"First Lady of Jazz" Born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs in 1910, Mary Lou Williams was one of the few women to have achieved fame in jazz not as a singer, but as an extraordinary pianist-composer-arranger. In 1946, her composition " Zodiac Suite " was performed at New York's Town Hall. Mary Lou Williams was a teacher of jazz history and Artist in Residence at Duke University from 1977 until her death in 1981 .