Donald Walbridge Shirley was born on January 29, 1927 in Pensacola, Florida, the son of Jamaican immigrants, his mother a teacher, his father an Epicospal priest.

Shirley started playing piano when she was two years old. At the age of nine, he was invited to study music theory with Mittolovsky at the Leningrad Conservatory. She also studied with Conrad Bernier and Thaddeus Jones at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where she obtained her Bachelor's degree in 1953. After giving up the piano for a while, Shirley obtained a PhD in Psychology from the University of Chicago.

In 1945, at the age of 18, Shirley Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Boston Pops Orchestra. A year later he played one of his compositions with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1949, he received an invitation from the Haitian government to perform at the second-rate General Exhibition at Port-au-Prince, and then President Dumarsais Estimé and Archbishop Le Goise asked him for a new performance for the next week.


Discouraged by the lack of opportunities for black skin classical musicians, Shirley left the piano as a career when she was young. He studied psychology at the University of Chicago and went to work in that city as a psychologist.6 There he also returned to music and received a scholarship to study the relationship between music and juvenile crime, which was in the post-war period until the early 1950s intensified. He played in a small club and experimented with sound to determine the reactions of the audience.

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