Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  Or as Mary herself said, looking back at the end, “I did it, didn’t I? Through muck and mud.”

  Acknowledgments

  IN THE JOURNEY that turned an idea into this book, I was guided by the good counsel and knowledge of extraordinary people. I wish to thank them all. First, Mary Lou Williams’s personal manager, Father Peter F. O’Brien, S.J., who shared so many hours and insights with me, meticulously chronicling his unparalleled trove of memories of Mary Lou Williams’s music and life. He also gave me unrestricted access to her large archive of papers, including letters, diaries, photos, and transcripts of interviews he made after her death with many of her friends and family. These include those with: Dr. Sam and Mrs. Marge Atkinson; Howard Burley; Father John Dear, S.J.; Father Vincent O’Keefe, S.J.; Father Frank O’Connor, S.J.; Doc Cheatham; Brother Mario (Grady Hancock); Conchita “Niki” Nikitani; Buttercup Powell; Irving “Mouse” Randolph and Henrietta Randolph; Anna Mae Riser; Willis Scruggs; Hilton Ruiz; Martha Salemme; John Williams (bassist); and Claude “Fiddler” Williams (also interviewed by Chuck Haddix for the Oral History Project for the Smithsonian Institution). For all Peter O’Brien’s help, I am deeply grateful.

  Mary’s family also opened their doors to me. (A family reunion dinner in Pittsburgh one hot summer day ranks among the best barbecue I’ve tasted.) For sharing their store of memories and memorabilia about their beloved Mary, who may have moved to New York and then Durham, North Carolina, but never completely left Pittsburgh, thanks to: her sisters Geraldine Garnett, Dorothy Rollins, and Marge Burley, her niece Helen Floyd, her grandnieces Karen Rollins and Bobbie Ann Ferguson. In Philadelphia, to Geraldine Stokes Williams, who pieced together a family genealogy. To Mary’s sister-in-law Ruth “Reeny” Burley in New York, widow of Mary’s brother Jerry. In Columbus, Ohio, the late John Williams, Mary’s first husband, assisted by his friend Andy Klein, gave me more great barbecue, recalling at ninety years old, with crystal-clear accuracy, dates and events from the 1920s on.

  Mary had many champions, and a talent for keeping friends. In no particular order, I wish to thank them for their generosity. To M. Gray Weingarten, a longtime friend of Mary’s who provided valuable nuggets from the Golden Age of Jazz and helped put order to the music as well. To Joyce Breach, Mary’s confidante and great fan for many decades, for exuberant talk, unflagging support, and beautiful Mary memorabilia. To Marsha Vick and her husband, Paul Vick, in Durham, North Carolina, who gave me southern hospitality, memories of Mary’s years while artist-in-residence at Duke University, and especially to Marsha for sharing the journal she kept during Mary’s last year and a half of life. To Johnnie Gary, whose candor and humor about Café Society days lit up the 1940s. To Lorraine Gillespie, Mary’s close friend and fellow convert to Catholicism, who laid aside her usual reticence to talk about Mary. To Barry Ulanov, Mary’s friend both musically and spiritually, for a highly insightful conversation. To Bernice Daniels, for her memories spanning many decades, and also for her astringent humor. To Elaine Lorillard, a steadfast admirer of Mary’s music and a free-spirited commentator on her life. To Jean Bach, another great lady, for the same. To Gemma Biggi for filling in the later Village period. To the Blisses—father Herbert, Mary’s attorney, and sons Jon and Matthew, who came of age in the 1970s hearing Mary play at the Cookery. To John Graziano and to Louis Ruffulo, for their candor—and thanks as well, John, for the photos. Also thank you to Chris Albertson, Gary Giddins, David Hadju, Phil Schaap, Lewis Porter, Jim C. Hall, Chuck Pickeral, Phil Schaap, Loren Schoenberg, D. Antoinette Handy, Eileen Egan, Lance Carter, Edward Flanagan, Delilah Jackson, Patricia Willard, Dr. Frank Kessler, Phyl Garland, Helen Keese, and others too numerous to include here.

  Many musicians were Mary’s friends as well as admirers and gave generously of their time, particularly in sharing memories about the music. Many thanks to: pianists Marian McPartland and Dr. Billy Taylor; saxophonist Harold Arnold for filling in details about Mary’s band with “Shorty” Baker in the mid-1940s; vocalist Al Hibbler, who was in the Ellington band in 1943 along with Mary. And for insight into her European sojourn in the 1950s, thanks to: vocalist Annie Ross, drummer Gérard “Dave” Pochonet, and pianist Aaron Bridgers. Also thanks to bassists Carline Ray and Brian Torff, both of whom played with Mary often. And to pianists Bob Rodriguez and Joel Simpson, who helped me with technical questions.

