Soul on Soul
The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams
A jazz woman in a jazzman's world, with a new preface by the author
The jazz musician-composer-arranger Mary Lou Williams spent her sixty-year career working inand stretching beyonda dizzying range of musical styles. Her integration of classical music into her works helped expand jazz's compositional language. Her generosity made her a valued friend and mentor to the likes of Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. Her late-in-life flowering of faith saw her embrace a spiritual jazz oriented toward advancing the civil rights struggle and helping wounded souls.
Tammy L. Kernodle details Williams's life in music against the backdrop of controversies over women's place in jazz and bitter arguments over the music's evolution. Williams repeatedly asserted her artistic and personal independence to carve out a place despite widespread bafflement that a woman exhibited such genius. Embracing Williams's contradictions and complexities, Kernodle also explores a personal life troubled by lukewarm professional acceptance, loneliness, relentless poverty, bad business deals, and difficult marriages.
In-depth and epic in scope, Soul on Soul restores a pioneering African American woman to her rightful place in jazz history.
"Kernodles Soul on Soul serves as an essential text, working to set the record straight on one of the genres most significantand conspicuously ignoredcomposers." --DownBeat
"Diligently chronicles the life and times of the extraordinary innovator."--Jazz Times
To order online:
//www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/83hbk7nh9780252043604.html
To order by phone:
(800) 621-2736 (USA/Canada)
(773) 702-7000 (International)
Related Titles

Steve Cushing

Katherine Baber

Edited by Gayle Sherwood Magee

Edited by Gillian B. Anderson & Ronald H. Sadoff

Edited by Don M. Randel, Matthew Shaftel, and Susan Forscher Weiss