A forgotten story: Jazz finds religion in Pittsburgh
Renowned pianist Mary Lou Williams and her ties to Bishop John Wright
By Mark Sullivan
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 Born in the brothels of New Orleans, Prohibition-era speakeasies and Mafia-run nightclubs, jazz has had to travel a long road to respectability. Few people realize that the road to respectability ran through Pittsburgh — through the diocesan building and the former Elizabeth Ann Seton High School on the city's North Side. More specifically, it was the friendship between the late bishop of Pittsburgh, John Wright, and the late jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams, a Pittsburgh native, who changed the course of jazz history almost single-handedly. Their correspondence, available in the diocesan archives, gives witness to this.
Spiritual crisis/awakening Williams, born in 1910, began her career playing for her white neighbors in Pittsburgh's East Liberty neighborhood as a young girl. The neighbors stopped throwing bricks through her windows once they heard her play. The peak of her popularity came with the Andy Kirk band during the 1940s. Williams wrote and/or arranged most of the band's material.
However, by the mid-1950s, jazz was losing its audience to rock ‘n roll, forcing many jazz artists to work in Europe. While Williams was working in France, she suffered a spiritual crisis/awakening and returned to New York. She gave up performing and devoted her time and energy to helping drug-addicted musicians get clean.
She also devoted herself to prayer and fasting. The Baptist church she was attending wasn't open during the week, but the Catholic church was. Williams spent long hours praying in front of the tabernacle, and eventually converted to Catholicism in 1957. Lorraine Gillespie, wife of trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, was her godmother.
Her spiritual director advised her to give up the dangerous work of drug rehabilitation and return to music. He suggested that she offer up her playing as prayer for others.
Dizzy Gillespie introduced Williams to Bishop Wright, who headed the Diocese of Pittsburgh from 1959 to 1969. The two became friends in the early 1960s — she would return to Pittsburgh to visit her family.
Teacher of jazz
There was something about Williams that made it very hard for the bishop to say “no” to her when she asked him for something. And what she asked for was staggering. She asked him if she could teach the history of jazz in the diocesan Catholic schools.
Bishop Wright didn't like the timing, so he compromised by saying that the diocese would sponsor a jazz festival in Pittsburgh. Despite the number of great jazz musicians that Pittsburgh had produced, it had never had a jazz festival.
Besides the jazz festival, Bishop Wright let her teach at Seton High School on the city's North Side. It was there that she wrote her first Mass, called “The Pittsburgh Mass.” Williams eventually became the first jazz composer commissioned by the church to compose liturgical music in the jazz idiom.
As their final correspondence reveals, Williams never stopped making requests of Bishop Wright.
“Long time, huh? I am now teaching (the history of jazz) at Duke University in Durham, N.C. ... It has brought the music (jazz) back,” begins a letter Williams wrote to then-Cardinal Wright in April 1978. Williams was beginning her tenure as an artist-in-residence at Duke that she would continue until her death in May 1981. This was a first for jazz musicians. Meanwhile, Cardinal Wright was in his ninth year as prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, the third highest position in the Vatican.
“The name jazz has a lot of derogatory meanings, but the title comes under the heading of art. Now the name is becoming more artistic and accepted by many. Please forgive me, but I was hoping this could be explained to our wonderful pope and someday do a jazz Mass in Rome,” Williams wrote.
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