  Williams poses in front of her
home in Durham at 1205 Shepherd St. on her way to class. Although
Williams maintained her apartment in New York, the home in Durham,
which she purchased at age 67, was the first house she'd ever owned.
|
 Williams shops for antiques
in Durham in the spring of 1980. The photo appeared in a May 1980
feature in People Magazine that focused on her work at Duke.
"She's irreplaceable," Duke President Terry Sanford told the magazine.
Photo by Tom Walters |
 Williams conducts the Duke University
Jazz Orchestra in the spring of 1978 in a program of her own compositions.
So popular were Williams and her two classes that the People Magazine
feature reported that the sale of jazz albums in the area went up
by about 40 percent after her arrival. |
 Williams was one of the honored
guests at the White House Festival in 1978 honoring George Wein and
the 25th anniversary of the Newport Jazz Festival. First Lady Rosalynn
Carter reportedly ran across the South Lawn to have her picture taken
with Williams, who played solo piano after that. |
 Mary Lou Williams visits with
ailing bassist and composer Charles Mingus at the White House Jazz
Festival in 1978. Williams' original response to an engraved invitation
to the event was to ask why should she go and sit around at some party.
Some party! ©Tom Copi |
 Williams joins pianist John
Lewis of Modern Jazz Quartet fame following a duet concert in July
1978 at the Grand Parade du Jazz in Nice, France. This photograph
by Williams' manager, Fr. Peter O'Brien, S.J., was taken the same
month as her solo piano recital at the Montreux Jazz Festival, later
released on Pablo Records. |
 Williams accepts the Atlanta
NAACP Grand Jubilee Award from chapter President Julian Bond during
a Freedom Fund Dinner held on October 19, 1978. The citation notes
that Williams's "extraordinary talents have enhanced the world of
music and greatly enriched our culture." |
 Williams playfully mugs in a
coin-operated photo booth en route by bus from a performance with
the Jazz Giants (Williams had replaced Thelonious Monk on the tour)
at the Masonic Theater in San Francisco to a Hollywood Bowl concert
in the late 1970s. At the Bowl, the Jazz Giants took part in a concert
featuring Billy Eckstine. A friend from her Paris days, writer James
Baldwin, came to her dressing room before the show to talk and stood
in the wings throughout the concert. |
 Though ill with cancer, Williams
kept up a busy performance schedule in her last year, such as when
she played at a packed concert at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston,
Carolina in the summer of 1980. "Just listening to her doesn't even
hint that she's 70," wrote one reviewer of a concert that concluded
with a performance by Sarah Vaughan. ©Patrick Hinely |
 Mary Lou Williams in Lincoln,
Nebraska for the 1980 taping of a broadcast for Nebraska Educational
Television that aired after her death, entitled Swingin' the Blues. |
 Even her worsening illness,
which caused her nearly constant pain in her last months, did not
deter Williams from carrying out her teaching. In this 1980 photo,
Williams encourages one of her students from her bed at Duke University
Hospital in Durham. |
 Mary Lou Williams at The Cookery
in 1972. © K. Abe |