (Despite reissues through the years, Mary fought unsuccessfully for royalties for decades.)
The slow “Drag ’Em” has a lot of the flavor of Earl Hines—octaves and tremolos in the right hand, melodic fragments and rhythmic devices in the left. The delightful ending is a favorite musical “upset” of Mary’s in which she shifts from a minor key to the relative major. But it is “Nite Life,” a faster blues, that especially demonstrates her unforced but crisp and authoritative command of the piano. The French jazz critic Hugues Panassié, who was one of the first to understand the passion in Mary’s playing, paid special attention to her performance of “Nite Life” in his (somewhat overwrought) Guide to Swing Music. While her style was clearly derivative of James P. Johnson and Fats Waller, Mary, says Panassié, “is much more fantastic and ardent. On ‘Nite Life’ she has made one of the most beautiful hot piano solos we have. Her hot, panting right hand phrases, and the swing she gets by the accentuation in the bass by the left hand, must both be admired.” Sometimes, Mary’s playing spilled over into a kind of nervous passion that would lead her to play at the very brink of rushing the time. This gave her music an edginess and lent a certain abruptness to her endings. But it also fueled the sense of excitement that is one of the prize elements of good jazz.
Panassié adds, almost as a throwaway, “Mary Lou Williams’ playing is like that of a man; one would never guess that it was a woman playing.” Thus he laid bare (though presumably unintentionally) the whole dilemma for women artists who must perform not as women but as men in order to be taken seriously. Mary, a product of her era, often said proudly that she “played heavy like a man”; though it would be more to the point to say that she was playing heavy like herself. Sharon Pease, a musician who sometimes collaborated with Mary, thought she achieved her strong touch by “proper relaxation, thus getting the weight of her arms and body onto the keyboard much in the same manner as a prizefighter gets the weight of his body into a punch. This relaxation not only improves tone quality, but makes for faster and smoother execution.” Where Panassié and many others thought in terms of brute strength, Pease thought of balance points.
Almost a week after Mary had recorded “Nite Life” and “Drag ’Em,” the band as a whole went into the studio, recording six tunes, enough material for three 78s. The band recorded mostly pedestrian material of limited musical interest, with a few notable exceptions. Her “Mary’s Idea,” (a title she used again later) has a striking, spiky melody line and is intelligently plotted. She makes good use of Kirk’s tuba, having him sign off the tune with deeply dipped grace notes, and she deftly incorporates her main influences of the time: the introduction is melodically beholden to Redman’s introduction in “Cotton Pickers’ Scat” and his “singing” arrangements for reed and brass, as well as the strutty, bright, short piano bits he liked to insert. “Don Redman was my model,” she declared about such early arranging efforts. “I could hear my chords in my head but didn’t know how to write them.” She also paid homage to Redman in the opening chorus for saxophones on “Travelin’ That Rocky Road.”
Then, working with a combo called the Seven Little Clouds of Joy, with John Williams as the leader, Mary wrote her most ambitious tune to date. “Gettin’ Off a Mess” has the kind of sinewy, odd melody line that she would so often write, and the centerpiece is her solo, with a ravishing interlude of Gershwinesque harmonies. Along with “Mary’s Idea,” “Gettin’ Off a Mess” demonstrates unequivocally that here was an original thinker.
Shortly before Christmas of 1930, the Clouds went to New York, where they recorded more tracks for Brunswick, including a Rudy Vallee-ish selection called “Saturday” that Jack Kapp may have hoped would be a crossover hit—from the “race” records section to the larger white market. It wasn’t. On “Sophomore,” another unabashedly commercial tune with vocals, Mary had her first 32-bar solo and used it to brilliant advantage. A reviewer lauds her playing as a “masterpiece with its aggressive percussive quality, broken tenths and quick runs. One of her tricks is a device used to build and release tension. This is heard in the third eight-bar set. Moving into the chorus, she upsets the rhythmic flow by holding a chord in the left hand for the first measure. The right returns to prance lightly through the rest, ending the whole matter with a surprise—a flurry of notes in the higher octaves.”
As usual, she and the band were paid peanuts for their work, “Maybe $4 or $5 for recording,” said John. “That was it. And never saw one penny from royalties, none of us. They’d take a number and then the engineer or someone would put any name on it—that’s why it’s hard to remember what tune someone’s talking about now. We just played them and didn’t think about it.” As for Mary’s arrangements, John thought she got $5 or $10 tops. No salary. Not that it mattered. Even John, the highest-paid member of the band, wasn’t being paid much, because it wasn’t there to give.
Money troubles exacerbated the problems in their marriage when they got back to Kansas City. “I left town to go play with the band for several days and didn’t leave her nothing. It was the one time she got me really angry.” All over a pair of shoes. “I asked my husband for money to buy a pair of good, I. Miller shoes,” said Mary, “and he blew his stack, saying I should be happy to get $2 for shoes. I never forgave John. He knew I had holes in my shoes and no winter coat, yet refused to give me money. And I knew he had over $300 in his pocket. Well, I wired home for money and I moved in with Mary Kirk, who was very kind to me. She fed me and gave me a short suit coat to wear underneath my little spring coat.” Mary added meaningfully, “After this, he looked ugly to me and I’d sit up a
ll night writing to keep from being in bed with him.”