  I was given invaluable help by everyone at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University’s Newark campus, where the Mary Lou Williams Archive is housed. Thanks especially to director Dan Morgenstern, music librarian Vincent Pelote, and archivist Tad Hershorn. At Duke University in Durham, university personnel were gracious, and thanks in particular to: Mrs. Marian Turner, retired secretary of the Music Department and Mary’s friend at the end of her life, and to Robert E. Ward and Paul Bryden, both of whom were with the Music Department when Mary was alive, for helping to elucidate Mary’s progress on her last major, unfinished composition. Thanks to the Ellington Archive at the Smithsonian Institution, above all to Annie Kuebler for her patient and meticulous work in identifying Mary’s manuscripts there. To Suzanne Egglestone, Public Services Librarian at Yale University, for help with the Benny Goodman Papers. Last but not least, my appreciation to Phyllis Keaton, library director of the Brewster Public Library, and the library staff, for cheerfully locating carloads of books for me.

  So many people contribute, immeasurably so, to the written “life” of a fabulous person such as Mary Lou Williams. Yet at some point, the writer has to go it alone, and then it can seem at once an exhilarating challenge and a lonesome job, as taxing on muscle and nerve as running a marathon or scaling a cliff. For their understanding, forbearance, and support of me during the “Mary Lou” years, I owe a particular thank-you to my friends, to all in my family, my sisters, brothers, and in-laws, and especially to my mother, Marilyn Decamp Dahl, for their understanding, forbearance, and support. To my stepson Tim and my daughter Katrina, my chief cheerleaders, and above all, to my husband, A. J. Vogl, for his good and wise counsel and selfless wielding of the red pencil. Finally, thanks to my faithful friend and agent, Susan Zeckendorf, and to the people of Pantheon, especially to the peerless Bob Gottlieb, who shepherded this book home.

  Sources and Notes

  MARY LOU WILLIAMS’S own writings and voluminous personal papers, a group of lengthy published interviews, and many oral interviews of family, friends, and musicians conducted by the author or others, and used with their permission, constitute the main sources for this book (see Acknowledgments).

  Mary Lou Williams wrote a series of eleven autobiographical articles, called Mary Lou Williams: My Life with the Kings of Jazz, edited by Max Jones, that appeared in Melody Maker magazine from April to June of 1954. They have been reprinted since in various books and are identified in the notes as: M/M.

  She also wrote an incomplete autobiography she called Zoning the History of Jazz, plus many other fragments and sections of drafts in her notebooks, all of which are identified in the notes as: ZONE.

  Some important interviews quoted from (followed by their identifying abbreviations) include:

  Whitney Balliett, “Out Here Again,” The New Yorker, May 4, 1964 (OHA).

  Stan Britt, a 1978 interview, “First Lady of Jazz,” Jazz Journal, September 1, 1981 (BRITT).

  D. Antoinette Handy, “Conversation with Mary Lou Williams,” The Black Perspective in Music, vol. 8, n. 2 (Fall 1980) (HANDY).

  Will Moyles, radio interview, “The Essence of Jazz,” Buffalo, N.Y., February 18, 1977 (MOYLES).

  Martha Oneppo, Yale University Oral History American Music Series, March 16–17, 1981 (YALE).

  John S. Wilson’s interview for the National Endowment of the Arts/Institute of Jazz Studies (WILSON/IJS).

  1. My Mama Pinned a Rose on Me

  1 “My mama pinned …” Lyric to “The Blues,” on My Mama Pinned a Rose on Me, Pablo CD 2310-819.

  2 “You see these things …” WILSON/IJS.

  3
“I was born …” ZONE.

  4 “Both my great-grandparents …” Arnold Shaw, The Street That Never Slept (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1971), pp. 223–24.

  5 “I’ve had a lot …” OHA.

  6 So separate was … Correspondence with the author, March 3, 1995.

  7 “I must have frightened …” ZONE (M/M April 3, 1954).

  8 “I never left the piano …” Owen Coyle, “Mary Lou Williams and the Jazz Crusade,” The Mississippi Rag, 3(1976):16.

  9 “My half-brother would …” Lynn Gilbert and Gaylen Moore, Particular Passions (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1981), p. 79.

  2. The Little Piano Girl of East Liberty

  1 “Almost everywhere white labor …” John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom, ed. Alfred A. Moss (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998), p. 493.

