Nina Simone
‘An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times.’ — Nina Simone
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
People along the way ⏳🌊
- FamilyMary Kate Waymon
Her mother, a Methodist minister; the first stage on which her daughter played accompaniment was her mother's church service.
- TeacherMuriel Mazzanovich
An English-born piano teacher who taught young Eunice Bach, building the framework of her playing for the rest of her life.
- InfluenceBillie Holiday
The elder singer critics constantly measured her against; she reinterpreted Holiday’s songs “I Loves You, Porgy” and “Strange Fruit” in her own way.
- FamilyAndrew Stroud
A former police detective, her second husband and manager, he built up her career in the 1960s; they divorced in 1970.
- FriendshipLorraine Hansberry
The playwright friend who drew her into the civil rights movement; the title of her posthumous play became “Young, Gifted and Black.”
- FriendshipMiriam Makeba
A South African singer who led her to Liberia in 1974.
I. The prodigy of Tryon · 1933–1950 (age 0–17)
(Tryon) In February 1933, Eunice Kathleen Waymon was born in Tryon, North Carolina. She was the sixth of eight children. Her father, John Divine Waymon, supported the family with all sorts of work, from barbering to odd jobs, and her mother, Mary Kate Waymon, was a Methodist minister. Money was scarce in the Depression years. (Church) From about the age of three she taught herself the piano by ear, and soon she was accompanying the services at which her mother preached. Hand claps, Black spirituals, and the answering voices of the congregation were the first grammar of music she learned. Her mother, she recalled, frowned on secular music. (Teacher) A white woman in whose house her mother worked as a domestic recognized the child’s gift and paid for lessons, and the English-born piano teacher Muriel Mazzanovich took her on. Mazzanovich taught her Bach. Bach’s textures, in which several melodies flow interlocked at once (counterpoint), became the backbone of her piano playing for the rest of her life. The townspeople raised a fund to support her studies. (Recital) At a town recital when she was about twelve, her parents, seated in the front row, were pushed to the back when they were told to give up their seats to white audience members; she held out, refusing to play until they were returned to their places, as she recalled in her autobiography. She remembered it as the moment she first felt the insult of segregation in her own body. (Graduation) In 1950 she graduated at the top of her class from Allen High School, a girls’ school in Asheville. To become America’s first Black female classical concert pianist was the dream she and the town shared.
II. A closed door, a new name · 1950–1957 (age 17–24)
(Juilliard) In the summer of 1950, on donated funds, she studied at the Juilliard School in New York while preparing to audition for the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her family, too, moved to Philadelphia in anticipation of her admission. (Curtis) In 1951 she failed the audition. She believed she had been turned down because she was Black, and she returned to that wound again and again for the rest of her life. She kept up private lessons afterward and never let go of her classical dream, but to make a living she taught piano to children and accompanied singers. (Atlantic City) In 1954 she landed a job playing piano every night at the Midtown Bar & Grill in Atlantic City, New Jersey. She recalled that she took a stage name for fear that her mother, a minister, would find out she was playing in a bar. She took Nina from niña (“little girl”), the Spanish pet name a boyfriend called her, and Simone from the French actress Simone Signoret. When the owner demanded that she sing too, she began singing in front of customers for the first time. (Fusion) Her sets were medleys that stitched together Bach-style counterpoint, gospel, blues, and Broadway songs within a single number. Hands trained on the classics and a voice formed in church had at last met in a bar. Her low, dark timbre and her way of setting words apart one by one, as if chewing on each, spread by word of mouth, and her stage widened to clubs in Philadelphia and New York. (Duality) For a long time she held on to the thought that the stage she had wanted was Carnegie Hall, not a bar. Paradoxically, that discontent made her playing rigorous. Even before noisy patrons she played as if at a recital, and she could not abide an inattentive audience.
