Later Years
Her final recording, Solo Recital (Montreux Jazz Festival, 1978), three years before her death, had a medley encompassing spirituals, ragtime, blues and swing. Other highlights include Williams's reworkings of "Tea for Two", "Honeysuckle Rose", and her two compositions "Little Joe from Chicago" and "What's Your Story Morning Glory". Other songs include "Medley: "The Lord Is Heavy", Old Fashion Blues", "Over the Rainbow", "Offertory Meditation", "Concerto Alone at Montreux", and "Man I Love".
In 1981, Mary Lou Williams died of bladder cancer in Durham, North Carolina, aged 71. She was buried in the Roman Catholic Calvary Cemetery in her native Pittsburgh. As Mary Lou Williams said, looking back at the end of her life, "I did it, didn't I? Through muck and mud."
Read more about this topic: Mary Lou Williams
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“The years teach much which the days never know.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust,... confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, aye, and years almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they are of,—sitting there now at three o’clock in the afternoon, as if it were three o’clock in the morning.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)