San Diego Magazine / December 2004 / Shirley Allen

 Email  Print  Feed

Shirley Allen

SHIRLEY ALLEN is one hell of a dame. At 70-something, this cocky blonde has been playing piano four nights a week for 14 years at the Red Fox Room, a multigenerational North Park joint that doesn’t care if it’s cool (but is way cool). With her not-quite-beehive, rich voice and sharp tongue, Allen entertains customers and lets them entertain themselves by singing with her combo—including Dave Shaw on clarinet and sax, and sometimes, her son, Mark, on drums.

 “I don’t know if this music thing is going to work into a steady job,” she deadpans. Once, in Hawaii, she played piano for Irving Berlin at a Big Island prison. She opened for Elvis in 1956, and helped Dean Jones get his first recording contract by accompanying him during his first singing contest.

“I wanted to be a nurse, but I couldn’t afford school,” she riffs. “Fifty-five years later, I’m still saving money for it.”

Allen is presently on hiatus, one of very few in her half-century of making music. She took time off for five weeks of chemotherapy and radiation. “I have cancer in my lung,” she says. “I don’t beat around the bush about it.” She expects to be back at the Red Fox in January.

Allen started playing when she was 4 and living in North Park. Her mom was a piano teacher; Dad played violin. “My mom always curled my hair in Shirley Temple curls on the piano bench and taught me the notes while I was sitting there,” Allen says. “Pretty soon, I could sit down and play what I heard.”

By 19, she was working in Hawaii, playing at Waikiki establishments and at the Warrant Officers Club at Pearl Harbor. “I wanted to come home and get married,” she says. “So I did, and I taught tap dancing during the day and played the clubs at night.” She played the great San Diego joints like the Zanzibar, the Satellite Room, the El Cortéz Hotel, the Stardust and the Brass Rail.

Around 1970, Allen became a fixture at the Colony House, where she found clarinetist Shaw—and her second husband. She also started going to New Orleans a couple of weeks each year, to the great Dixieland clubs, where she struck up lifelong friendships with jazz greats Al Hirt and Pete Fountain and the Dukes of Dixieland.

Allen moved over to the Fox in 1991, lured by owner John Dimas. “She’s an amazing gal; she’s pure show biz,” Dimas says. “There’s always going to be a place for her here.”