Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams, Kernodle Tammy L.

The jazz musician-composer-arranger Mary Lou Williams spent her sixty-year career working in--and stretching beyond--a dizzying range of musical styles. Her integration of classical music into her works helped expand jazzs 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 Williamss life in music against the backdrop of controversies over womens place in jazz and bitter arguments over the musics evolution. Williams repeatedly asserted her artistic and personal independence to carve out a place despite widespread bafflement that a woman exhibited such genius. Embracing Williamss 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.