Harlem Nocturne (18 page)

Publicity photo, 1946. Courtesy of the Mary Lou Williams Collection, Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University.

A child prodigy, Williams had proven herself to be a gifted musician, composer, and arranger long before settling in New York. Born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs, the second of eight children, on May 8, 1910, in Atlanta, Georgia, she was recognized early for her musical and spiritual gifts. Williams emerged from the womb with a veil, a thin membrane of placenta, thought by African Americans to be a sign of the child's clairvoyance. “I used to hear so many stories about spooks and ghosts,” she remembered. “Seemed like I picked up on that when I was about two or three years old because my mother was afraid to take me out anywhere with us.”
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Early on the young girl experienced visions. Blessed from birth with a psychic sensibility, Williams would always link her musical gift to her deep spirituality.

At age three, Williams stunned her mother, herself a talented musician (though not a professional one), when she played melodies on the piano that she'd heard. Mary Lou, on her mother's lap at the piano, played the notes she had just watched her mother play, and it shocked her mother so much that she dropped her.
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An introspective child, Williams possessed a complex inner life that helped her to see both the significance of her musical gift and the role it might play in helping her make her way to a better life than that into which she was born. Williams always possessed a sense of self far beyond what might have been expected for a young person in her situation. At best, a young black woman born into poverty might have worked as a domestic servant for most of her life. A musically talented one might have become a highly respected church musician. Had she acquired education, she might have
become a teacher. As an entertainer, she might have acquired a modicum of success and fame. But Williams's ambitions went beyond all of this. She was confidently aware of her genius, and throughout her life she sought opportunities to express it fully.

Williams described her family's home in Atlanta as “a wooden frame house near swampy woods” where her mother and grandmother went on “regular weekend drinking sprees.”
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In fact, Williams's mother spent the week as a live-in domestic servant. If she enjoyed partying on Saturday night, she also regularly attended church on Sunday morning. There she served as pianist and organist. Eventually, both Williams's mother, Virginia Burley (who married Williams's stepfather, Fletcher Burley), and her grandmother, Anna Jane, earned money as laundresses.

Williams hid under the bed when her great-grandparents recounted stories about slavery, but she heard the tales nonetheless. From these stories she learned about the history of her people and their music, and for the rest of her life she saw black music as the deepest expression of black history. This association drove her sense of purpose and mission as well as her pedagogy. In a number of essays, both published and unpublished, Williams insisted that “jazz began with the spirituals.” She wrote, “The black American Slaves were taken to church. They learned the hymns of the white people. Soon they began to create their own psalms or hymns. These became known as the spirituals. This is the first music that was later to develop into what we know as jazz.”
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Years later, she would
have her friend David Stone Martin create an illustration of a black music tree with its roots in slavery and suffering.

Williams had no knowledge of her father, Joseph Scruggs, until years later. As she explained, “I was born out of wedlock, a common thing not only for black people, but also whites in the South.” Eventually, she took the name of her stepfather, and throughout her life she thought of Fletcher Burley as her daddy. Burley nurtured Williams's musical gift, taught her the blues, and bought her her first player piano. On the player piano she heard and learned from the masters, people like Jelly Roll Morton and James P. Johnson. Before long she became a student of the Atlanta native Jack Howard. Later she said of him, “I like Jack Howard because he played such a strong piano he could break up all the pianos and as a baby I started playing like that. I think I got the masculine quality [of playing] from him.” But for the most part, Williams was a self-taught pianist who learned by listening and playing. She learned to play in a variety of music styles from the player piano, including Harlem stride, boogie-woogie, waltzes, and light opera. She was also aware of the black religious music that permeated her surroundings.
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Unlike Petry and Primus, who grew up far removed from the racism and violence of the South, Williams experienced this prejudice firsthand. Williams certainly did not grow up in a family of middle-class professionals like Petry. She did escape the South. When she was five years old, she and her family joined the first wave of black migration, moving to Pittsburgh in 1915. Nevertheless, some of Williams's earliest memories
were of racial violence. She retained images of lynching and of seeing a man's head “split open with an ax.”
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In Pittsburgh, white neighbors threw bricks into their windows and harassed her family, who lived with the constant threat of physical abuse. If that were not enough, lighter-skinned blacks were prejudiced against the chocolate brown child as well. Williams's great-grandfather was nearly white, with blond hair, and her great-grandmother, Matilda, was believed to be part Native American. According to Williams, Matilda, the most powerful figure in the family (especially after the death of her husband), was a color-struck woman who beat her dark-skinned grandchildren more often than she did the lighter ones.

From the moment Williams discovered the piano, she could not be dragged away from it. The music became her refuge from poverty and maternal indifference. In Williams's memory, her mother was a cool, distant figure who never came to hear her play after she became famous. Her older sister Mamie, four years her senior, acted as her caregiver and confidante. Williams's younger siblings and her niece Bobbie Ferguson dispute this characterization of Virginia Burley.
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In the beginning of Williams's life, Virginia was a single mother who had to work two jobs to care for her children. Once in Pittsburgh, though married, Burley continued to work long hours, and she had a number of other children.

In Pittsburgh, Williams earned the nickname “the little piano girl of East Liberty.” She played around town at parties for the city's elite, for funerals, and at silent films. She was even discovered by neighborhood prostitutes, who paid her to play
in the local brothel. So, like Billie Holiday, who started out as an errand girl doing housework, eventually singing for money in Baltimore brothels, Williams found that her talent brought her paying brothel gigs. Unlike Holiday, however, Williams never became one of the working girls. In fact, her stint in the brothel didn't last long: instructed to peep through a view hole and play for the entire sexual encounter, she quit when one such encounter went on too long.

