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 Williams'
sacred music places her in the rarified company of Duke Ellington.
Her music combined two important themes of the times. Mary's faith
was formed (and complemented) by the post-Vatican II upheaval in the
church and the civil rights movement. She prevailed upon Father Woods
to write lyrics for her first sacred work, Black Christ of the Andes,
in 1962. It celebrated St. Martin de Porres, a seventeenth-century
Dominican lay brother and the first black canonized by the Roman Catholic
Church.
She was the guiding spirit behind a February 1967 concert at Carnegie Hall, entitled "Praise the Lord in Many Voices." That spring, Mary briefly returned to Pittsburgh, where her sister lived, and composed her first Mass, known as The Pittsburgh Mass. She wrote Mass for the Lenten Season the following year. Williams returned to Europe in late 1968. Her hopes to perform Mass for the Lenten Season during a Mass at the Vatican in February 1969 in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King were dashed by church officials, who |
objected to use of drums in the composition. In March 1969, Msgr. Joseph Gremillion, secretary of the Pontifical Commission on Justice and Peace, commissioned Mary to write a Mass using texts for the Votive Mass for Peace, known as Music for Peace. In 1971, the great choreographer Alvin Ailey reworked elements of that work to choreograph dances of praise, which he called Mary Lou's Mass. Williams' earlier disappointment in Rome was alleviated to a degree when she performed Mary Lou's Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral, on February 18, 1975. The first jazz played during Mass at the New York cathedral included a 60-voice youth choir and concluded with spontaneous applause that transformed the solemn proceedings.
Since 1996, two Ph.D. dissertations and one master's thesis (all in the collection of the Institute of Jazz Studies) explore this aspect of her work. Mary Lou's Mass was performed in concert in the National Cathedral in Washington in March 1999 and by the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Company, an African-American troupe in Denver, in September 2000. |
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  Williams
continued to compose sacred music during the 1960s. In 1967, she wrote
her first Mass (simply called Mass) in Pittsburgh. The following
year, she wrote Mass for the Lenten Season, and performed it
for six Sundays at the Church of St. Thomas the Apostle on West 118th
Street, just up from the Cecil Hotel, site of Minton's Playhouse.
Here, Williams is seen in an audience with Pope Paul VI at the Vatican
in 1969. |
 While
she was in Rome in 1969, Msgr. Joseph Gremillion of the Vatican Institute
for Justice and Peace commissioned Williams to compose music based
on the texts for the Votive Mass for Peace. The result was her third
Mass, Music for Peace, recorded for Mary Records in 1970. |
 Williams
and her manager, Fr. Peter F. O'Brien, at the Monterey Jazz Festival
shortly after O'Brien's ordination in 1971. Fr. O'Brien met Williams
in 1964 when the pianist was performing at the Hickory House. They
became fast friends and Fr. O'Brien began to manage her career a year
before this photo was taken. |
 Dudley
Williams portrays Poor Man Lazarus; Kelvin Rotardier is the preacher/narrator;
and John Parks is Dives, the rich man, in a production of Mary
Lou's Mass choreographed by Alvin Ailey. His setting of Williams'
Music for Peace, which he christened Mary Lou's Mass,
played for three seasons between 1972 and 1973. Photo by Louis Peres |
 Some 3,000
attended the celebration of Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New
York on February 18, 1975 when Williams'Mary Lou's Mass was
sung by a 60-voice youth choir. This event was a high point at the
intersection of her spiritual and musical lives. Buster Williams is
on bass; Jerry Griffin played drums. |
 Cover art
by Berit de Koenigswarter for the reissue of Music for Peace,
released in 1975 on Mary Records as Mary Lou's Mass. The recording
featured five additional pieces not previously issued. |
 Williams
poses with a youth choir in Chicago in the mid-1970s. Williams' sacred
music and the opportunities to influence young people to reach out
to jazz were important themes of her later life. |
 Williams
rehearses a church choir for a performance of Mary Lou's Mass
at a Corpus Christi, Texas church in the spring of 1980. The performance
took place about a year before her death on May 28, 1981. |