Morning Glory Dahl, Linda

ETHNIC STUDIES / AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES

Mary Lou Williams's childhood, like that of Ethel Waters and Billie Holiday, two other great black female musicians of her era, was rough and short. (from the first line)

Like Waters and Holiday, she had to earn her own livelihood while still a child, and became a woman before she was ready. Also like them, Mary succeeded against forbidding odds. Yet no matter how much she accomplished, she could not crack the carapace of her parents' fundamental indifference to the fact of her existence. It was musicians, not family, who nurtured her talent, who shared her life of poor-boy sandwiches, broken-down cars and rooming houses, the many stretches with no pay. But more than anything else, it was Mary's own innate vision of possibilities, her tremendous grit and empathy, that molded her musical gift. That and later her religious faith kept her going through many hard years--what she called the "muck and the mud" of American show business.

Mary Lou Williams -- pianist, arranger, composer, and probably the most influential woman in the history of jazz -- receives the attention she has long deserved in this definitive biography.

From the Publisher:
Mary Lou Williams--pianist, arranger, composer, and probably the most influential woman in the history of jazz--receives the attention she has long deserved in this definitive biography.

Annotation:
In this jazz history, music authority Linda Dahl tracks the life and career of pianist Mary Lou Williams. The engaging narrative illuminates Williams' devotion to spirituality and her determination to succeed. Despite Williams' impoverished homelife and indifferent parents, she taught herself how to read and write music and pursued public performances when she was a child. Dahl also reveals Williams' relationships with other legendary musicians, such as Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie.

Praise

New York Times
"As Dahl sees it, Williams learned early to live in her head. The dark-skinned 5-year-old discovered both intrablack and black-white racism when her family moved from Atlanta to Pittsburgh. Her mother was a party-girl drunk with a slew of children who raised themselves; the family would often teeter on the brink of starvation. When a friend of her stepfather was teaching the 12-year-old Mary Lou to drive, he tried to rape her....At its best, MORNING GLORY pulses with that sort of vignette. Dahl, who previously wrote STORMY WEATHER does not put Williams in a straitjacket of psychopathology or feminism. Instead, she keeps her sense of historical context sharp and probes rather than labels her subject's teeming contradictions." - Gene Santoro 2/20/2000

Product Attributes

Book Format:		Paperback
Number of Pages:		0471
Publisher:		University of California Press

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Morning Glory A Biography of Mary Lou Williams (Paperback)

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