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Editorial Review From Publishers Weekly In a time when the music of Harlem was beginning to stake a claim on the racially mixed Greenwich Village clientele, Williams, a young black pianist, trained her sights on a more classical venue. In 1947 she reached it, leading Carnegie Hall’s New York Philharmonic in a boogie-woogie symphony of [...]

Mary Lou Williams was born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs, on May 8, 1910, in Atlanta, Georgia, and grew up in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As a very young child she taught herself to play the piano and her first public performance was at the age of six. She became a professional musician in [...]