Nina Simone

Eunice Kathleen Waymon was born on February 21, 1933, in Tryon, North Carolina, the sixth of eight children in a family struggling through the Depression. Her mother, Mary Kate Waymon, was a Methodist minister and housekeeper; her father, John Divine Waymon, worked as a handyman and barber after his dry-cleaning business failed ^[1]. The child began picking out hymns on the piano before her fourth birthday, and her talent was obvious enough that her mother's employer helped pay for lessons.

From about the age of six she studied classical piano with a local English teacher, Muriel Mazzanovich, whom she called Miss Mazzy. The lessons ran for years and were funded in part by a community collection known as the Eunice Waymon Fund, organized so that a gifted Black child in a segregated Southern town could continue her training ^[2]. Bach became her deepest musical love, and she resolved to become the first Black woman to perform as a classical concert pianist in America.

One childhood incident stayed with her for life. At a recital she gave around the age of twelve, her parents were moved from the front row to make room for white audience members. She refused to play until they were returned to their seats. She later described the moment as her first act of protest and a lasting lesson in the daily insults of Jim Crow ^[1].

After finishing high school as valedictorian of Allen High School in Asheville, Waymon spent the summer of 1950 studying at the Juilliard School in New York, preparing for an audition at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Curtis rejected her application in 1951. She believed for the rest of her life that racial prejudice played a part in the decision, a conviction that shaped her politics and her sense of grievance toward the American classical establishment ^[2]. Days before her death, the institute awarded her an honorary diploma.

To support herself and her family she taught piano and accompanied singers in Philadelphia. In 1954 she took a job playing in the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City, where the owner insisted she sing as well as play. To hide the nightclub work from her devout mother she invented a stage name, combining "Nina", from a Spanish endearment, with "Simone", after the French actress Simone Signoret ^[1]. The disguise became an identity.

Her 1958 recording of George Gershwin's "I Loves You, Porgy" for the small Bethlehem label reached the Billboard top twenty and became her only major American pop hit ^[3]. The album that contained it, later reissued as Little Girl Blue, announced a performer who fused classical technique, jazz phrasing, gospel feeling, and folk song into something no category could hold. She famously sold her rights to those recordings outright for a few thousand dollars, a decision that cost her substantial royalties over the following decades ^[3].

Anyone asking who was Nina Simone must reckon with 1963, the year her art and her anger fused. After the murder of Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, which killed four Black girls, she wrote "Mississippi Goddam" in under an hour ^[4]. The song, brisk and show-tune bright in its melody and unsparing in its words, was banned by radio stations in several Southern states, and she performed it at the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march.

Through the middle 1960s she recorded a string of civil rights material: "Old Jim Crow", "Four Women", a portrait of four Black women shaped by slavery and colorism, and "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free", which became an anthem of the movement ^[4]. In 1969, grieving the death of her friend the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, she and Weldon Irvine wrote "To Be Young, Gifted and Black", later recorded by Aretha Franklin and adopted by the Congress of Racial Equality as an unofficial hymn ^[5].

Her activism carried professional costs. Promoters grew wary, some radio outlets avoided her records, and she felt increasingly estranged from an industry she believed punished her outspokenness. She was closer in temperament to Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael than to advocates of nonviolence, and she said openly that she was not opposed to armed self-defense ^[4].

Any list of Nina Simone achievements begins with the catalog: more than forty albums recorded between 1958 and 1993 for labels including Bethlehem, Colpix, Philips, and RCA ^[3]. Signature recordings ranged across "My Baby Just Cares for Me", "Feeling Good", "Sinnerman", "I Put a Spell on You", and interpretations of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and the Bee Gees that critics often judged superior to the originals. Her 1987 resurgence came when a British perfume commercial used "My Baby Just Cares for Me", pushing the thirty-year-old track into the UK top ten ^[6].

Formal honors arrived mostly late or after her death. She received an honorary doctorate from Amherst College in 1977 and another from Malcolm X College in Chicago, and she liked to be addressed as Dr. Nina Simone ^[2]. The Grammy organization gave her a Hall of Fame award in 2000 for "I Loves You, Porgy", and she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018, fifteen years after her death ^[7].

Among essential Nina Simone facts is the breadth of her musicianship. She improvised Bach-style fugues inside popular songs, conducted audiences into silence with a stare, and refused the label "jazz singer", preferring "Black classical music" as a description of her work ^[1].

Simone married twice. A brief first marriage to Don Ross, a fairground barker, ended quickly. In 1961 she married Andrew Stroud, a New York police detective who became her manager and the father of her only child, Lisa Celeste Stroud, born in 1962. Lisa later performed as the singer and actress Simone ^[1]. The marriage, which ended in divorce around 1970, was marked by Stroud's violence, which Simone described in her 1992 autobiography, I Put a Spell on You ^[1].

Her later life was complicated by illness that went undiagnosed for years. In the late 1980s she was found to have bipolar disorder, a diagnosis made public by friends and biographers after her death; the condition helped explain the volatile behavior, canceled concerts, and confrontations with audiences that had damaged her reputation ^[8].

She left the United States in the early 1970s, exhausted by racism, tax disputes, and the music business. Her wandering exile took her to Barbados, Liberia, where she spent some of her happiest years, then Switzerland, the Netherlands, and finally the south of France ^[2].

From the late 1970s Simone worked irregularly, recording the album Baltimore in 1978 and touring Europe with performances that could be transcendent one night and combative the next. The 1987 commercial success of "My Baby Just Cares for Me" restored her audience and finances, and she settled permanently in France, first near Aix-en-Provence and later in Carry-le-Rouet, a small town on the Mediterranean coast west of Marseille ^[6].

Her final studio album, A Single Woman, appeared in 1993. She continued to give concerts into the late 1990s, often seated regally at the piano, dispensing songs and commentary on her own schedule. Breast cancer shadowed her last years. Nina Simone died at her home in Carry-le-Rouet on April 21, 2003, at the age of seventy; her ashes were scattered in several African countries at her request ^[9].

Two decades after her death, any serious Nina Simone biography must account for an influence that keeps widening. Her recordings have been sampled and covered by artists from Talib Kweli and Kanye West to John Legend and Lauryn Hill, and "Feeling Good" and "Sinnerman" circulate constantly in films, advertising, and television ^[7]. The 2015 Netflix documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?, built around archival interviews and her daughter's testimony, earned an Academy Award nomination and introduced her to a new generation ^[8].

Her childhood home in Tryon, a three-room clapboard house, was purchased in 2017 by four Black artists, among them Adam Pendleton and Rashid Johnson, and named a National Treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation the following year ^[10]. A statue of Simone stands in downtown Tryon, and the Curtis Institute rejection that wounded her is now taught as a case study in the barriers Black classical musicians faced.

Musicians and historians alike return to the same point: no one else combined her particular gifts. She brought conservatory discipline to the nightclub, prophetic rage to the concert hall, and an unbending insistence that an artist's duty, as she put it in interviews, was to reflect the times ^[4].