When she wasn't playing the piano at home or on her many local gigs, Williams attended Lincoln School, where she excelled in music and mathematics. From Lincoln she went to Westinghouse High School. Westinghouse boasted an array of important former students, pianists all: Ahmad Jamal, Billy Strayhorn, and Erroll Garner among them. Williams attended for only one term. During the summer of her twelfth year, in 1922, Williams joined the tent show “Buzzin' Harris and His Hits and Bits,” and thus began her time on the black vaudeville circuit. During summer break, Williams's mother agreed to let her go on tour. By that time, she'd already earned a professional reputation in her hometown; been squired around the city's nightlife by an uncle figure, Roland Mayfield; and begun to develop into the beautiful young woman she would become. “At the age of 12 I looked like 18,” she later said. Protected by Mayfield and her stepfather, she escaped numerous attempts by men to seduce and even rape her. When the opportunity to join Buzzin' Harris's outfit came along, she gladly jumped at it.

In spite of her multiple musical gifts, Williams had not learned to read music, a skill she wouldn't develop until a few
years later, when she wanted to write down the sounds she heard in her head. Andy Kirk, tuba player and bandleader of the Twelve Clouds of Joy, and Johnny Williams, the show's saxophonist bandleader, helped her to transcribe them. Johnny Williams became her mentor and, eventually, her husband.

Bitten by the show-business bug, Williams eventually joined Andy Kirk's Twelve Clouds of Joy, an important territory band that toured the Southwest. Territory bands traveled within a designated area, transporting new musical styles along the way. Along with Benny Moten's Kansas City Orchestra, Andy Kirk's Twelve Clouds of Joy helped to nationalize the Kansas City sound, a highly rhythmic blues-based style of jazz that first developed in Kansas City, Missouri. Williams traveled extensively with the Kirk band and gained a reputation as an important and gifted musician. In her capacity as soloist and arranger, she soon became known as “The Lady Who Swings the Band.” She'd reached her peak with the Kirk band when she began to set her sights on New York. She also divorced her first husband, and on December 10, 1942, she married the trumpeter Harold “Shorty” Baker. Williams and Baker began an affair when both were working for Kirk, and while Mary Lou was still married to John Williams. By this time, John and Mary Lou were married in name only.

Baker left the Kirk band first, to play with Duke Ellington, and Williams eventually followed him. During this time, Williams wrote arrangements for Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. She wrote the rollicking “Roll 'Em,” a blues-based boogie-woogie tune, for the Goodman orchestra. The tune
moves through space and time with a momentum and sense of joy that surely sent dancers soaring. She also arranged a number of tunes for Ellington, including “Trumpet No End” and “Blue Skies.”

Throughout much of their brief time together, Baker was on the road with Ellington. In late 1943 or early 1944, Baker was drafted into the military.
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Williams, desperate for a little stability, found an apartment for them in Harlem, #21 at 63 Hamilton Terrace. But Baker would never live there. Williams, excited about the possibility of a stable gig and eager to create a home for herself and her husband, moved in, but the marriage did not survive the war. Although Williams and Baker never legally divorced, Baker did not share Williams's life after the move. Nonetheless, the move to New York did bring the much-needed stability to Williams's life that she had sought. She had been on the road since she was twelve or thirteen years old. Williams lived at Hamilton Terrace throughout her time in New York and maintained the apartment after she left for Europe in 1952. She would continue to live there throughout the rest of her life, keeping it even after moving to Durham, North Carolina, in the 1980s, when she began to teach at Duke University.

Hamilton Terrace is located near 144th and St. Nicholas Avenue, in a neighborhood known as Sugar Hill. Bound by 155th Street to the north, 145th to the south, Edgecombe Avenue to the east, and Amsterdam Avenue to the west, Sugar Hill was home to many of Harlem's most prosperous and prominent citizens, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Duke Ellington. Describing
Sugar Hill in the 1940s, Ann Petry wrote, “There is a moneyed class, which lives largely in and around the section known as the Hill. . . . The Hill suggests that Harlem is simply a pleasant and rather luxurious part of Manhattan.”
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In an essay on Sugar Hill in the
New Republic
, Langston Hughes explicitly stated what Petry implied. His wasn't a celebration of black achievement, but an effort to point out the contradictory experiences of Sugar Hill residents, always a minority, and that of other, poorer Harlemites.

Elegant and secured with a doorman, Williams's building housed her small, sunlit, one-bedroom apartment. She painted the kitchen lemon yellow and furnished the bedroom with two twin-sized Hollywood beds, upholstered in pink. She wrote music and kept up with correspondence in the bedroom. The apartment also had cabinets and files that held her compositions and arrangements as well as important papers and the essays and other writings she published. The heart of the apartment was the small living room, where a small upright Baldwin piano stood. On top of the piano she had placed various knickknacks, vases, and photos. Photographs taken by William P. Gottlieb in 1947 show Williams entertaining musician friends in this apartment. Dizzy Gillespie, Tadd Dameron, Jack Teagarden, and others surround Williams or Hank Jones as they play. Sometimes they are all seated in front of the piano engaged in conversation; at other times, they play cards on a small table that sits near the instrument. Williams had purchased a white rug for the center of the room, and she and her friends often sat there on the floor, listening to records on a portable record player.