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Who was the real Don Shirley? What Green Book gets right – and wrong –about the enigmatic jazz genius
Who was the real Don Shirley? Until recently, few people were even aware of this astonishingly gifted, much recorded and yet mysteriously elusive black American pianist. Thanks to the film Green Book, this year's Best Picture winner, he’s on everyone’s lips. The film gives a fictionalised portrayal of a two-month tour Shirley took through the American Deep South in 1962, in the company of his white chauffeur Tony "Lip" Vallelonga.
In this film we learn that Don Shirley is a pianist of astonishing virtuosity, who has a unique way of launching off on a virtuoso classical piece before leading into a spiritual or Cole Porter song. As portrayed by Mahershala Ali, he is a dandy who lives alone in an apartment above Carnegie Hall decorated with extravagant and somewhat camp luxury.
He’s aloof, not just from his ill-educated chauffeur (who comes to question his own racism, and with whom Shirley eventually strikes up a friendship) but also from the African Americans he meets in the humble hotels on his journey. We learn that his marriage has failed, that he’s estranged from his brother, and that he’s fluent in Russian, which he uses to converse with the Russian cellist and double-bassist who are touring with him.
How true is this to the man himself? In recent months the film has been criticised by his relatives for exaggerating the friendship between Shirley and Vallelonga, and for suggesting that the pianist was estranged from his own family, particularly his three brothers. Shirley's only surviving brother, Maurice Shirley, branded the film “a symphony of lies".
However, Michiel Kappeyne van de Coppello, a friend of Don Shirley who was his assistant and confidante in his later years, has nothing but praise for the film. “All of us who knew Dr Shirley well, not just me, feel that it’s right on the money," he tells me. "It captures the generosity of his soul, the inner spirit, the struggle, the wariness, the solitary aspect which he certainly had because he was on such a high level, he found it difficult to encounter people who were on the same level.”
It’s intriguing that while Shirley is referred to as “Don” in the film, Kappeyne refers to him as “Dr Shirley.” So was he a genuine Doctor of Philosophy, as some biographies say? Kappeyne hesitates. “Well, an awful lot of stories about Dr Shirley were invented by his record company. They had to market a black classical pianist who had this incredible native talent, which seemed inexplicable.
"But they needed to give him a pedigree so that white audiences would take him more seriously. So they put this idea around that he got a PhD in music perception, and they also said he studied in Leningrad for a while. But they thought 'Donald' was too formal, so they renamed him Don for his first album and it just stuck. Dr Shirley was never happy with that – he thought it lacked dignity.”
In the case of Don-Donald-Dr-Shirley, fact and myth are inextricably intertwined. Shirley may not have got a PhD, but he did get two honorary doctorates later in life, so to call him “Dr” is perfectly justified. He never went to Leningrad but he did learn Russian. “He had this incredible talent for languages,” says Kappeyne, “he just soaked them up. In that respect it was just like his talent for music. If he heard a melody once he could memorise it, and invent incredible improvisations on it.”
Some of the facts related in Green Book are undoubtedly true. Shirley really did live in one of the apartments above Carnegie Hall, home to such luminaries as Marlon Brando and the dancer Isadora Duncan, until all the leaseholders were forced to quit in 2010. Beyond that, it’s known that he was born in 1927 to an Episcopalian minister, and that his musical talent revealed itself astonishingly early, first on the organ, later on the piano. His only formal musical training was as an organist in the The Catholic University of America in Washington DC.
He met and impressed the great impresario Sol Hurok in 1957, who advised him that the time was not yet right for audiences to accept a “coloured” musician as virtuoso classical pianist. So Shirley had to play his music wherever it would be accepted; clubs and theatres, well off the classical circuit. He made many tours in a unique trio format of piano, cello and bass.
He is understood to have been a close friend of Martin Luther King Jr, and, according to his brother Maurice, Shirley went to play in Selma at the time of the Selma-to-Montgomery marches to show his support for the civil rights movement. Villelonga's son Nick, who co-wrote Green Book's script, has said Shirley largely kept his civil rights work quiet, which may explain why this side of his life is not so well documented.
