Don Shirley

Early life

Don Shirley was born on January 29, 1927, in Pensacola, Florida, to Jamaican immigrants Stella Gertrude, a teacher, and Edwin S. Shirley, an Episcopal priest. His birthplace was sometimes incorrectly given as Kingston, Jamaica, because his label advertised him as being Jamaican-born. Shirley started to learn piano when he was two years old. By age three, he was playing the organ.

He briefly enrolled at Virginia State University and Prairie View College, both historically black universities, then studied with Conrad Bernier and Thaddeus Jones at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where he received his bachelor's degree in music in 1953. He was known as "Dr. Shirley" for his two honorary doctorates. According to some sources, Shirley traveled to the Soviet Union to study piano and music theory at the Leningrad Conservatory of Music, but cellist Jüri Täht, who performed with him, said Shirley never studied there.

Shirley's nephew Edwin said his record label falsely claimed he studied music in Europe to "make him acceptable in areas where a Black man from a Black school wouldn't have got any recognition at all."

Career

In 1945, at age 18, Shirley performed the Tchaikovsky B-flat minor concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. A year later, he performed one of his compositions with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. While a student at Catholic University of America, he was a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship in 1949, though he was not selected; had he been, he would have studied "oriental languages" at Oxford. In 1949, he received an invitation from the Haitian government to play at the Exposition Internationale du Bi-Centenaire de Port-au-Prince, followed by a request from President Estimé and Archbishop Joseph-Marie Le Gouaze for a repeat performance the next week.

Discouraged by the lack of opportunities for black classical musicians, Shirley abandoned the piano for a time, studied psychology at the University of Chicago, and worked as a psychologist. He received a grant to study the relationship between music and juvenile crime, and in a small club he secretly experimented with sound to gauge audience response, planting students to measure reactions. At Arthur Fiedler's invitation, Shirley appeared with the Boston Pops in Chicago in June 1954.

In 1955, he performed with the NBC Symphony at the premiere of Duke Ellington's Piano Concerto at Carnegie Hall. His first album as a leader, Tonal Expressions, reached No. 14 on Billboard's Best-Selling Pop Albums chart in 1955. In 1961, his single "Water Boy" reached No. 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed on the chart for 14 weeks. He performed at Basin Street East in New York City, where Duke Ellington heard him and they started a friendship.

During the 1960s, Shirley went on concert tours, some in Deep South states, and for his initial tour in 1962 hired New York nightclub bouncer Tony "Lip" Vallelonga as his driver and bodyguard. Their story was dramatized in the 2018 film Green Book. Igor Stravinsky, an admirer, said of Shirley, "His virtuosity is worthy of Gods."