Nina Simone ( ; born Eunice Kathleen Waymon; February 21, 1933 – April 21, 2003) was an American composer, concert pianist, singer, songwriter, and civil rights activist. Simone's bearing and stage presence earned her the title the High Priestess of Soul. Her music spanned styles including classical, folk, gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, and pop. Her piano playing was strongly influenced by baroque and classical music, especially Johann Sebastian Bach,. and accompanied expressive, jazz-like singing in her contralto voice.. Rolling Stone named Simone one of the greatest singers on various lists.
The sixth of eight children born into a respected family in North Carolina, Simone initially aspired to be a concert pianist. With the help of a local fund set up in her hometown, she enrolled at Allen High School for Girls, then spent a summer at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, preparing to apply for a scholarship to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. She failed to gain admission to Curtis,Liz Garbus, 2015 documentary film, What Happened, Miss Simone? which she attributed to racism. She remained musically active until her death in 2003, two days after the institute awarded her an honorary degree.
Early in her career, to make a living, she played piano at a nightclub in Atlantic City. She changed her name to "Nina Simone" to disguise herself from family members, having chosen to play "the devil's music" or so-called "cocktail piano". She was told in the nightclub that she would have to sing to her own accompaniment, which effectively launched her career as a jazz vocalist. After making her debut with Little Girl Blue in 1958, she went on to record more than 40 albums up to 1974. She released her first and biggest hit single in the United States in 1959 with "I Loves You, Porgy", which peaked inside the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Simone became known for her work in the civil rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s, and she later left the United States and settled in France following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. She lived and performed in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. In 1991, Simone published her autobiography, I Put a Spell on You (taking the title from her famous 1965 album), and she continued to perform and attract audiences until her death.
Biography 1933–1954: Early life Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon on February 21, 1933, in a 650-square-foot, three-room clapboard house in Tryon, North Carolina, the sixth of eight children in a respected family. Her father, John Divine Waymon, worked as a barber and dry-cleaner as well as an entertainer. Her mother, Mary Kate Irvin, was a Methodist preacher. Simone began playing piano at the age of three or four. The first song she learned was "God Be With You, Till We Meet Again". Demonstrating a talent with the piano, she performed at her local church. Her concert debut, a classical recital, was given when she was 12. Simone later said that during this performance, her parents, who had taken seats in the front row, were forced to move to the back of the hall to make way for white people. She said that she refused to play until her parents were moved back to the front,.. and that the incident contributed to her later involvement in the civil rights movement. Simone's music teacher helped establish a special fund to pay for her education.. Subsequently, a local fund was set up to assist her continued education. With the help of this scholarship money, she was able to attend Allen High School for Girls in Asheville, North Carolina where she graduated as the valedictorian.
After her graduation, Simone spent the summer of 1950 at the Juilliard School as a student of Carl Friedberg, preparing for an audition at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her application was denied. Only three of 72 applicants were accepted that year, but as her family had relocated to Philadelphia in the expectation of her entry to Curtis, the blow to her aspirations was particularly heavy. She was outspoken about her application having been denied because of racial prejudice, a charge the staff at Curtis have denied, particularly as African Americans Blanche Burton-Lyles and George Walker had both studied at Curtis.
Discouraged, she took private piano lessons with Vladimir Sokoloff, a professor at Curtis, but never could re-apply. At the time, the Curtis Institute did not accept students over 21. She took a job as a photographer's assistant, found work as an accompanist at Arlene Smith's vocal studio, and taught piano from her home in Philadelphia.
1954–1959: Early success In order to fund her private lessons, Simone performed at the Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey, whose owner insisted that she sing as well as play the piano, which increased her income to $90 a week. In 1954, she adopted the stage name "Nina Simone". "Nina", derived from niña, was a nickname given to her by a boyfriend named Chico, and "Simone" was taken from the French actress Simone Signoret, whom she had seen in the 1952 movie Casque d'Or. Knowing her mother would not approve of her playing "the Devil's music", she used her new stage name to remain undetected. Simone's mixture of jazz, blues, and classical music in her performances at the bar earned her a small but loyal fan base.
In 1958, she befriended and married Don Ross, a beatnik who worked as a fairground barker, but quickly regretted their marriage. After leaving Ross, Simone moved to New York. While playing in small clubs, she recorded her debut album Little Girl Blue which was released in February 1959 through Bethlehem Records. It included George Gershwin's "I Loves You, Porgy" (from Porgy and Bess), which she learned from a Billie Holiday album and performed as a favor to a friend. It was subsequently released as a single and became her only Billboard top 20 single in the United States. Because she had sold her rights outright for $3,000 (), Simone lost more than $1 million in royalties (notably for the 1980s re-release of her version of the jazz standard "My Baby Just Cares for Me") and never benefited financially from the album's sales..
