Mary Lou Williams’ Religious Conversion

After suffering an emotional breakdown in Europe, Mary Lou Williams decided to retire from public musical performance. She experienced much financial strain and hardship in her musical career: it was her only source of income, and so she could not stop making recordings. Greatly distressed, she turned to the Abyssinian Church in 1955, but she finally found solace in the Roman Catholic Church. Mary Lou Williams was baptized and confirmed as a Roman Catholic in 1957 by Father Anthony S. Woods. Taking advice from her friend Dizzy Gillespie, Williams decided to offer up her music as a prayer to others rather than leaving music altogether. In 1962, she wrote "Black Christ of the Andes (Hymn in Honor of St. Martin de Porres)", her first sacred work. Father Woods wrote the lyrics; her piece celebrated St. Martin de Porres, the first black canonized by the Roman Catholic Church in the seventeenth-century.


Mary also wrote several masses. In 1967 she composed her first Mass, known as The Pittsburgh Mass, as she was staying with her sister in Pittsburgh at the time. The following year, she wrote Mass for the Lenten Season, which she hoped would be performed during the 1969 mass at the Vatican honoring Martin Luther King Jr. Sadly, her hopes were crushed when church officials objected to the use of drums in her composition. In 1969, Mary was commissioned to write the mass Music for Peace, using texts for the Votive Mass for Peace. That work was later turned into a dance by choreographer Alvin Ailey in 1971. It was entitled Mary Lou’s Mass, and was performed at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1975.
References

http://newarkwww.rutgers.edu/ijs/mlw/religious_2.html


Murchison, Gayle. “Mary Lou Williams’ Hymn Black Christ of the Andes (St. Martin de Porres): Vatican II, Civil Rights, and Jazz as Sacred Music.” The Musical Quarterly 86.4. (2002): 591-629. Web. 2 March 2010.

By: Stacy Schipellite