Shirley’s life unfolded like one of her ballads, set to her own gradual rhythm. Born May 1, 1934, in Washington, D.C., Shirley was a shy child, reluctant to leave the house despite her mother’s exhortations. She spent most of her years in the Woodridge neighborhood in the northeast area of the city, settling a ten-minute drive from the house in which she was raised, not far from the Ivy City home in which her own mother grew up. A lifelong homebody, for many of her prime career years, she stayed in D.C., all but disappearing from major stages on the jazz circuit, focused on being a present mother to her daughter. For a time, Baltimore was about the limit. She could drive back home after a gig. She had a strong rubber band, she said.
D.C. is an extraordinarily fertile town for jazz, and was especially so as Shirley came of age in her early twenties, when, in 1957, it became the first U.S. city with a majority black population, earning it the nickname “Chocolate City.” A constellation of clubs—both white- and black-owned—drew national acts and cultivated local talent. There was Olivia Davis’s Patio Lounge on Seventh and T around the corner from the Howard Theater; the Pigfoot in Brookland; the Spotlitle on Rhode Island, where Miles Davis and Ahmad Jamal recorded live albums; and Bohemian Caverns on U Street, an underground club whose predecessor, Crystal Caverns, was one of the first jazz clubs in the country, sited on D.C.’s famed U Street corridor, referred to as “Black Broadway” for its profusion of black-owned businesses. Duke Ellington, Dr. Billy Taylor, and the great drummers Jimmy Cobb and Billy Hart had all grown up in the capital but had all made their careers beyond it. It was (and remains) unheard of for a musician of Shirley’s stature to reside in D.C., avoiding the pull of Los Angeles and New York for as long as she did. Perhaps the same sensitivity that disposed her to find the marrow of a song that made it necessary for her to insulate herself from the tempests of the business.