  2 Her very first professional gig … Naomi Jolles, New York Post, December 11, 1944.

  3 “I was out booking my gigs …” MLW quoted in Joanne Burke’s documentary film, Music on My Mind, released 1981.

  4 “And he sometimes took me …” ZONE (M/M).

  5 “He told me always to play the left hand louder …” WILSON/IJS.

  6 “None of the original pianists …” David Jasen and Trebor Jay Tichenor, Rags and Ragtime (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), p. 6.

  7 “You don’t get the feeling …” WILSON/IJS.

  8 “I had to see things for myself …” Gilbert and Moore, Particular Passions, p. 85.

  9 “You can imagine my surprise …” BRITT.

  10 “During the summer …” WILSON/IJS.

  11 After graduating from … Located by Lance Carter, Activities Director, Westinghouse High School, Pittsburgh, Pa., 1996.

  12 Mary was suitably impressed … HANDY.

  13 If Mary had completed … Per David Hadju, transcription of talk by Billy Strayhorn to the Duke Ellington Society in 1962.

  14 “They gave me $10 …” Earl Hines to Barry Ulanov in Frank Joseph, “We Got Jazz!” Pittsburgh Magazine, October 1979.

  15 But black musicians … Leonore R. Elkus, ed., Famous Men and Women of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh: History and Landmarks Foundation, 1981).

  3. Hits ’n Bits

  1 “It was terrible …” YALE.

  2 “I was playing saxophone …” Interview by Peter O’Brien, 1995.

  3 “My husband would say …” WILSON/IJS.

  4 “You come out with …” Coyle, Mississippi Rag.

  5 “There was a musician friend …” MOYLES.

  6 “Almost immediately I was stopped …” M/M.

  7 Gunther Schuller agrees … Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 351–52.

  8 “I played the entire show …” M/M.

  9 “Holder’s boys rehearsed …” M/M.

  4. Nite Life

  1 “To get around that …” Frank Driggs, “My Story, by Andy Kirk,” Jazz Review, February 1959.

  2 “This was the most …” WILSON/IJS.

  3 “We didn’t even know …” Andy Kirk as told to Amy Lee, Twenty Years on Wheels (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), p. 60.

  4 “No other city …” Dave Dexter, liner notes, The Best of Andy Kirk, MCA 2-4105.

  5 “In Kansas City it was like …” Kirk, Twenty Years on Wheels.

  6 “It was the first time …” Gary Giddins, “Mary Lou Williams 1910– 1981,” Village Voice, June 10, 1998.

  7 They auditioned us … Kirk, Twenty Years on Wheels, pp. 70–71.

  8 “But the boys …” M/M.

  9 “The next night …” ZONE (early draft only).

  10 “Don Redman was my model …” OHA.

  11 A reviewer lauds … Dick Raichelson, The Territories, Volume One, Arcadia LP 2006.

  12 “I told her …” Kirk to Chip Deffaa, In the Mainstream (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1992), p. 87.

  13 “She had a set of ears …” Kirk to Dick Sudhalter, Mary Lou Williams obituary, New York Post.

  5. Walkin’ and Swingin’

  1 “When Kirk came backstage …” YALE.

  2 “I just loved it …” Ibid.

  3 “The word went round …” M/M.

  4 “I didn’t hang around …” Count Basie as told to Albert Murray, Good Morning Blues (New York: Random House, 1985), p. 110.

  5 “When we arrived …” Pete Johnson, Jazz Journal, August 1959.

  6 “If they were looking …” Count Basie, Good Morning Blues, p. 149.

  7 “At set’s end …” Dave Dexter, Billboard magazine, June 13, 1981.

  8 “She had a good ear …” Kirk, Twenty Years on Wheels, p. 73.

  9 “Actor Dick Powell …” Seventeen magazine, 1947, article in MLW papers.

  10 “Ben Webster was the type of guy …” WILSON/IJS.

  11 “I needed a fourth saxophone …” Interview on KUON-TV, Nebraska Educational Television, 1980.

  6. Silk Stockings

  1 “By 1937 and thereafter …” Schuller, The Swing Era, p. 353.

  2 “If I passed out an arrangement …” YALE.

  3 “odd, beautifully constructed …” OHA.

  4 “frequent unison playing …” Erica Kaplan, “The Lady Who Swings the Band,” Jazz Research Papers #9 (1989).

  5 “Built on jam sessionlike riffs …” Liner notes, Decca CD GRD-2-641, Black Legends of Jazz.