The country was plummeting into deep economic depression. People couldn’t afford to buy records, and Brunswick dropped the band from its roster. But Kirk, hoping to record with Brunswick again when the economy bettered, took care to have the band use the pseudonym “The Joy Boys” when the rival company, Victor, recorded the Clouds that year behind vaudevillian Blanche Calloway, sister of Cab. But the Clouds were to make no more records for five years, a period during which some of the finest talent passed through the band—Ben Webster, Lester Young, Buddy Tate—and also when the band’s attractive brand of swing matured.
They were still riding fairly high, despite Black Tuesday and a worsening economy. Between the first recording session in Chicago and the next in New York, the band got a break: two weeks in the spring of 1930 at the famous Roseland Ballroom in New York, where Fletcher Henderson had the house band. “He liked the band,” recalled John Williams, “and he said, ‘I can give you a break, I’ll put you in there while I’m out on tour with my band.’ ” But the band arrived at Roseland exhausted and broke, having had a car accident on the way that made them miss a gig and run out of money. Both John and Claude Williams emphasized that the Clouds were no match then for the established bands they played opposite—the white bands of Gene Goldkette and his Vagabonds, and Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra, with their bigger sections and better arrangements. But the Clouds’ sound was still a success with audiences, and their engagement was extended. Mary sat in once or twice a night to do specialty numbers like “Froggy Bottom” and “Mary’s Idea,” during which, she remembered, the kids would stop dancing to crowd around the piano.
While in New York, they accumulated good new arrangements (new for them). The Casa Loma Orchestra was cleaning out their band book, recalled John Williams. “Glen Gray gave us about 12 to 15 charts. This was good stuff,” John emphasized. “Glen Gray was one of your greatest bands back at that time. Before Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman made it, Glen Gray was it.” Among the new music was a discarded chart of the lovely Bix Beiderbecke piece “In a Mist.” Mary, though still not able to read music, learned the piano part perfectly and played it with the band. And John Williams’s friend Benny Carter copied some charts that the terrific drummer Chick Webb’s band was currently playing—”Ol’ Man River” and “Liza”—for five dollars apiece. John recalled that the Clouds went on to play the Savoy Ballroom after their Roseland stint, opposite Webb. “He would always let the other band play their best arrangements, then come out after and get ’em. But now we sounded like a new band.” They sounded so good not the least because Andy Kirk had asked Mary to custom-tailor the new arrangements for the Clouds of Joy, providing high polish and pointing up individual players’ strengths.
By 1931 there wasn’t much lucrative work for the Clouds (or any band). They put together strings of one-nighters, and played the Grand Terrace Ballroom in Chicago, but entertainment was becoming a luxury fewer and fewer people could afford. Everyone was “at liberty” a lot, and Mary filled her time by becoming an avid card player, a lifelong passion. Never good at holding her liquor, she avoided drinking; instead, she went bowling, hung out with her girlfriends, and filled in on piano whenever she could for “Jack,” which troubled Kirk. “She was very attractive and very talented, but you know how they were on women in those days,” he explained to friend Delilah Jackson. “They didn’t want women to be in the band and the musicians would really get upset; seemed like the musicians were jealous. But she was just so determined to play that piano.” For her part, Mary never acknowledged having been aware of any conflict in the band because of her gender. “No one ever rejected me or my music,” she was wont to say. True, and not true. While she did win over the crowd and her fellow musicians with her music, the fact remained that there was a lot of winning over to do.
ANDY KIRK AND Mary Lou Williams were oil and water, developing an adversarial relationship that got worse over time. Hardly surprising: as Mary put it, Kirk wanted to be the black Guy Lombardo, while she was all about jazz. Still, they were adversaries who realized fully that each had ambitions beyond the ordinary and was bound to attain them. Though Kirk made it seem in his autobiography that he “decided” to make Mary the band’s regular pianist eventually, by all accounts he resisted as long as he could. “I told her,” Kirk said, ‘I didn’t want you to get a head. Hot-headed. You are a pest.’ ” Then the Clouds ended up in Philadelphia, scuffling, after working in Chicago in the winter of 1931, and counted themselves lucky to put together a week at a theater called the Pearl. It was run by a man named Sam Steiffle, who by a lucky coincidence was looking for a house band to back his headliner Blanche Calloway, whom he was trying to promote as a rival to her brother Cab. The Clouds grabbed Steiffle’s offer.