III. Little Girl Blue · 1957–1962 (age 24–29)
(Bethlehem) In 1957 she signed with Bethlehem Records, and that December she recorded her first album, “Little Girl Blue,” a piano trio with Jimmy Bond on bass and Albert ‘Tootie’ Heath on drums. It included jazz repertoire such as Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo” and Tadd Dameron and Count Basie’s “Good Bait,” but Bach still lay beneath the playing. (Porgy) Gershwin’s “I Loves You, Porgy,” from the 1959 album, climbed to No. 18 on the Billboard pop chart and made her name. She is said to have learned the song from Billie Holiday’s recording. Critics often compared her to Holiday, but she disliked the label of jazz singer and wanted her music called Black classical music. (Contract) Yet she had signed away her recording rights outright for $3,000, and she received almost no royalties from the record. She said the loss came to more than a million dollars. The sense of having been robbed of her rights lingered heavily in her later dealings with record labels and managers. (Colpix) In 1959 she moved to Colpix and released a live recording of her concert at New York’s Town Hall, and in 1960 she took the stage at the Newport Jazz Festival. It was the period in which she passed from club performer to concert-hall artist. (Marriage) A brief marriage to Don Ross in 1958 ended the following year. In 1961 she married Andrew Stroud, a New York police detective, who left the force to become her manager. Their daughter Lisa was born in 1962; she later made her way as a singer and actress under the name Lisa Simone. Stroud built her career methodically but drove her through a relentless schedule of performances, and she recorded his violence in her diaries.
The first trio album by a bar-room pianist, it captures on one record hands honed on Bach and a voice formed in church. It is the very record whose rights she sold for $3,000.
- In the title track the piano lays down the melody of the Christmas carol “Good King Wenceslas” and sets Rodgers and Hart’s song on top of it. The texture of two melodies flowing at once (counterpoint) shows where her music begins.
- In the piano interlude of “Love Me or Leave Me,” the two hands chase the same melody like a Bach fugue. It is often singled out as the passage where her classical training shows most clearly.
- Jimmy Bond’s bass and Tootie Heath’s brushes never push forward; they carry the beat lightly, leaving the piano and voice room to spread out.
- “My Baby Just Cares for Me” flows calmly over a jaunty accompaniment in which the left hand alternates between bass notes and chords. It is the very recording that became a hit again in Britain 30 years later.
- She recalled that the album was recorded in little more than a day’s session.
IV. Mississippi Goddam · 1963–1968 (age 30–35)
(Awakening) In June 1963 the civil rights activist Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi, and in September the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killed four Black girls. She recalled that at first she tried to make a gun with her own hands, but her husband stopped her, telling her she had music, and that right then, in little more than an hour, she wrote “Mississippi Goddam.” (Friendship) The playwright Lorraine Hansberry was the friend who drew her into politics. She was close to James Baldwin and Langston Hughes as well, and Malcolm X’s family lived near her home in Mount Vernon, just outside New York. In March 1965 she sang at the rally on the final night of the Selma–Montgomery march. (Philips) In 1964 she moved to Philips and included “Mississippi Goddam” on “In Concert,” recorded live at Carnegie Hall. It was kept off the air in parts of the South, and one distributor is said to have sent back a box of the records snapped in half. On “Pastel Blues” in 1965 she included “Strange Fruit,” Billie Holiday’s indictment of lynching, and “Sinnerman,” more than 10 minutes long, and the following year she released “Four Women,” which portrays the lives of four Black women in turn. (Cost) Her sense of mission exacted a price. Some clubs and broadcasters shied away from her, and her bookings dwindled. In 1965 Hansberry died at the age of thirty-four. She believed songs should be used to give strength to Black audiences, and she refused to sing only love songs. (Tribute) In 1967 she moved to RCA. Three days after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April 1968, she sang, on the stage of the Westbury Music Fair, a tribute hastily written by the bassist Gene Taylor. Midway through the song she spoke directly to the audience, and that performance was included on “’Nuff Said!”
A live recording from the Carnegie Hall stage that first put on record “Mississippi Goddam,” written in fury over the Evers assassination and the Birmingham bombing.
- She introduces the song as a show tune (a Broadway number), and it really does have a brisk, breezy Broadway rhythm. The clash between the bright accompaniment and the furious content is the song’s power.
- The audience laughter that bursts out early in the song and fades as it goes on is preserved intact on the recording.
- Many passages are closer to speech than to song. She confronts head-on the white South and those who counsel her to go slow.
- However high the emotion boils, the tempo never wavers. Short, hard chords on the piano hold the song in cool check.
An album released in the thick of the civil rights movement, it brings together “Sinnerman,” a church spiritual stretched out at length, and “Strange Fruit,” Billie Holiday’s song of indictment.
- “Sinnerman” stretches a spiritual she heard in church as a child to more than 10 minutes. A piano figure repeating a short pattern without end (ostinato) drives the whole piece.
- Midway the instruments nearly all drop out and only hand claps remain; there the tension peaks, and from there the sound builds up once more.
- Rudy Stevenson’s guitar, Lisle Atkinson’s bass, and Bobby Hamilton’s drums stay right on her heels as she accelerates. The breath of the church-style exchange of shout and answer (call and response) is alive in it.