Dr King wasn't his only influential friend; Shirley often told the story of how, when Vallelonga was arrested for speeding, he put in a call to Bobby Kennedy – at that time the US attorney general – to get his chauffeur off the hook.
Many stories about Shirley have the aura of myth, even though they may well be true. Kappeyne is full of such stories. “When he was young, his mother had to beg his teachers not to play a piece before showing the boy the music, because his memory was so good he would just play the piece straight back from memory, and she was worried he would never learn to read music.” Then there’s the story about the precocious infant’s organ-playing. “The boy would creep at night into any church in Pensacola, he was so obsessed with playing the organ. He even found a way into the Saenger Theatre, but because he was still tiny and couldn’t reach the pedals of its pipe organ, he would walk on them while reaching for the manuals above his head.”
Other mysteries remain. There are references to recordings of concertos with the New York and Minneapolis orchestras, which were never released. Why? And why are the classical pieces he wrote such as the organ symphonies, and a tone-poem based on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, seemingly impossible to track down?
One thing is for sure; the sheer talent of the man, which went beyond a dazzling virtuoso technique and an extraordinary sensitive touch (the jazz singer Sarah Vaughan said he could command more shades of tone than any pianist she knew). He had a prodigious memory, and an astonishing innate musicality that allowed him to discover affinities between apparently disparate things. Many of the recordings of popular songs he made with his trio demonstrate his encylopaedic knowledge of the Western canon.
For example, his recording of Jonny Green and Edward Heyman’s song I Cover the Waterfront begins with an allusion to Ravel’s Une barque sur l’Ocean before leading to the melody. There’s a riveting recording of Sammy Fain and Paul Webster’s Secret Love which is haunted by Schubert’s 2nd Impromptu. He uses the trio in extraordinarily imaginative ways. One version of Richard Rodgers’s My Funny Valentine has the melody high in the double bass, while Shirley swathes it in mysterious parallel harmonies.
The most striking evidence of Shirley’s talent I’ve encountered is the music he created to illustrate the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, released on an LP adorned with Shirley’s own vivid painting of Orpheus among the Shades. The music was apparently improvised in a single sitting, and pours forth in an unstoppable, stream-of-consciousness flow, responding to every twist and turn of the story often with amazing poetic inventiveness.
The episode where Eurydice is pulled back to the underworld, after Orpheus breaks the command not to look back at her, is chilling and touching at once. At one point there’s a fierce major-minor clash which shows Shirley was aware of musical modernism, but one has the sense that it was uncongenial to him; it’s the only awkward moment on a disc which otherwise is staggeringly fluent.
All this, combined with the mysterious biography, full of early promise but marked with big gaps, points to a man who could never find his niche in life. Like those other gifted black piano virtuosi Nina Simone and Shirley Horne, his heart’s desire was to become a classical pianist. But unlike them, he refused to accept his rejection by the white classical world, and take the well-meaning advice of that world to turn to jazz.
"He was wary of jazz," says Koppeyne, "even though he admired the best jazz and was a friend of some of the jazz greats like Duke Ellington... He wanted to be taken seriously as a musician, and he wanted to take black music and the music of Broadway, and raise it up to the level of classical music. He refused to compromise and that’s why life was difficult for him.”
Shirley tried to create an entirely new genre, a fusion of black popular song and the Great American Songbook with classical harmony, counterpoint, and piano virtuosity. One looks in vain for any parallel for Don Shirley among other African-American musicians. He had more in common with European-born composer-pianists like Leopold Godowsky, who were also uncomfortable with modernism and created numerous pieces in a late-romantic style rooted in a physical joy of virtuosity.
Torn between two worlds, Shirley was in some ways a solitary figure. One of the obituaries hints that he was not the easiest man to deal with in later years. My sense is that he combined the prickliness of the autodidact, the insecurity of being a black man in a white world, and a fierce conviction of the dignity of his calling, touchingly revealed in a 1982 interview:
“I am not an entertainer. But I’m running the risk of being considered an entertainer by going into a nightclub because that’s what they have in there. I don’t want anybody to know me well enough to slap me on the back and say, ‘Hey, baby.’ The black experience through music, with a sense of dignity, that’s all I have ever tried to do.”