Tracey was born in St Pancras, London, England. Her parents, Sidney Tracey and Bessie Hay, were an American vaudeville dance team that performed for Allied soldiers during World War II. Her father's original name was Murray Katzelnick. He emigrated to the United States from Russia with his Jewish parents as an infant.
When Doreen was four, her family returned to the United States, where her father first ran a nightclub, then opened a dance studio in Hollywood, California. She learned to dance and sing at an early age, courtesy of the many instructors and performers who worked out at her father's studio. Her first professional work was an uncredited singing and dancing bit in the musical film The Farmer Takes a Wife (1953). At age twelve she auditioned for the Disney's Mickey Mouse Club and was hired. She appeared for all three seasons of the show's original run.
In 1956, Tracey was featured in the Disney western Westward Ho, the Wagons!, and in the third season of the Mickey Mouse Club, had a role in the serial Annette. She was cast as Scraps, the Patchwork Girl, in a musical number from the proposed live-action Disney film Rainbow Road to Oz on an episode of the Disneyland television show in September 1957. The movie was never made, and when the Mickey Mouse Club was cancelled in 1958, Tracey switched to singing live at concerts and teen nightclubs.

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