Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams (Music in American Life)

First time in paperback and e-book! The jazz musician-composer-arranger Mary Lou Williams spent her sixty-year career working in—and stretching beyond—a dizzying range of musical styles. Her integration of classical music into her works helped expand jazz's compositional language. Her generosity made her a valued friend and mentor to the likes of Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. Her late-in-life flowering of faith saw her embrace a spiritual jazz oriented toward advancing the civil rights struggle and helping wounded souls. Tammy L. Kernodle details Williams's life in music against the backdrop of controversies over women's place in jazz and bitter arguments over the music's evolution. Williams repeatedly asserted her artistic and personal independence to carve out a place despite widespread bafflement that a woman exhibited such genius. Embracing Williams's contradictions and complexities, Kernodle also explores a personal life troubled by lukewarm professional acceptance, loneliness, relentless poverty, bad business deals, and difficult marriages. In-depth and epic in scope, Soul on Soul restores a pioneering African American woman to her rightful place in jazz history. "This biography presents the life and music of the pianist, composer, and arranger Mary Lou Williams (1910-1981), a talented and versatile jazz artist well versed in most of the emerging styles in jazz's evolution. Williams wrote and arranged for the likes of Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, and was a friend, mentor, and teacher to Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and other stars of the bebop scene. Tammy Kernodle draws on extensive interviews, letters, oral histories, and meticulous research, bringing rich biographical detail together with incisive commentary on Williams's music, performances, and recordings. This deeply contextualized portrait chronicles Williams's impoverished upbringing in Pittsburgh, where she began performing publicly at the age of 6, through her harsh life on the road and rise to fame in the 1930s. In later years, Williams's powerful sacred jazz compositions and dedicated support to help rehabilitate jazz musicians struggling with addiction contributed further to her lasting influence as a composer and educator"-- Provided by publisher Cover Title Copyright Contents List of illustrations Acknowledgments Prefae to the New Edition Introduction 1. I Dream a World 2. Take Me to Froggy Bottom: The Early Musical Years 3. From East Liberty (Pittsburgh) to Beale Street (Memphis) to Eighteenth and Vine (Kansas City) 4. Until the Real Thing Comes Along: The Andy Kirk Years (1931– 42) 5. How Do You Keep the Music Playing? 6. Love on a Two-Way Street: Barney Josephson and Moe Asch 7. Under the Signs of the Zodiac 8. The Calm before the Storm 9. The Crossroads 10. The Long Journey Back Home 11. What a Difference a Day Makes 12. A Season of Change 13. The Fruits of One’s Labor Notes Bibliography Selected Discography Index Back cover