Morning Glory

By Linda Dahl

Pantheon, 2000, $30

North Carolina was home to jazz composer and artist Mary Lou Williams for the last few years of her life. After eking out a modest living as a musician and composer since the 1920s, Williams achieved financial security when Terry Sanford hired her as a professor at Duke University in 1975. She died in 1981 with an estate that became the Mary Lou Foundation.

Because Williams, a Roman Catholic convert, was associated with religious music for the past 40 years, and known for her jazz settings of gospels and masses, she was draped in spirituality. Jazz historian Linda Dahl has written a superb biography, which deconstructs this myth while retaining the genuine charm of this woman who existed in the rough world of jazz.

The African-American Williams, who was born Mary Lou Burley in Atlanta, Ga. in 1910, grew up in Pittsburgh, Pa. Her destitute family moved there during World War I to gain employment in the thriving war industry economy. Her musical gifts were discovered early because her mother loved playing the piano and Mary Lou basically taught herself by observing and following her mother. But the Burley household was far from harmonious. Her mother was a drunk and her stepfather Burley was a gambler and drinker. Her sister Mamie raised Mary Lou, but in a sense Mary Lou raised herself, earning her own living as a child performer and giving the money to her family to survive.

She married early, had many lovers and knew the underside of the music world. Though she was independent and self-reliant, her hard life caused her mental depression. A religious conversion in the 1950s eased the mental anguish, and her closest male friends were priests. In the 1960s she developed a friendship with Father Peter O’Brien, a Jesuit priest who essentially gave up his parish work to manage her career and eventually her estate. Dahl credits him with organizing Mary Lou’s music for royalty and copyright purposes.

Dahl characterizes the musical style of Mary Lou Williams as improvisational and not strictly melodic, “tending” Dahl writes, “instead to weave her work from found objects of riffs, voicing, and rhythmic patterns with the same economy and attention to particularities as, say, a quilted or regional novelist.”

Her art relied on “harmonics and the subtle rhythms of jazz.” She was known as a musician’s musician because of the inspiration she gave other musicians to create their own unique musical patterns and not rely on cliched arrangements.

Kevin Lewis is a freelance writer, formerly of Pinehurst, who now makes his home in Staten Island, N.Y.