Williams made her professional debut at just age 12 when she filled in for a pianist in a traveling show in 1922. She toured the country under the name Mary Lou Burley, playing for famous jazz ...

The center opened in 1983 and is named after Mary Lou Williams, a jazz pianist and composer whose contemporaries included Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. Williams came to Duke in 1977 as an ...

“You see that you’re not here by yourself.” The Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture opened in 1983 and is named after Mary Lou Williams, a jazz pianist and composer, who worked with Duke ...