During a trip to Europe in 1953, accomplished 20th-century jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams was exhausted, emotionally drained, and facing financial peril when a friend took her to a small church in France where she began to pray.
As Deanna Witkowski explains in her 2021 biography of Williams, titled “Music for the Soul,” that’s where the musician’s spiritual journey and conversion to Catholicism began.
She later told friends that she saw a vision of the Virgin Mary in the church’s fenced-in garden. Around the same time, Williams was at a party in England when a soldier noticed she was visibly upset and suggested she read Psalm 91 for comfort — the Psalm starts, “Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.” She didn’t read just Psalm 91 — she read all 150 of them. Witkowski told The Tablet that Williams always said she felt “cooled” or a sense of peace when she read.
Outside of these spiritual moments, Williams’s troubles persisted. In May 1954, she was still in Europe when her close friend Garland Wilson, a fellow pianist from the United States, died. After hearing the news, Williams wound up alone in a hotel room, mourning the loss of her friend and questioning the purpose of her vocation.
At that moment, she again turned to prayer but hadn’t yet converted. It was still the beginning of her spiritual journey. “It’s in Europe she begins to question what her music is specifically doing to help people,” Witkowski said. “Does she need to do something more? And that is where she found God.”
By the end of 1954, aided by friends, Williams got the money to return home to New York. It was from that point that her Catholic faith played an integral role in her music and life. It’s a spiritual journey and transformation Witkowski believes should be more mainstream.
“Her story needs to be more well known whether or not someone is a jazz fan,” Witkowski said. “Her story in and of itself and how she came to Catholicism, but also her spirituality throughout her life and how it was deepened by her conversion is really important.”
Witkowski herself is a jazz composer, pianist, interpreter, and scholar of Williams’s life and work. In January 2022, she came out with an album, “Force of Nature,” that features Williams’s work. Witkowski describes Williams as an “experimenter” on the keys — somebody it was impossible to pin a style on, which she admires. Stride, Bebop, early swing, and funk were a few of the jazz styles Williams was proficient in.
Her music, she said, isn’t as well-known as other jazz musicians from that era like Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, or Dizzy Gillespie. However, her mentorship of those three greats and other jazz musicians certainly is. Williams also meant more to the jazz community than just being a musical mentor.
Seeking to help musicians struggling with addiction after Parker’s death just months after her return to New York, she opened her apartment to musicians as a halfway house, sometimes composing music for her houseguests to keep their minds off drugs.
As those efforts to help began, her internal struggles continued. Williams’s music career was on pause from when she returned to New York in 1954 through 1957. She again found peace praying and reading the Psalms. “I didn’t really stop on my own. Something carried me away. I began praying, and I never thought about playing anymore,” Williams once said about why she left jazz. “I decided to help them in the flesh instead of playing for them.”
In 1956, four years after her spiritual journey began in Europe, Williams joined Our Lady of the Lourdes Church in Harlem. She joined the church because it was open during the day for her to pray, and as Witkowski notes, it gave her a safe place to play the piano.
Williams then became an evangelizer, getting the likes of Hazel Scott, Gillespie, and Monk, among others, to come to the church and pray. She eventually left the church, but her spiritual journey continued with constant support from fellow Catholics.
She was baptized on May 9, 1957, at age 47, at St. Ignatius Loyola Church in Manhattan. She returned to the stage for the first time in five years less than two months later at the Newport Jazz Festival with the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra.
The rest of her life, until she died on May 28, 1981, was rooted in her faith. Williams used her music as a means to fundraise for musicians struggling with drug and alcohol abuse. She opened a thrift store and a boutique to fundraise as well.
