The remarkable breadth of her interests and experiences began to be developed in her youth in Oakland, California.  Born in San Jose, she moved with her family first to San Francisco when she was three or four, then to Oakland, where she attended Manzanita, Lockwood,
and Allendale Elementary Schools, Roosevelt Junior High and Oakland High School.  She began to play the alto horn and the clarinet while still in elementary school, and her parents refularly took her and her two brothers to operas at the Scottish Rite Auditorium in Oakland as well as to concerts at the Oakland Auditorium and the Greek Theater in Berkeley.  Rachel began piano lessons at age eight; in college she began extensive organ studies while continuing to study the piano.

Her mother, a native of San Francisco, nurtured the international and artistic side of her children's education, taking them to museums, subscribing to National Geographic magazine and introducing them to family and friends from many different backgrounds.  Rachel had close friends who lived in Chinatown and recalls the appeal of the Chinese music she heard there.  The travel accounts of a family friend who served as a missionary in India inspired Rachel's first serious composition, "Waters of the Ganges" for solo piano (c. 1936), composed  when she was in her early teens.  Later, while a graduate student at Columbia University in New York City, she often visited Chinatown and  saw Chinese opera.  At Columbia she studied ethnomusicology, and subsequently travelled to many parts of the world, developing her famed  multifaceted expertise.

Upon completion of her varied studies at the University of California-Berkeley in undergraduate composition and orcehestration with Charles Cushing, continuing her masters' degree work at Columbia with Otto Luening, Douglas Moore, Seth Bingham, Normand Lockwood and Randolph Thomas, Rachel taught at the Carmen Shepherd School of Music in New York City.  Upon graduation, she attended the Eastman  School of Music and moved to Georgia where she served briefly as Head of the Music Department at Albany State College. 

Returning to  California to study composition with Roger Sessions, she later chaired the music department at Wilberforce University in Ohio, adding to her musical expertise by taking organ lessons at Capitol University in Columbus.  It was this series of experiences that prompted Dr. Eubanks to start her own independent music school in California, while continuing to further her knowledge across curricular and varied interest areas.