By Magdalena Hernandez

Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams
by Tammy L. Kernodle (Northeastern University Press; Boston; 2004; 348 pages; $30)

Duke Ellington. Miles Davis. Mary Lou Williams.

Even if you don’t have to ask, “Mary Lou who?” the latter isn’t a name that springs immediately to mind when you think of the jazz giants. Now Tammy L. Kernodle’s biography, Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams, seeks to burnish a fading star, recounting the struggles and accomplishments of this pianist, arranger, and composer.

Though Williams was, the author believes, a true “midwife to the modern jazz age,” racism and sexism helped to keep her contributions little known. Of course, her black contemporaries suffered the same hardships she endured: exclusion from lucrative radio spots and bookings at prominent hotels, hostile club owners, low-ball wages, less renown than white artists. But Williams was also the victim of a double standard. She was a pianist—not a singer, the accepted role for women in jazz.

Consequently, the public and the music establishment weren’t sure how to classify her. Since Williams played “as well as or better than most men,” Kernodle notes, critics “often centered their discussions on the masculine qualities of her abilities, largely ignoring the feminine qualities of her physical beauty. Paradoxically, the woman musician could not, through her adoption of a serious and cerebral musical approach, maintain her femininity.”

Williams was born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs in Atlanta in 1910 to Virginia Riser, a church pianist and organist who introduced the child to the keyboard. At four, Williams surprised her mother by repeating note for note a song she’d just heard played. From there, the “little piano girl,” who soon moved with her family to Pittsburgh, astonished everyone who heard her perform.

At fourteen, the prodigy hit the road, eventually touring with the vaudeville show “Hits and Bits.” Though her family had reservations about letting a teenager play gigs all over the country, they sorely needed the income. While traveling with the troupe, she met and married saxophonist John Williams.

During the Depression, Mary became part of the famous Kansas City jazz scene, playing in Andy Kirk’s swing band Twelve Clouds of Joy. Here, Kernodle writes, Williams attained “a level of fame that was comparable to that of many of her well-known counterparts. No woman other than the vocalists Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald had so dominated the swing scene or earned the genuine respect of bandleaders and musicians alike. Mary had seemingly broken through the ‘glass ceiling’ that had prevented many talented jazzwomen from pursuing their professional goals.”

After leaving Kirk’s band, Williams played at New York’s stylish Café Society, where her inventive improvisations at the keys were popular with the supper club crowd. Yet the spotlight had dimmed. It would be years before she again enjoyed success comparable to the Kirk years.

Williams was a prolific and talented composer. Her Zodiac Suite, twelve movements based on the astrological signs, was performed at Carnegie Hall in 1946. Critical opinion, the author writes, “would place the composition in the category of Duke Ellington’s extended works, which also combined elements of the classical tradition with jazz.”

And Williams was no stranger to artistic collaboration. She composed and arranged works for Ellington and Benny Goodman. She also formed influential friendships with Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. Williams, in fact, claimed Davis derived the idea for his “Birth of Cool” sessions from her. Among the beboppers, she was particularly close to Thelonius Monk, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie.

But as if to live up to—or, rather, down to—the clichés about musicians, Williams led a tumultuous personal life. Separated from her husband in the late 1930s, she often endured physical abuse at the hands of the men in her life. She was no stranger to marijuana during, and some years after, her time with Kirk. To purchase the luxurious wardrobe expected of a woman performer, she racked up debts she couldn’t pay.

Maddeningly, we read that pride led her to turn down job opportunities she felt were beneath her. For instance, in 1953 Williams declined Louis Armstrong’s offer to join his all-star band because, as Kernodle explains, she “no longer had any desire to share the spotlight or serve as a sideman.”

Despite her disappointments in the music industry, Williams found a constructive channel for her energies when she decided to address jazz’s dirty little secret: rampant drug abuse. In 1958, she established the Bel Canto Foundation along with a thrift shop that featured upscale wares donated by fellow players and society swans; the proceeds of both went toward providing medical care for addicted musicians.

The hard knocks in Williams’s life led to her conversion to Catholicism. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, her compositions tended to be religious in nature. Though her dismantling of barriers to the acceptance of sacred jazz was yet another innovative turn, she was also returning home, to the musical foundation her churchgoing mother had instilled.

Happily, Williams didn’t toil in complete obscurity in her later years. Eventually hailed as the “grande dame of jazz,” she was often quoted by the mainstream media during the 1970s when they needed a jazz spokesperson. And by the middle of the decade, renewed attention to her work meant she was earning some of the biggest fees of her career.

At age sixty-six, Williams was offered a position that brought stability to her life, teaching jazz history and leading the jazz ensemble at Duke University. Her campus fans were chiefly white; Duke’s few black students, for the most part, didn’t know who she was. This was symptomatic of a widespread problem facing jazz—its latest, avant-garde incarnation had lost its black audience, and was appealing largely to whites.

Nevertheless, until her death from cancer in 1981, Williams did her part to educate others about, as Kernodle writes, the “evolution of jazz and its connections to the experiences of blacks in America.” Years later, Wynton Marsalis “would assert the cultural connection between jazz, spirituals, and slavery,” the author notes. But “the public articulation of such ideas began with Mary Lou Williams in the 1970s.”

An associate professor of music at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, Kernodle has written a fine introduction to Williams. Drawing from extensive research, Kernodle writes thoughtfully about Williams’s artistic style and skillfully sketches the jazz milieu she inhabited.

Unfortunately, the book gives readers scant insight into what must have been a complex interior life. Considering the setbacks Williams endured and the demons she clearly battled, this is a noticeable omission. Though the biography thoroughly recounts the events in Williams’s career, we’re left wanting greater interpretation of her psyche.

But, in all, Soul on Soul is a long overdue and detailed portrait, which does much to elevate Williams to her rightful place in the jazz firmament.

Magdalena Hernandez is a senior editor.

Harry Scores a
Hat Trick
by Mary Mahony; Redding Press; 2003

Harry’s not quite a fifth-grader, but he’s already faced a trio of major challenges: a national chess competition (he won), a hockey injury (he’s itching to get back on the ice), and a recently diagnosed case of scoliosis.

How does a typical preteen—in this case, an inner-city Boston child who’s being bused out to a school in the suburbs—deal with the doors that are opening and closing in his life? That’s the premise explored by Harry Scores a Hat Trick, a novel for young people written by Mary Mahony, MEd’77, whose own daughter was diagnosed with scoliosis twenty-five years ago.

Mahony has a knack for capturing the small and telling details of Harry’s story, which—as in her earlier novel Stand Tall, Harry—the title character relates in his own lively, straightforward voice. Clearly, the author’s broad knowledge of the various forms and effects of scoliosis allows her to use fiction to teach young readers and their parents about the disorder.

More than that, however, this warm and gentle novel reveals fundamental life lessons. Hold your head up and believe in yourself, its message goes, and you’ll find a way to reach your goals.