  6 “When we first began to hit …” WILSON/IJS.

  7 “Joe Glaser was the most …” Max Gordon, Live at the Village Vanguard (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), pp. 78–83.

  8 “I didn’t like Joe …” Kirk to Deffaa, In the Mainstream, p. 82.

  9 “There was nothing you could do …” Ibid.

  10 “When I used to play ‘Froggy Bottom,’ …” Mary to Eric Townley, Mississippi Rag, January 1980.

  11 “Andy Kirk said to me …” YALE.

  12 “I was very high strung …” Quoted in John S. Wilson, Mary Lou Williams obituary, New York Times, May 30, 1981.

  13 “Arranger Mary Lou Williams …” Schuller, The Swing Era, p. 353.

  14 “little that is really unexpected… “ Albert McCarthy, Big Band Jazz (London: Royce Publications, 1974), p. 244.

  15 “I did 20 things …” MOYLES.

  16 “letters like lyrical talking notes …” Ibid.

  17 “The studios have always typed …” Morroe Berger, Edward Berger, and James Patrick, Benny Carter: A Life in American Music, vol. 1 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1982), p. 276.

  18 “I was writing …” MOYLES.

  19 “Whenever musicians listened …” M/M.

  20 “Usually, we’d play five or six arrangements …” Benny Goodman, quoted in Gary Giddins, Village Voice, June 10, 1981.

  21 “I was one of the first …” M/M.

  22 “I learned how to accompany …” Jimmy Rowles, quoted in Whitney Balliett, Night Creature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 153–54.

  7. Why Go On Pretending?

  1 “We arrived in most places …” M/M.

  2 “June [Richmond] … was the cause …” Kirk, Twenty Years on Wheels, p. 110.

  8. Trumpets No End

  1 “We rehearsed the new outfit …” M/M.

  2 “Then,” Mary went on … WILSON/IJS.

  3 “This particular time …” YALE.

  4 she was paid $100 … Payroll records in the Ellington Archive of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

  5 “Duke,” Mary reminisced … BRITT.

  6 His way of writing voicings … MOYLES.

  7 “Sometimes there was a mistake …” Gilbert and Moore, Particular Passions, p. 86.

  8 “Mary Lou Williams is perpetually …” Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1973), p. 169.

  9 “Harold called me …” MOYLES.

  10 Mary performed for … Jolles, New York Post, December 11, 1944.

  11 “I moved around …” M/M.

  9. Café Society Blues

 
; 1 “our first political nightclub …” Helen Lawrenson, Whistling Girl (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1978), pp. 86, 89.

  2 “The way they are treating my people …” Quoted in Mary L. Dudziak, “Josephine Baker, Racial Protest, and the Cold War,” Journal of American History, September 1994.

  3 “My friends thought …” Wambly Bald, “A Gamble on Race Equality That Paid Off,” New York Post, November 4, 1946.

  4 “Not only were Reds …” David W. Stowe, Swing Changes: Big Band Jazz in New Deal America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 67.

  5 “On my way down to the club …” WILSON/IJS.

  6 “Mary Lou was very self-effacing …” Phyl Garland, “The Lady Lives Jazz,” Ebony, October 1979.

  7 “Hammond himself said …” James Lincoln Collier, Benny Goodman and the Swing Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 99–100.

  8 Another review of Mary … Jolles, New York Post, 1944.

  9 “full of joys …” Eric Thacker, The Essential Jazz Records, 1984.

  10 “was the first visual artist …” Obituary for David Stone Martin, New York Times, 1992.

  11 Martin went on to illustrate … Manek Daver, David Stone Martin, Jazz Graphics (Tokyo, Japan: Graphic-Sha Publishing Co., 1991).

  12 “I can’t keep husbands …” New York Post article, 1945, clipping from MLW files.

  10. The Zodiac Suite

  1 “I wrote ‘Scorpio,’ …” Dan Morgenstern, liner notes, Signs of the Zodiac, Folkways LP FTS 32844.

  2 “many pedal-point ostinatos …” Andrew Homzy, liner notes, The Zodiac Suite, Vintage Jazz Classics CD 1035.

  3 It was at this point … Carter Harman, unidentified newspaper article about Mary’s long appearance at the Village Vanguard, fall of 1949, in MLW papers.

  4 “Stylistically the suite …” Richard Thompson, “Mary Lou Williams: Zodiac Suite, a Critical Analysis,” undated academic paper archived at Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, N.J.

  5 “The long, drawn-out strings …” M/M.