Donald Walbridge Shirley (January 29, 1927 – April 6, 2013) was an American classical and jazz pianist and composer. He recorded many albums for Cadence Records during the 1950s and 1960s, experimenting with jazz with a classical influence. He wrote organ symphonies, piano concerti, a cello concerto, three string quartets, a one-act opera, works for organ, piano and violin, a symphonic poem based on the 1939 novel Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, and a set of "Variations" on the 1858 opera Orpheus in the Underworld.[1]
Born in Pensacola, Florida, Shirley was a promising young student of classical piano. Although he did not achieve recognition in his early career playing traditional classical music, he found success with his blending of various musical traditions.
Shirley was born on January 29, 1927, in Pensacola, Florida,[4] to Jamaican immigrants, Stella Gertrude (1903–1936), a teacher, and Edwin S. Shirley (1885–1982), an Episcopal priest.[5] His birthplace was sometimes incorrectly given as Kingston, Jamaica, because his label advertised him as being Jamaican-born.[4] Shirley started to learn piano when he was two years old.[6] By age three, he was playing the organ.
According to some sources, Shirley traveled to the Soviet Union to study piano and music theory at the Leningrad Conservatory of Music.[10] According to cellist Jüri Täht, who performed with him, Shirley never studied in Leningrad or the Soviet Union.[11] Shirley's nephew, Edwin, said his record label falsely claimed that 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."[7]
While a student at the Catholic University of America, Shirley was a finalist for the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship in 1949, though he was not selected. Had he been selected, Shirley indicated that he would study "oriental languages" at Oxford rather than music.[12]
Discouraged by the lack of opportunities for black classical musicians, Shirley abandoned the piano as a career for a time. He studied psychology at the University of Chicago[15] and began work in Chicago as a psychologist. There he returned to music. He was given a grant to study the relationship between music and juvenile crime, which had broken out in the postwar era of the early 1950s. While playing in a small club, he experimented with sound to determine how the audience responded. The audience was unaware of his experiments and that students had been planted to gauge their reactions.[16]
Shirley's first album as a leader was Tonal Expressions, for Cadence Records.[17] It reached No. 14 on Billboard's Best-Selling Pop Albums chart in 1955.[18] During the 1950s and 1960s, he recorded many albums for Cadence, experimenting with jazz with a classical influence. In 1961, his single "Water Boy" reached No. 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed on the chart for 14 weeks. He performed in New York City at Basin Street East, where Duke Ellington heard him and they started a friendship.
During the 1960s, Shirley went on a number of concert tours, some in Southern states, believing that he could change some minds with his performances. For his initial tour, in 1962,[19] he hired New York nightclub bouncer Tony "Lip" Vallelonga as his driver and bodyguard. Their story is dramatized in the 2018 film Green Book,[2] the name of a travel guide for black motorists in the segregated United States. While the film depicts Shirley as estranged from his family and alienated from other African Americans, Shirley's surviving family members dispute this. They say he was involved in the Civil Rights Movement, attended the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march, and knew other African American artists and leaders. He also had three brothers with whom, according to his family, he kept in touch.[20] Author David Hajdu, who met and befriended Shirley in the 1990s through composer Luther Henderson, wrote: "the man I knew was considerably different from the character Ali portrayed with meticulous elegance in Green Book. Cerebral but disarmingly earthy, mercurial, self-protective, and intolerant of imperfections in all things, particularly music, he was as complex and uncategorizable as his sui generis music."[21]
