Nina Simone trained for Bach and became the High Priestess of Soul
Eunice Waymon spent her youth training to become a classical concert pianist. Rejected by the Curtis Institute, she took a job playing an Atlantic City bar whose owner insisted she sing too. Adopting the name Nina Simone to hide this devil's music from her family, she became one of the most distinctive voices of the century.
She was born on February 21, 1933, in Tryon, North Carolina, in a clapboard house of three rooms, one of eight children of a barber and a Methodist preacher. Playing piano from about age three, she gave a classical recital at 12, and later said she refused to begin until her parents, moved to the back to seat white people, were returned to the front. A local fund paid for her schooling, and in 1950 she spent a summer at Juilliard studying with Carl Friedberg.
Curtis turned her down that year, accepting three of 72 applicants. Simone blamed racial prejudice; the institute denied it, noting Black students such as George Walker had studied there. Too old to reapply after 21, she took lessons privately with Vladimir Sokoloff and paid for them with bar work that earned $90 a week, taking her stage name in 1954. Her debut, Little Girl Blue, arrived in 1958, and I Loves You, Porgy reached the top 20 the following year.
The killing of Medgar Evers and the Birmingham church bombing of 1963 drove her to write Mississippi Goddam, which she said came in a rush of fury. Some southern stations boycotted it, yet civil rights themes became central to her work. She sang at the Selma to Montgomery marches, turned Lorraine Hansberry's unfinished play into To Be Young, Gifted and Black, and three days after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated dedicated a Westbury concert to him.
Feeling punished by the industry, she left the United States in September 1970, later settling in France and performing across Europe, Africa and the Caribbean. Her 1991 autobiography borrowed the title I Put a Spell on You. She died on April 21, 2003, two days after Curtis awarded her an honorary degree.
Source: Nina Simone
