Nina Simone

Their life

A classically trained pianist from Tryon, North Carolina, who was refused a place at the Curtis Institute in 1951 — a rejection she believed to her death was racial, and which redirected her into nightclubs where she sang because the owner insisted. She built an unclassifiable body of work out of Bach counterpoint, gospel, blues and chanson, and after the 1963 Birmingham church bombing wrote "Mississippi Goddam" in under an hour, ending her commercial radio career in the South. "To Be Young, Gifted and Black" became an anthem of the movement. She left the United States in 1970, lived in Barbados, Liberia, Switzerland and France, struggled for decades with bipolar disorder that went undiagnosed until the late 1980s, and was awarded an honorary degree by Curtis two days before she died.

Known for

• Mississippi Goddam
• Four Women
• To Be Young, Gifted and Black
• I Loves You, Porgy
• Classical-jazz-gospel fusion
• Voice of the civil rights movement

The road they walked

She was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon on February 21, 1933, in Tryon, North Carolina, one of eight children in a family of modest means. Her mother was a Methodist minister, and her father worked a variety of jobs. She was playing piano at church by the age of three or four. A local teacher, Muriel Mazzanovich, took her through Bach and the classical repertoire, and a fund raised by people in her community helped pay for her training. She dreamed of becoming the first great Black concert pianist, and she studied at Juilliard in New York before her family's finances ran short.

In 1951 she applied to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and was not admitted. She believed for the rest of her life that the reason was her race, and the wound shaped everything after it. Needing money, she began playing in an Atlantic City bar in 1954. The owner told her she would have to sing as well as play, and she took a stage name, Nina Simone, partly to keep her mother from learning she was playing secular music in a bar. What came out of those nights was a style no one had a category for, with classical counterpoint, hymns, blues, folk and French chanson all in one voice. Her 1958 debut album included a version of 'I Loves You, Porgy' that became a hit. She sold the rights cheaply and never saw the royalties it earned.

By the early 1960s she was a major concert artist, friends with Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry, and drawn into the civil rights movement. The murder of Medgar Evers and the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four girls pushed her to write 'Mississippi Goddam,' which she performed at Carnegie Hall in 1964. 'Four Women' followed in 1966, and 'To Be Young, Gifted and Black,' a tribute to Hansberry, in 1969. She paid for the stance with her career, and she grew disillusioned with the United States. She left in 1970 and spent years in Barbados, Liberia, Switzerland, the Netherlands and finally France. Her health and finances were unsteady, and her bipolar disorder was not diagnosed until late in her life. A British perfume advertisement in 1987 sent 'My Baby Just Cares for Me' back up the charts, and she published a memoir, I Put a Spell on You, in 1991.

How their story ended

Nina Simone died on April 21, 2003, at her home in Carry-le-Rouet, near Marseille, in the south of France. She was seventy. She had been in declining health for some time, and her death is generally attributed to cancer. In her last days she learned that the Curtis Institute, which had turned her away more than fifty years earlier, was awarding her an honorary degree, and she died two days after it was conferred.

In their words

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