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

Women & Music readers who are interested in jazz history have surely noticed the ubiquitous "Mary Lou Williams Paragraph" as it appears in countless documentaries, textbooks, and other sweeping representations of jazz history. With a teensy-weensy bit of exaggeration, it goes something like this:

Although jazz is primarily a man's world (except for singers who are tragic and don't know what they're doing), one woman excelled, thus proving the meritocracy of jazz. The child prodigy known as "The Little Piano Girl of East Liberty" came of age as "The Lady Who Swings the Band" before her remarkable career peaked in New York as "The Maternal Care Giver of the Troubled Young Men Who Invented Bebop." A selfless accompanist to "real jazz history," Williams is notable for not thinking of herself as a woman, for her religious fanaticism, and for her amazing chameleonic ability to absorb and repeat every style in every era of jazz without calling attention to her own abilities.

Feminist jazz historians have shuddered at this familiar and trifling framework for this important composer, arranger, pianist, educator, and jazz innovator whose career spanned sixty years, who penned over one hundred compositions and arrangements, and who appeared on over one hundred recordings. At the same time, I must admit that I, for one, have found the "Mary Lou Williams Paragraph" an extremely useful bit of easy-to-find evidence for demonstrating the sexism of mainstream jazz historiography.¹ Yet in the process of presenting a critique of jazz historiography through pointing out the tokenizing representations of Williams, I suppose I am guilty of inventing my own "Mary Lou Williams Paragraphs" that don't tell us much about her music and life. Not developing an analysis of what makes her "important" unwittingly capitalizes on the fact of her unquestioned greatness to prove sexism runs counter to Williams's own career-long stance of distancing herself from discussions of gender discrimination and glosses over the voluminous creative and intellectual work she accomplished.

The invaluable trio of books published in the 1980s by Linda Dahl, D. Antoinette Handy, and Sally Placksin have served a crucial purpose in summarizing the achievements of Mary Lou Williams (1910–81) in the contexts of the histories of women in jazz and of black women instrumentalists in the United States.² One of these authors, Linda Dahl, provided fuller information on Williams's personal and professional life in her 1999 book Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams. Yet even this four-hundred-page treatment, with its emphasis on an isolated individual's life of sex, suffering, and eccentricity, gave us a compromised alternative for talking about Williams, one that problematically resembled other portraits of "the tragic, difficult, eccentric black woman" whom we see, for instance, in representations of Billie Holiday. Farah Jasmine Griffin has helped us to understand the historical and contemporary impact of such limiting narratives and of the need to "search" for more productive frameworks for understanding Holiday and other black women artists. How wonderful it would be if someone were to help us look anew at Mary Lou Williams—to recognize the stakes of the usual narratives, including feminist ones—and to craft worthy responses to Griffin's call for finding ways of narrating her life as a "multi-dimensional, complex, and brilliant black wom[a]n," situated in history and culture.³ In short, Mary Lou Williams, the woman jazz instrumentalist most likely to appear in historical treatments of jazz, has been just as difficult to talk about for people who include women in jazz history as for those who do not.

I fully expected that Tammy Kernodle's Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams would extend my knowledge of the life and especially of the music of Mary Lou Williams, but I didn't expect that this book would also push me to think more critically about how to negotiate the...