Nina Simone

Eunice Kathleen Waymon was born in Tryon, North Carolina, on the twenty-first of February 1933, the sixth of eight children. Her mother, Mary Kate Irvin, was a Methodist minister; her father, John Divine Waymon, worked as a barber, a dry-cleaner, and a handyman who had once been an entertainer. A prodigy at the keyboard, she began playing piano at the age of three and was accompanying services in her mother's church while still a small child.

Her gift drew local patrons who funded her classical training, and she came to dream of becoming the first great Black concert pianist. She studied at the Allen High School for Girls in Asheville and then at the Juilliard School in New York, preparing to audition for the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her rejection there, which she attributed to racial prejudice, closed one door and opened another: to earn a living she began playing and singing in Atlantic City nightclubs, taking the stage name Nina Simone so her devout family would not know she played what they called the devil's music.

Her 1958 debut and the hit "I Loves You, Porgy" launched a recording career that would range across classical, jazz, blues, gospel, folk, and soul, yielding more than forty albums. In the 1960s she gave her art to the freedom struggle, answering the Birmingham church bombing and the murder of Medgar Evers with the searing "Mississippi Goddam," and lending her voice to "To Be Young, Gifted and Black" and "Four Women." She stood with the movement and its writers, among them Langston Hughes and James Baldwin.

Disillusioned after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., she lived abroad in later years and settled in France, where she died at Carry-le-Rouet on the twenty-first of April 2003, days after Curtis at last granted her an honorary degree. The High Priestess of Soul, who turned sorrow into defiance and beauty into resistance, is honored here among the ancestors whose voices still summon a people to dignity.