Adele Darlene Allen was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 19, 1953, to Oscar Clement Allen, a physician from Baltimore, Maryland, and Hattie Lawson Allen, a registered nurse, high school administrator, and author from Danville, Virginia. Carol Allen, a physician, is her only sibling.
Adele began formal piano lessons at the age of five with virtuoso pianist Ira Pendler. From the age of ten to sixteen, she studied with David LeVita, a musicologist at the Brooklyn Museum. Allen graduated with honors from Midwood High School in Brooklyn in 1969.
She then attended Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics and Political Science with a minor in Piano Performance in 1973. Allen founded the African-American Gospel Choir, which consisted of thirty black females, while a student at Wellesley.
Allen worked in Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm’s New York office after graduating from Wellesley. She continued her musical studies at the New York School of Liturgical Music during this time. Allen enrolled in post-baccalaureate music studies at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1975.
Allen earned a Master of Science in Human Nutrition from the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. Allen was inducted into the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority’s Delta Rho Omega chapter. She graduated with honors from the American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine in Plymouth, Montserrat, in 1985.
Allen, the founder of the Saint Croix Community Chorale, has conducted members of the El Conservatorio de Msica de Puerto Rico as well as the annual Handel’s Messiah. Allen was the accompanist for the Saint Croix Central High School Mixed Concert Choir and Madrigal Singers at the North American Music Festival in Atlanta, Georgia, from 1990 to 2000.
She has also performed with flutist Austin A. Venzen of the New York Symphony Orchestra and opera baritone Lawrence O. Benjamin. Allen performed classical compositions in 2003 at Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral in Charlotte Amalie, Virgin Islands, with the Polymnia Chorus and the Puerto Rico Symphony Chamber Orchestra.
Allen released the CD “Out of the Black Experience” in 2009, and in 2010, she produced and starred in “LIVE from ST. Thomas, USVI: A Tribute to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”
Dr. Adele Darlene Allen, a retired physician and educator, continues to perform and conduct music ensembles in New York City and the US Virgin Islands.