The bodyguard, Tony “Lip” Vallelonga, became the chauffeur for Dr. Don Shirley, a piano prodigy who collected two honorary degrees and made his concert debut at 18 playing Tchaikovsky’s ...

During the 1960s, Shirley went on a number of concert tours, some in Deep South states. For a year and a half, he hired New York nightclub bouncer Tony "Lip" Vallelonga as his driver and bodyguard.

Co-writer, Brian Hayes Currie, added, “It’s only supposed to be a two-month window. It’s not the biography of Don Shirley.” The controversy began bubbling after the Shirley family claimed ...

Don Shirley left no memoir, and no biography of him exists. How did Don Shirley navigate within this paradox? Shirley’s first record, “Tonal Expressions,” from 1955, ...

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 ...

Viggo Mortensen (left) and Mahershala Ali star in Green Book. DreamWorks Pictures / Universal. It was well after dark on a Saturday night in January 1963 when the Don Shirley Trio took the stage ...

After Don Shirley performed with his trio before an appreciative audience in the Putnam High School auditorium in November 1965, he did not go back to his lonely motel room and hit the Cutty Sark ...