Music like Shirley Walker

Shirley Anne Walker (née Rogers; April 10, 1945 – November 30, 2006) was an American film and television composer and conductor. She was one of the few female film score composers working in Hollywood. Walker was one of the first female composers to earn a solo score credit on a major Hollywood motion picture (preceded by Suzanne Ciani, 1981) and according to the Los Angeles Times, is remembered as a pioneer for women in the film industry.

Walker often wrote her film scores entirely by hand, and always orchestrated and conducted her own scores by herself.

She won two Emmy Awards during her career, while the ASCAP Shirley Walker Award was created in her honor in 2014.

Walker (née Rogers) was born in Napa, California on April 10, 1945. Walker was a piano soloist with the San Francisco Symphony during high school, and later attended San Francisco State University on a piano scholarship. She studied music composition under Roger Nixon and piano studies with Harald Logan of Berkeley, California. For several years, she wrote jingles and composed for industrial films.