Mary wrote tactfully, “Sam Steiffle had the idea of putting Blanche in front of the band because Andy played tuba in the band and the only front man we had was Billy Massey, our vocalist; but Steiffle’s idea didn’t work out too well.” Though Blanche was tall, vivacious, and seasoned, the records she made with the Clouds of Joy—with Mary on piano—make clear that she was not particularly musical. (Nevertheless, Miss Calloway, who failed in her attempt to “steal” the Clouds away from Kirk for a road show, did put together another band in the teeth of the Depression, and pieced together a living as a bandleader until the end of the thirties.)
At first, Mary was hired as a second piano attraction with the band. “Steiffle got a great idea: put two pianos on the stage, a baby grand for Marion Jackson and a Tom Thumb for me. I made people scream and carry on, because they saw a woman that weighed around 90 pounds. To hear me play so heavy, like a man, that was something else.
“Over the two pianos, Kirk had a shed-like enclosure built,” she continued. “On top of the shed stood the drums. Ben Thigpen had joined the band, replacing Crack McNeil. It was tough going; I was used to a large piano, but … I was doing my best. And I could hear practically nothing but the thunder of drums overhead.
“This went on for some time, when Marion Jackson began not showing up on time. One day, when Jack didn’t show up at all, I jumped on the baby grand and played, surprising everyone in the theatre. When Jack came in he seemed to be loaded. This did it. Steiffle went over Andy’s head and fired Marion, saying, ‘You don’t need him. Keep her—she’s great!’ ” Jack was given two weeks’ pay and a ticket back home. I stayed on as the orchestra pianist, composer and arranger.”
Other now legendary talents came to play at the Pearl, and Mary met seasoned pianists who gave her tips. Eddie Heywood, Sr., was a conservatory-trained veteran who was accompanying the famous act of Butterbeans and Susie. (Mary and Heywood’s son, Eddie, Jr., were featured pianists at Cafe Society in the forties.) The second was Pearl Wright, longtime accompanist to the great Ethel Waters, headlining that year in the show Blackbirds. “Pearl had to go away and sat with me for at least a week teaching me how to accompany Ethel Waters, because I’d have to play for her while she was absent.” Evidently it went very well. Five years later (in December 1936), Ethel Waters pleaded with Mary by telegram to drop everything and come with her on tour. “What a beautiful, tall woman, and so kind,” Mary wrote of that complex personality. “I used to hear how Ethel would take her big car and chauffeur to a very poor Negro section, fill her car with poor kids and take them downtown to buy them clothing.”
Meanwhile, John Williams had come down with diphtheria, for which there was then no effective treatment, and lay in a hospital until he was released at Eastertime, fully recovered. During his convalescence, Bennie Moten, passing through Philadelphia, told Andy Kirk to contact the union back in Kansas City. “A couple places that had never hired Negroes had an opening: exclusive Winnwood Beach and Fairyland Park,” Mary wrote. In May, the Clouds, broke again, got a job in Baltimore that funded their return to Kansas City.
“This,” Mary said, “was the beginning of my career as the pianist, arranger and composer wi
th the Andy Kirk band.” By now Kirk had changed his tune, confiding after her death, “She had a set of ears you wouldn’t believe. I used to say that if you dropped a dishpan on the floor, she’d tell you what key it was ringing in.” To a friend he added, “She was so smart, plus she could arrange and was very attractive.”
Chapter Five
Walkin’ and Swingin’
1931–1935
ALTHOUGH THE CLOUDS made no known records from 1931 until 1936, it was a fecund period for jazz in general, for the band itself, and for Mary. In the intensely creative atmosphere of the homely, homey clubs in black Kansas City, a music at once handcrafted and sophisticated evolved. And Mary was in the thick of it.
While economic despair was new to many formerly comfortable whites in the 1930s, for many blacks the widespread poverty produced by the Great Depression was just another step or two down the American ladder that they never seemed able to climb. A piquant comment summarized their situation: “It’s hard to jump out the window and kill yourself when you’re living in the basement.” John Williams expressed a commonly held view among black musicians: “White musicians—they worked all the time, ’cause they had those white bands in every leading hotel with their ballrooms, all over the United States. Dancing was the big thing. But we had to get what we could. We couldn’t play in those white hotel ballrooms regular, so we were playing for a night or a week. Sometimes we were the house band for a month. But then after that, you’re on your own.”
Road life was gritty, and more so as the thirties wore on. Black musicians in Kansas City had little choice but to go on the road, though. Despite the occasional solid engagements in town—a summer at the popular white resort Winwood Beach and a tour at Fairyland Park, a run at the elegant Vanity Fair club—the town simply couldn’t support them full-time. The Clouds’ bread-and-butter dancehall jobs dried up and, as with other bands, their stories of those years traveling the “territory” are filled with tales of being left without money or prospects. “In 1933, when President Roosevelt closed all the banks—they called it the banking holiday—we played a theatre in Little Rock, Arkansas, and there weren’t but 20 people in there for a show,” recalls John Williams. “Well, we were stranded in Little Rock. So was Bennie Moten’s band, which had Basie in it.