- In “Strange Fruit” the accompaniment is pared to a minimum and the words are set down slowly, one by one. Heard beside Billie Holiday’s recording, it shows at what a different temperature the same indictment can arrive.
A live recording that holds the tribute she offered from the stage at Westbury three days after Dr. King's assassination. It preserves, intact, the way grief can transform a performance.
- “Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)” was written by bassist Gene Taylor in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, and it is said to have gone onstage without adequate rehearsal.
- Midway through the song she slows the playing and speaks directly to the audience, pouring out her grief and anger. The record preserves those words at length.
- The slow tempo and gospel-tinged harmonies call a funeral service to mind.
- “Ain't Got No, I Got Life,” from the same album, stitches together two songs from the musical “Hair,” and it climbed high on the British charts.
V. Departure · 1969–1992 (age 36–59)
(Anthem) On “Black Gold,” recorded at Lincoln Center's Philharmonic Hall in 1969, she sang “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” named for Hansberry's posthumous play. It was a song meant to hand Black children a sense of pride, and it soon became an anthem of the civil rights movement. Yet as the movement's leaders fell one after another, her anger and exhaustion deepened. (Divorce) When she divorced Stroud in 1970, she lost her manager as well, and was left with no one to look after her money or her schedule. Biographers explain that her withholding of part of her taxes in protest of the Vietnam War was tangled up in all this, and she left the United States. (Wandering) After a stop in Barbados, in 1974 she settled for a time in Monrovia, Liberia, at the urging of her friend Miriam Makeba. She would remember her years there as the happiest of her life. In 1972 her father had died. She is said to have moved on through Switzerland and the Netherlands before settling in Paris. (Baltimore) In 1978 she released “Baltimore” on Creed Taylor's CTI. She reportedly complained that she had been given no say in the choice of songs or the arrangements. There was a period, too, when she sang in small Paris clubs for meager fees. In the late 1980s, biographers report, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and began taking medication. Her long swings of feeling had at last been given a name. (Comeback) In 1987, when “My Baby Just Cares for Me” was used in a Chanel perfume commercial in Britain, it rose to No. 5 on the singles chart. A recording thirty years old brought her a new audience. In 1991 she published her autobiography, I Put a Spell on You, setting down her life in her own words.
The Lincoln Center live recording on which “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” named for a play by her late friend Hansberry, was first committed to record.
- She wrote the music for “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” and Weldon Irvine supplied the lyrics. At the heart of the song is its way of speaking to Black children — tender, yet resolute.
- On “Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair,” she introduces the song with a long story, then sings it quietly to guitar accompaniment alone. On a grand stage, she chose the smallest sound of all.
- So much of the talk and laughter traded with the audience survives that you can hear how she led the concert as a conversation.
- The album was nominated for a Grammy for best female R&B vocal performance.
An album made for Creed Taylor's CTI during her wandering years away from America. She voiced her dissatisfaction with how the record was made, yet it holds the solitary voice of that time.
- She sets Randy Newman's title song to a lazily swaying reggae rhythm. It is a song that gazes at a city in decline, and she sings it with feeling held in check, quietly composed.
- The arrangements were by David Matthews. Over the sleek strings and rhythm, her dark, heavy timbre stands out as something foreign.
- The album was recorded in Brussels, Belgium. She reportedly complained that she had only sung, with no say in the choice of songs or the mixing.
VI. Last days in Carry-le-Rouet · 1993–2003 (age 60–70)
(Settling) In 1993 she found a house in Carry-le-Rouet, a seaside village near Marseille in the south of France. That same year she released her final studio album, “A Single Woman,” on Elektra. Her voice had grown lower and rougher, but the weight carried by each note had only increased. (The stage) Even in her last years she went on performing, moving between Europe and America. Onstage she often demanded silence from the audience or spoke at length between songs, and she was quick to anger when she felt disrespected. Biographers read this prickliness alongside an old wound: the recognition she had hoped for as a classical performer never came. (Illness) She suffered from breast cancer. In April 2003 the Curtis Institute of Music awarded her an honorary diploma — the same school that had turned her away fifty-two years earlier. Two days later, on April 21, she died at her home in Carry-le-Rouet, at the age of seventy. As she had wished, her ashes were scattered across several African countries. (Legacy) After her death her songs reached a new generation through hip-hop sampling, film and advertising. In 2018 she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She had refused to be filed as either a jazz singer or a pop singer, and in the end she remains a name that no single genre can wholly contain.
Her final studio album, released the year she settled in Carry-le-Rouet. Her deepened voice tells the stories of those left alone.