1959–1964: Burgeoning popularity After the success of Little Girl Blue, Simone signed a contract with producer Hecky Krasnow at Colpix Records and recorded a multitude of studio and live albums. Colpix relinquished all creative control to her, including the choice of material that would be recorded, in exchange for her signing the contract with them. After the release of her live album Nina Simone at Town Hall, Simone became a favorite performer in Greenwich Village. By this time, Simone performed pop music only to make money to continue her classical music studies and was indifferent about having a recording contract. She kept this attitude toward the record industry for most of her career.
While in New York, Simone became friends with civil rights and gay rights activists and artists such as James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and Lorraine Hansberry, with whom she would also collaborate professionally (see below). She had a number of same-sex affairs and at least one relationship with a woman whom she was in love with. She noted being attracted to men and women in her diary and was bisexual, but never came out as such.
In December 1961, Simone married Andrew Stroud, a detective with the New York Police Department. In a few years he became her manager and the father of her daughter Lisa. Simone later said that he abused her psychologically and physically. Simone said that Stroud treated her "like a work horse" in an interview with the BBC in 1999. Stroud is also often the primary source for information about Simone's sexuality, leading Simone scholar Jordan Alexander Stein to argue that basing "nearly the entire biographical account of Simone's sexuality" on "her ex-husband's speculative report of what she may have done with other people" does not give an adequate account of the complexities of attraction, desire, and self-understanding that Simone may have experienced.
1964–1974: Civil rights era
In 1964, Simone changed record distributors from Colpix, an American company, to the Dutch Philips Records, which meant a change in the content of her recordings. She had always included songs in her repertoire that drew on her African-American heritage, such as "Brown Baby" by Oscar Brown and "Zungo" by Michael Olatunji on her album Nina at the Village Gate in 1962. On her debut album for Philips, Nina Simone in Concert (1964), for the first time she addressed racial inequality in the United States in the song "Mississippi Goddam"..
This was her response to the June 12, 1963, murder of Medgar Evers and the September 15, 1963, bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young black girls and partly blinded a fifth. She said that the song was "like throwing ten bullets back at them", becoming one of many other protest songs written by Simone. The song was released as a single, and it was boycotted in some southern states. Promotional copies were smashed by a Carolina radio station and returned to Philips.
She later recalled how "Mississippi Goddam" was her "first civil rights song" and that the song came to her "in a rush of fury, hatred and determination". The song challenged the belief that race relations could change gradually and called for more immediate developments: "me and my people are just about due." It was a key moment in her path to Civil Rights activism. "Old Jim Crow", on the same album, addressed the Jim Crow laws. After "Mississippi Goddam", a civil rights message was the norm in Simone's recordings and became part of her concerts. As her political activism rose, the rate of release of her music slowed.
Simone performed and spoke at civil rights meetings, such as at the Selma to Montgomery marches. Like Malcolm X, her neighbor in Mount Vernon, New York, she supported black nationalism and advocated violent revolution rather than Martin Luther King Jr.'s non-violent approach.. She hoped that African Americans could use armed combat to form a separate state, though she wrote in her autobiography that she and her family regarded all races as equal.
In 1967, Simone moved from Philips to RCA Victor. She sang "Backlash Blues" written by her friend, Harlem Renaissance leader Langston Hughes, on her first RCA Victor album, Nina Simone Sings the Blues (1967). On Silk & Soul (1967), she recorded Billy Taylor's "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" and "Turning Point".
Her 1968 album 'Nuff Said! contained live recordings from the Westbury Music Fair of April 7, 1968, three days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. She dedicated the performance to him and sang "Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)", a song written by her bass player, Gene Taylor. In 1969, she performed at the Harlem Cultural Festival in Harlem's Mount Morris Park. The performance was recorded and is featured in Questlove's 2021 documentary Summer of Soul.
Simone and Weldon Irvine turned the unfinished play To Be Young, Gifted and Black by Lorraine Hansberry into a civil rights song of the same name. She credited her friend Hansberry with cultivating her social and political consciousness. She performed the song live on the album Black Gold (1970). A studio recording was released as a single, and renditions of the song have been recorded by Aretha Franklin (on her 1972 album Young, Gifted and Black) and Donny Hathaway. When reflecting on this period, she wrote in her autobiography: "I felt more alive then than I feel now because I was needed, and I could sing something to help my people."
1974–1993: Later life