Mary Lou Williams, Missionary Of Jazz
Mary Lou Williams seemed to learn early that playing piano would keep her alive.
Maybe she realized this at age six, when she started venturing to her white neighbors' homes to play piano for them. As Williams later recalled to the journalist John Wilson for the Jazz Oral History Project at the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies, she got the neighbors to stop throwing bricks into her family's house by giving them private concerts.
Williams' mother didn't know why the neighbors had stopped terrorizing her family until young Mary Lou broke her arm. Her concerts suddenly stopped, and the neighbors came by to ask where the music had gone.
By 1925, at just 15 years old, Williams was a "full-time working. By the middle of the 20th century, Williams had solidified her status as a jazz great. She helped develop the Kansas City swing sound of the 1930s. And in the 1940s, she mentored some of bebop's most famous innovators like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk.
