Visualizing the Interiority of Mary Lou Williams

Why now? What does Carol Bash’s documentary of Mary Lou Williams (1910–1981) add that we don’t already know about the incomparable composer, arranger and pianist? These were the first questions that came to mind upon learning of the film Mary Lou Williams: The Lady Who Swings the Band. In 1990, Joanne Burke produced the first documentary on Williams, Mary Lou Williams: Music on my Mind. Burke’s filmic investigation presented new photos, interview footage and personal video that created an intimate picture of Williams and showed some of the dynamics of her working relationship with manager Father O’Brien. The film’s most prominent narrative was that it was very important for Williams to promote the value of jazz, to teach its history, and to show how jazz was both an important American music as well as always already a spiritual music. Burke’s film opened the door for more critical scholarship in written form. In 1999, Linda Dahl wrote the first seminal biography on the musician, Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams. With the breadth of space the book form offers, Dahl’s account contributed more depth to Williams’ relationships and encounters, such as the not-always-so-rosy time Williams had in Europe in 1952–1954 as she struggled to collect money for her return to the U.S. Tammy Kernodle offered another account of Williams’ life just five years later with Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams in 2004. The book added salient interviews and a useful selected discography. Kernodle’s work complemented Dahl’s, showing also the challenges to surviving in the jazz industry–especially as we see Williams’s 1956 letter to the IRS in which she says she has been “broke since 1947.” Despite her dire financial situation, both biographies show how Williams mentored musicians, helped them rehabilitate, and took care of relatives. This is a perspective in which the books excel but which both films show cursory attention. So then to return to one question: what does Carol Bash offer that is new to the legacy of Mary Lou Williams? Bash interweaves the rich (if still not plentiful) jazz scholarship with the archival material on Mary Lou Williams. Burke’s film created an archive of materials now housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Throughout the film Bash draws on their work as well as the vast Mary LouWilliams collection at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, which has stored everything from personal letters to financial records since 1981. Bash’s film works almost like a scholarly argument, illustrating an artifact from the historical archive in one scene, sharing William’s own words read in voice over or illustrated through video in the next moment, then featuring a cast of jazz scholars who share their perspectives. Bash also joins these historical materials with the present by showing a range of Williams’s performances in conjunction with contemporary performances by Geri Allen (a fitting choice