@Rutgers University Libraries : She formed the Bel Canto Foundation to assist drug- and alcohol-dependent musicians in 1958. This initiative prefigured her founding of Cecilia Music, a publishing firm to release her compositions, and the establishment of Mary Records to issue her and other selected artists’ recordings.

@rat haus reality, ratical branch : I was there when it began. ..In the early 20’s I was jamming with professional musicians; I went to New York and played with Duke Ellington’s Washingtonians in the pit of the Lincoln Theater when I was 13 or 14. I was in Kansas City and met Lester Young and Thelonious Monk. And in the bop era, the musicians used to come to my apartment every night….

@Bnet : : Williams was always her own woman. She boldly spoke up when she thought she and her bandmates were being underpaid, and she wouldn’t play the sex-appeal card in the media–a la Hazel Scott–in order to attract a wider audience.

@Answers.com : Born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs (although she soon took the name of her stepfather and was known as Mary Lou Burley), she taught herself the piano by ear and was playing in public at the age of six.

@The Mary Lou Williams Foundation : In the ‘50s she had a spiritual crisis that led her to abandon music for about three years; she became a Roman Catholic. Her religious conversion had more than personal results. She began to compose in a sacred vein.

@Women in Jazz : Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk would bring their compositions to her to listen to and the musical sessions extended through the night and into the next day and might involve Erroll Garner or Mel Torme or Sarah Vaughan, etc

@all-about-jazz : : Calling “Black Christ of the Andes ” mainstream is a bit misleading, since it includes four pieces of choral/sacred music and one avant garde cut. In a way, it’s the perfect mirror of where Mary Lou Williams was in the early 1960’s

@Jazz Police : The original presentation and recording of Zodiac Suite was as a collection of twelve solo, duo and trio piano pieces named for the astrological signs of the jazz legends to whom Williams dedicated the compositions.

@US Embassy in Tanzania : Williams took her cancer in stride, using “her music [to] ease her pain.” In 1980 Williams played her last concert, in Tallahassee, Florida. After radiation treatments she insisted on performing one of her masses at Sacred Heart Cathedral in Raleigh, North Carolina, in November 1980

@Flickr : I remember being stoned in the 80s with my friend Calhoun at his apartment, watching Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, when Mr Rogers ambles over to talk to Mary Lou Williams at her piano!. to be continued… probably