- The title song is by Rod McKuen, and she sings it calmly, like a woman living alone talking to herself.
- The strings spread out wide while the piano holds its tongue. Her range, lower than in her youth, lends the songs added weight.
- Michel Legrand's “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” is a song calling out to a father who has died, and it echoes her own story.
Lesser-known stories
All her life she said that the Curtis Institute had rejected her because of her race, and the story became the most often quoted scene in her legend. Later accounts, however — among them Princess Noire (2010) by the biographer Nadine Cohodas — also point out that Curtis's piano program at the time was a fiercely competitive one that admitted only a handful, and that another Black student was already enrolled. Whether the rejection was racially motivated can be neither confirmed nor disproved by the record. What is certain is that she believed it, and that this belief was the engine driving a lifetime of anger and perfectionism. This subtle grain is often lost in popular accounts, overshadowed by the dramatic anecdote. The small shack in Tryon where she was born was long neglected and came close to being demolished. In 2017 four artists — Adam Pendleton, Rashid Johnson, Ellen Gallagher and Julie Mehretu — bought the house together, and the following year the National Trust for Historic Preservation named it a National Treasure. That it was the art world, not the music world, that saved her starting point shows what she meant to Black artists beyond music. Even when “My Baby Just Cares for Me” became a big hit again in Britain in 1987, she said she had earned almost nothing from its success, having already signed away the rights to the recording in 1957. Her late comeback was built not on royalties from old records but on the concert stages that the hit filled once more.
Term notes 📚🔎
Counterpoint
(Meaning) The word daewi (對位) means 'a position (位) where notes are set facing (對) one another.' The Western name, counterpoint, comes from the Latin for 'note against note.' (In jazz) A technique of composition and performance in which two or more melodies move independently at the same time while still fitting together. Bach was the master of this art, and Nina Simone brought it into the accompaniments of her pop and jazz songs to forge a sound all her own. When two groups sing a round, each singing a different phrase at once, the sound blends instead of tangling — counterpoint is the deliberate crafting of just that kind of weave.
Ostinato
(Meaning) Italian for 'stubborn, persistent.' The name comes from the stubborn repetition of the same figure. (In jazz) A short melody or rhythmic cell repeated over and over throughout a piece or an entire section. Once that repetition is laid down like a floor, the voice and the other instruments are free to move above it. The piano in “Sinnerman” is a classic example. It is like the steady chant of 'one, two, one, two' while jumping rope, as friends leap in above it, switching from one move to the next.
Blues
(Meaning) The English word blue means not only the color but also sad. The blues, once a phrase for a melancholy mood, became the name of a music. (In jazz) A music born in the Black communities of the American South in the late 19th century, usually repeating the same frame in 12-bar cycles and using sorrowfully colored notes sung slightly flat (blue notes). Jazz and rock 'n' roll both have their roots in the blues. Like a rap battle, where different lyrics are poured into the same rhythmic frame each time, the blues sets the story of the day upon a fixed form. (Elsewhere) In everyday English it can also simply mean a gloomy mood, with nothing to do with music.
Spiritual
(Meaning) The word yeongga (靈歌) means 'song (歌) of the spirit (靈).' The English spiritual likewise means 'of the spirit, of the soul.' (In jazz) Religious songs sung by Black Americans in the era of slavery, carrying Bible stories filled with suffering and the hope of deliverance. They are a vital root of gospel, blues and jazz, and Nina Simone's “Sinnerman,” too, grew out of the spirituals she heard in church as a child. Just as classes at a school field day draw strength from singing their cheers in one voice, spirituals were songs for enduring together.
Call and response
(Meaning) English for a call and a response. (In jazz) A form in which one person or instrument throws out a phrase and others — people or instruments — take it up and answer. It arose from African music and Black church worship, and in jazz it carried on as an exchange between soloist and band, singer and audience. The cheerleader shouts a chant and the whole stand shouts it back — that is call and response.
Show tune
(Meaning) From the English for a tune from a show, the term refers to songs written for Broadway musicals. (In jazz) A song created for a musical, which jazz musicians eagerly borrowed as material for improvisation. Gershwin’s “I Loves You, Porgy” likewise comes from the opera “Porgy and Bess.” Nina Simone wryly introduced “Mississippi Goddam” as a show tune for a show that hadn’t been written yet, loading her fury onto a jaunty, musical-style rhythm. Imagine a cheerful song from a school play suddenly made to carry a deadly serious story, and you can sense the shock that mismatch delivers.