Shirley Horn - Infinite Women

Born: 1 May 1934, United States
Died: 20 October 2005
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA

This biography is reprinted in full with permission from the National Women’s History Museum (United States of America). It was written by Emma Rothberg, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Predoctoral Fellow in Gender Studies, 2020-2022. NWHM biographies are generously supported by Susan D. Whiting. All rights reserved.

Jazz singer and pianist Shirley Horn was one of the leading jazz musicians of her generation. With her distinctive voice and the slow pace of her music, Horn had a long and storied career which touched both national and international audiences.
Shirley Horn was born on May 1, 1934, in Washington, D.C. Her father was a General Accounting Office clerk and her mother was a homemaker. At the encouragement of her mother, who wanted Horn to become a pioneering African American classical artist, she began playing piano at age 4. She learned on her grandmother’s parlor upright piano. By age 12, she was studying classical music at Howard University’s Junior School of Music. Horn recalled her childhood was “all about music” and “going to school” and even her “mother used to say, why don’t you go and play with the kids outside?” As a teenager, Horn won a scholarship to study music at the Julliard School in New York. Deciding it was too expensive for her parents to support her living in NYC, Horn stayed in D.C.
She began playing in clubs and cocktail lounges around D.C., attracting a small following. One night, an older customer offered the then 17-year-old Horn a four-foot-tall turquois teddy bear if she would sing “My Melancholy Baby,” which Ella Fitzgerald had sung. Horn recalled “I was very shy and it was hard for me to sing” but “I wanted that teddy bear.” Horn cites this moment as the one that convinced her she could both sing and play jazz music. While she was reluctant to do anything besides classical, she realized she could make more money as a jazz musician. Of her transition from classical to jazz, she liked to say, “I loved Rachmaninoff, but then Oscar Peterson became my Rachmaninoff. And Ahmad Jamal became my Debussy.” At age 20, she began leading her own jazz trio in Washington, D.C. They played at many of the clubs in the U Street jazz corridor.
Horn was a perfectionist and worked hard to develop her sound. She had one of the slowest deliveries in jazz, a genre known for its fast pace, and a unique phrasing in her singing. She sung with a soft, sensitive voice that distinguished her from other performers of the era.
In 1960, Horn recorded her first album, Embers and Ashes, for a small label called Stere-O-Craft. While the record was not widely heard, one person who did listen was Miles Davis. Davis immediately tracked down Horn and asked her to open for his performance at the Village Vanguard in New York. Miles told the Village Vanguard’s management that if Horn, an unknown outside of D.C., did not play the opening set then he would not play. Opening for Davis at the Vanguard led to many new opportunities for Horn. At the Vanguard, she met actor Sidney Poitier. Horn recalled Poitier came “up to me and said how much he enjoyed my music and kissed my hand. I almost fainted.” Horn went on to sing on the soundtrack of Poitier’s film “For the Love of Ivy” (1968).
The Vanguard performances also led her to a contract with Mercury Records. At Mercury, Horn worked with Quincy Jones on two albums, Shirley Horn with Horns and Loads of Love, both released in 1963. Despite the success of these albums, Horn was displeased. Horn said Mercury “wanted to groom me as a stand-up singer” which she thought was not right since she was a piano player. She “felt so uncomfortable, standing in this little booth, singing off the lyric sheets there in front of me…those records were not me.” By the mid-1960s she stopped touring. At the urging of her husband Sheppard Deering, a Metro mechanic, Horn only played gigs in the D.C.-Baltimore area. She too wanted to remain close to home and family so she could raise her daughter, Rainy. Between 1963 and 1978, Horn only made two records: Travelin’ Light (1965) and Where Are You Going? (1972).
In 1980, Horn attended a musicians’ convention at D.C.’s Shoreham Hotel. Past midnight one night, she sat down at the piano to play for some friends. The performance dazzled many in the crowd, including some recording executives and concert promoters. One invited her to the North Sea Jazz Festival in the Netherlands. Her concert there led to a career resurgence. Now in her 50s, she got a contract with the prestigious Verve Records and became widely known outside of D.C. In the 1980s and 1990s, she worked with a regular trio of bass and drums, recorded 11 more albums, received nine Grammy nominations, and won a Grammy in 1999 for Best Jazz Vocal Performance. Miles Davis played as a “side man” on her album You Won’t Forget Me (1991). Her album Here’s to Life (1992) spent 16 weeks at number one on the Billboard Jazz Chart; two other albums also reached number one in 1992 and 1993. PBS nationally broadcasted her performances at the White House in 1994 and New York’s Lincoln Center in 1998.
In 2001, Horn’s right foot was amputated due to her long struggle with diabetes. She continued performing, but it was difficult for her to use the piano pedals in the way that was necessary for her trademark style. For a few years, another pianist played while she performed facing the audience. She then switched to using a prosthetic device that allowed her to work the pedals. Despite her declining health, she not only struggled with diabetes but breast cancer, Horn continued to dazzle audiences. In 2004, she was honored by the Kennedy Center and named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master.
On October 20, 2005, Shirley Horn died at age 71 at a nursing home in Cheverly, Maryland.

The following is republished from the National Endowment for the Arts. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).

Shirley Horn began leading her own group in the mid-1950s, and in 1960 recorded her first album, Embers and Ashes, which established her reputation as an exceptional and sensitive jazz vocalist. Born in 1934 in Washington, DC, she studied classical piano as a teenager at Howard University’s Junior School of Music.

Under the influence of artists such as Oscar Peterson and Ahmad Jamal, she then began a career as a jazz pianist and soon after discovered the great expressive power of her voice. When Miles Davis heard Embers and Ashes, he brought her to New York, where she began opening for him at the Village Vanguard. Soon she was performing in major venues throughout the United States and recording with Quincy Jones for the Mercury label.

For some years she spent much of her time in Europe, then took a ten-year hiatus to raise her family in Washington. She continued to appear in and around the DC area, and in the 1980s she returned to the recording studio. The overwhelming critical success of her 1981 appearance at Holland’s North Sea Jazz Festival reintroduced revitalized her career, allowing her to take to the road with her trio and record more albums.

Her association with the Verve label, which began in 1987, gave a new showcase to her inimitable style and cemented her reputation as a world-class jazz artist. Six of her more than 20 albums have been nominated for Grammy Awards, and she has collaborated with jazz artists including Hank Jones, Kenny Burrell, Wynton Marsalis, Roy Hargrove, Buck Hill, Branford Marsalis, and Toots Thielemans.

In 1990, she collaborated with Miles Davis on her critically acclaimed album You Won’t Forget Me. Her 1992 recording Here’s to Life was that year’s top-selling jazz album and earned a Grammy Award for arranger Johnny Mandel. In 1998, Horn paid tribute to her mentor with the brilliant recording I Remember Miles, winning the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Performance. Health problems in the early 2000s forced her to cut back on her appearances.

Selected Discography
Embers and Ashes, Stereo-Craft, 1960
Violets for Your Furs, Steeple Chase, 1981
You Won’t Forget Me, Verve, 1990
I Remember Miles, Verve, 1998
May the Music Never End, Verve, 2003