Nina Simone

Eunice Kathleen Waymon was born in Tryon, North Carolina, on the twenty-first of February 1933, the sixth of eight children of a preacher and a Methodist minister. She took piano lessons from the age of three and was widely identified by her early teens as a child prodigy with the gifts to become America's first Black concert pianist. She applied to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia in 1951 and was rejected — by her account on racial grounds. She never reconciled with the rejection. She took the name Nina Simone — "Nina" from a former boyfriend's term of affection, "Simone" from the French actress Simone Signoret — to keep her bar-and-club work from her family.

She made her first recording, Little Girl Blue (1958), at twenty-five. Her cover of George Gershwin's "I Loves You Porgy" reached number eighteen on the Billboard pop chart in 1959. From 1964 onward she recorded as an explicitly political artist: "Mississippi Goddam" (1964, after the killing of Medgar Evers and the bombing of the Birmingham church), "Four Women" (1966), "To Be Young, Gifted and Black" (1969, after the death of Lorraine Hansberry), and "Backlash Blues" (1967, lyrics by Langston Hughes).

She left the United States in 1970 after the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy and lived for the rest of her life in Barbados, Liberia, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and finally Carry-le-Rouet in southern France. She struggled with bipolar disorder, financial mismanagement, and the cumulative cost of decades of political stigma in the American music industry.

She died at home in Carry-le-Rouet on the twenty-first of April 2003, age seventy.

She is honored here as the High Priestess of Soul, whose songs gave the American civil-rights movement its incandescent record.