Ellen Shaw

music theorist

Abstract

Over the course of her 60-year career, Mary Lou Williams composed more than one hundred compositions and arrangements, recorded over a hundred records, and was a world-renowned jazz pianist. In this paper, I take an analytical approach to evaluate how Williams’s conversion to Catholicism in 1957 at the age of 47—which aligned with significant reforms in the Catholic Church as a result of Vatican II—allowed for a marked shift in her stylistic evolution. I analyze Mary Lou Williams’s work titled “Black Christ of the Andes (Hymn in Honor of St. Martin de Porres)” (1962), the first of her pieces emblematic of the then emergent genre of “sacred jazz,” in order to dissect how Williams envisioned jazz as a sacred language. 

In composing “Black Christ”, Williams built upon compositional techniques she had developed throughout her life, allowing the work to emerge as a natural extension (and ultimately, an amalgamation) of her compositional output to this point as shaped by the circumstances of her religious conversion (Kernodle 2001, Murchison 2002). In this light, I first detail Williams’s earlier compositional voice through two brief analyses of “Messa-Stomp” composed during her stint with the Clouds of Joy in Kansas City, and “Cancer” from The Zodiac Suite (1945) written following her deep engagement with the subgenre of bebop. With the foregoing established, I explore how “Black Christ” embodies an interconnected collage of Williams’s musical influences and oeuvre up to this point, interlacing her intimate knowledge of the spiritual, blues, ragtime, Kansas City swing, bop, and the Western hymnal. 

© 2026 Ellen Shaw

Last updated: June 2026