As a small child in Pittsburgh, Mary Lou Williams played piano in white neighbors’ homes to keep them from throwing bricks at her family’s house. This episode follows ‘the little piano girl’ from supporting ten half-siblings at age six, through the Orpheum vaudeville circuit, a stretch transporting bodies for a Tulsa undertaker, and her rise as chief arranger for Andy Kirk’s Twelve Clouds of Joy in Kansas City.

We explore her freelance charts for Earl Hines, Tommy Dorsey, and Benny Goodman, the Hamilton Heights apartment where Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker gathered at 4 a.m., the Zodiac Suite at Town Hall in 1945, and the night in Paris in 1954 when she walked away from the piano for three years. Then comes her conversion to Catholicism, the Bel Canto Foundation halfway house, her return at Newport in 1957, Mary Lou’s Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and her final years teaching at Duke University.

• Lovie Austin as the template that showed a woman could lead a room from the keyboard
• What a big band arranger actually does and why Williams dictated the Kansas City sound
• Her role as harmonic professor to the bebop generation, not just hostess
• Why grief over the heroin epidemic and Charlie Parker’s death drove her from music
• Alvin Ailey’s argument for a Mary Lou’s Mass alongside Bach, Mozart, and Bernstein