Mary Lou Williams: The Little Piano Girl of East Liberty

American Catholic History

Noelle & Tom Crowe

History, Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, Education

5 • 724 Ratings

🗓️ 12 February 2025

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Born in 1910, Mary Lou Williams was a child prodigy. She played piano concerts in the homes of her neighbors in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh as early as five years old, and was touring by her teens. After a meteoric rise as an arranger for the biggest names in jazz she became a mentor and mother-figure to many of the great jazz musicians of the 20th century. She was a remarkable pianist and composer in her own right — one of the most important of the 20th century. But she also saw the suffering and grief of those around her as drugs and lives of loose morals wreaked havoc on friends and loved ones. Eventually, in her 40s, she had a crisis and walke off the stage in Paris, vowing to never play music again. She instead did everything she could to help everyone she could, but she didn't know how to. She found refuge in a Catholic church in Harlem that she found was not kept locked, so she was able to go in to pray — though she was not Catholic. But her friend Lorraine Gillespie, wife of jazz great Dizzy Gillespie, was considering becoming Catholic. Together they met with the priest and eventually were received into the Church in 1957. After her conversion to Catholicism she returned to the jazz scene, seeing her music as a way to praise God and to evangelize. Her music found new depths of meaning in the prayers, devotions, and themes from Scripture that saved her. She believed that jazz was one of the most pure art forms, and wrote heart-wrenchingly beautiful music over the last few decades of her life, including three different Mass settings. She died in 1981 of cancer and is buried in Calvary Cemetery in Pittsburgh.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to American Catholic History.
0:08.3	If you like our podcast, be sure to rate us and give us a review wherever you get your podcasts.
0:14.0	I'm Noelle Heister Crowe.
0:15.5	And I'm Tom Crowe.
0:16.5	Today we're talking about Mary Lou Williams, who is known as the First Lady of Jazz.
0:22.7	She was a woman with tremendous strength, talent, and grace, who always seemed to be a blessing
0:27.3	to everyone around her, despite being treated very poorly by many people throughout much of her
0:32.7	life.
0:33.0	Now, we've talked about a lot of people who chose lives of hardship and sacrifice, like the priests
0:38.2	and religious who came over from Europe, fleeing the French Revolution, or those who came to
0:42.9	be missionaries. Those people have remarkable stories because of the example they give of
0:47.4	choosing sacrifice for others over their own comfort. Mary Lou Williams is one of those who had
0:52.9	no choice, really, about whether or not she would
0:55.3	face hardship and exploitation, but the choice she had was how she would react to these realities.
1:02.3	Yes, and she saw how so many of her dear friends handled difficulty resorting to drugs and
1:07.8	alcohol, some of them dying from these addictions. When her moment of crisis came, she chose a very different path.
1:14.4	Hers is a beautiful story. There's a bit of an Augustinian flare to it.
1:18.7	Late have I loved the beauty ever ancient, ever new.
1:21.9	Right. She recognized beauty from an early age, but didn't fully appreciate the power of beauty until later in life.
1:29.3	So, let's get into this beautiful story. Absolutely. Mary Lou Williams was born Mary Alfreda
1:36.2	Scruggs in Atlanta, Georgia in 1910. Her parents were Baptist and she grew up in their church.
1:42.7	When she was still very young, the family moved to the East
	...

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