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Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams. By Tammy L. Kernodle. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004. [328 p. ISBN 155553-609-9. $30.] Illustrations, bibliography, discography, index.
This is the second biographical monograph to appear on Mary Lou Williams (1910-1981), jazz pianist, arranger, and composer. Lately there seems to be a Williams revival, and a reaffirmation in print of her music and writings. Along with the two biographies and several unpublished dissertations, we also have Williams' remarkable 11-article series on her early career that originally appeared in Melody Maker (10 April-12 June 1954, later collected by Max Jones as My Life With the Kings of Jazz, most recently reprinted in Reading Jazz, ed. Robert Gottlieb [New York: Pantheon, 1996]). Her voluminous papers, which include various attempts at autobiographical writing, are now maintained at the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark NJ; an online description of those materials may be accessed at http://newarkwww.rutgers .edu/ijs/mlw/collectionIJS.html (accessed 23 February 2005).
Williams was born out of wedlock as Mary Lou Scruggs in Atlanta, Georgia in 1910, and from 1915 she was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She began playing keyboard at age 3 or 4, in imitation of the harmonium lessons her mother was taking. Developing her own piano technique and learning to play songs by ear became ways for the growing girl to withdraw from her alcoholic mother. By age 8 she was playing piano around various local spotsincluding a brothel-and before long she became known as "the little piano girl of East Liberty," her Pittsburgh neighborhood. In 1925, she dropped out of high school and joined a black vaudeville troupe in which she met her first husband, saxophonist John Williams, whose last name she would adopt. Three years later John Williams joined The Dark Clouds of Joy, which later renamed itself as...