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Mary Lou Williams Accomplishments

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Mary Lou Williams was an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger. “She wrote hundreds of compositions and arrangements, and recorded more than one hundred records (in 78, 45, and LP versions). Williams wrote and arranged for such bandleaders as Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, and she was friend, mentor, and teacher to Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Tadd Dameron, Dizzy Gillespie, and many others (Wikipedia).”
Born Mary Elfrieda Winn in Atlanta, GA, May 8, 1910, Williams was one out of eleven children raised in a single parent household. She didn’t know her biological father until she was in her twenties and her mother was an alcoholic that made ends meet by taking in laundry. Her family eventually moved to Pittsburgh, …show more content…

Then there was Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk who met their career demise in the early nineteen forties. But Williams, in continuing to outdo herself, also outdid these heroes of her time in several crucial respects: she played better in her sixties than she ever did, reaching an artistic fulfillment in the nineteen-seventies that was due to the triple coincidence of external circumstances of the music world, those of her personal life, and those of her own creative evolution (The New Yorker). I admire Mary Lou Williams’s strength, persistence and talent, what did in her era was monumental. Being a woman. African-American, composing and arranging music; as well as leading a band was not a common thing back in her time. But she did and did it well! She finesse her craft from era to era making her one of the most influential female jazz musicians of all …show more content…

Oxford University Press. Web. 7 Nov. 2015.
Brody, Richard. "A Hidden Hero of Jazz - The New Yorker." The New York. The New Yorker, 21 Sept. 2015. Web. 7 Nov. 2015.

“Mary Lou Williams." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 14 Oct. 2015. Web. 6 Nov. 2015

"Mary Lou Williams Biography." The Biography.com. A&E Networks Television. Web. 7 Nov. 2015.

Ratcliffe, David T. "Mary Lou Williams - Giant of Jazz." Mary Lou Williams - Giant of Jazz. Ed. Rebecca Michele Lord. Rat Haus Reality Press. Web. 6 Nov. 2015.

"The Top 10 Female Jazz Musicians You Should Know." Theculturetrip.com. The Culture Trip Ltd. Web. 7 Nov.

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