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)
The people beside her ⏳🌊
- FamilyMary Kate Waymon
Her mother, a Methodist minister, who first introduced her daughter to church music but never came to welcome her path into secular music.
- TeacherMuriel Mazzanovich
Her first teacher, who taught her Bach and the classics in Tryon, laying the roots of a lifetime of contrapuntal playing.
- InfluenceBillie Holiday
Simone learned “I Loves You, Porgy” from her recording, and the song became Nina Simone's first hit.
- FamilyAndrew Stroud
Husband and manager, he ran her career through its peak in the 1960s, but the marriage was scarred by violence and control.
- FriendshipLorraine Hansberry
The playwright who drew her into the civil rights movement and the world of Black thought; “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” is the song Simone dedicated to her.
- FriendshipMiriam Makeba
A South African singer and friend who in 1974 urged her to settle in Liberia.
I. Eunice of Tryon · 1933–1950
(Birth) She was born in February 1933 in Tryon, a small town in North Carolina. Her given name was Eunice Kathleen Waymon. Her father, John Divine Waymon, made a living as a barber, a dry cleaner, and a handyman, and her mother, Mary Kate Waymon, was a Methodist minister. She was the sixth of eight children, and at the tail end of the Depression the household had little to spare. (Church) She was sitting at the piano by the age of three and was soon accompanying hymns in her mother's church. She was a child who could play back anything she heard by ear. The white woman whose house her mother cleaned recognized the gift and paid for lessons. (Bach) Her teacher was the English-born pianist Muriel Mazzanovich. The child called her Miss Mazzy and learned Bach, Chopin, and Beethoven from her. Of these, Bach became the pillar of a lifetime. Years later, even when she played popular songs, her two hands moved in Bach's manner of weaving separate melodies together (counterpoint). The townspeople raised a fund to support the girl's studies. (Recital) At her first solo recital, at around twelve, her parents, seated in the front row, were told to give up their seats to white audience members and were pushed to the back. The girl refused to play until they were returned to their places. Recounted in her autobiography, the scene remained her first memory of standing up to discrimination from the stage. (Dream) When she graduated at the top of her class from the Allen High School for girls in Asheville in 1950, she had a single goal. It was to become America's first Black woman classical concert pianist.
II. A pseudonym in Atlantic City · 1950–1960
(Curtis) In the summer of 1950 she studied with the pianist Carl Friedberg at the Juilliard School in New York while preparing to enter the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her family moved to Philadelphia as well. But in 1951 Curtis turned her down. All her life she believed the reason was racism, and the rejection became a wound that never quite healed. (Pseudonym) Getting by teaching piano and accompanying singers, she found work in 1954 at a bar in Atlantic City. The owner told her she had to sing as well. To keep her mother from learning that a daughter of the church was singing in a bar, she changed her name. She took Nina from a Spanish pet name meaning little girl, and Simone from the French actress Simone Signoret. Her playing, a mix of Bach-like improvisation, long-loved jazz standards, and gospel, and her voice, set in a low, rich female range (contralto), spread by word of mouth. (Contract) In 1957 she signed with Bethlehem Records and recorded her first album, “Little Girl Blue,” in little more than a day. “I Loves You, Porgy,” from that record, reached No. 18 on the Billboard singles chart in 1959. But she had sold the recording rights for $3,000 and saw almost none of the royalties that followed. She later said the deal cost her more than a million dollars, and her deep distrust of the music industry began here. (New York) After moving to Colpix Records, she played New York's Town Hall in 1959 and the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960. She had married Don Ross in 1958, but they parted within a year. She never stopped disliking it when her music was called jazz. The name she wanted was Black classical music.
A song from Gershwin's opera “Porgy and Bess,” which she learned from Billie Holiday's recording. It was the first hit from the very debut album whose rights she signed away for $3,000.
- The opening piano begins like a classical solo, scattering its chords (arpeggios). The first impression is closer to a recital pianist than a jazz club singer.
- The voice stays in a low register, restrained almost to a whisper. Pressing the emotion down instead of letting it burst out makes it sound all the more yearning.
- Bass and drums support her very quietly, as if sweeping with brushes. The spare lineup of just piano·bass·drums brings the conversation between voice and piano into sharp focus.
- Even while she sings, the piano does more than accompany, slipping short answering phrases in between the vocal lines.
III. Songs of rage · 1961–1965
(Marriage) In 1961 she married Andrew Stroud, a New York police detective. Stroud left the force to become her manager and took hold of the tours, the contracts, and the money. A daughter was born in 1962, and the family lived in Mount Vernon, just outside New York. But from the start the marriage harbored violence and control. Her diaries and records made public later preserve her husband's beatings and a spirit crushed under a relentless schedule. (Awakening) Around this time, through the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, she entered the world of Black intellectuals. She grew close to Langston Hughes and James Baldwin as well. She recalled that she and Hansberry never talked about men or clothes; they always talked about revolution. The performer at the piano was becoming an artist who spoke for her times. (Rage) In June 1963 the civil rights activist Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi, and in September a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, killed four Black girls. She recalled that her first impulse was to make a gun. Her husband stopped her, telling her she had music, and in little more than an hour she wrote her first protest song, “Mississippi Goddam.” Released in 1964 as a live recording from Carnegie Hall, the song was kept off the air by some Southern stations, and the story goes that a whole box of records came back with every disc snapped in two. (Selma) On the final night of the Selma-Montgomery march in March 1965, she sang the song before the marchers. That same year, on Philips Records, “I Put a Spell on You” carried “Feeling Good,” and “Pastel Blues” carried “Sinnerman,” a Black spiritual stretched past 10 minutes. There was a price. The more she insisted on political songs, the narrower the doors of clubs and radio became.
Her first protest song, written in little more than an hour out of rage at the Evers assassination and the Birmingham church bombing. It appeared on the Carnegie Hall live album “Nina Simone in Concert.”
- It races along at a brisk, jaunty Broadway show-tune tempo. The irony of bright piano colliding with furious words is the heart of the song.
- When she introduces the song at the top, laughter breaks out in the audience. The recording preserves the air in the room as that laughter turns to tension while the song goes on.
- Now and then she all but stops singing to talk, throwing instructions straight at the band. These are moments when the line between song and speech blurs.
- Toward the end her voice sharpens and she drives the beat hard. Follow the change as a singer who had kept to a decorous tune stops hiding what she feels.
A song from the British musical “The Roar of the Greasepaint,” which she recorded anew in her Philips years. In the same year she was writing songs of rage, it showed another face, a song of liberation and self-affirmation.
- The opening passage begins with the voice alone, unaccompanied. A bare voice, down to every breath, sets the weight of the whole song.
- Breaking the stillness where only the voice had flowed, brass and strings pour in all at once. Arranged by Hal Mooney, this big-band blow is the song's most famous moment.
- Over the slow tempo she comes in a little behind the beat, taking her time. Her unhurried stride sounds like self-possession.
- At the close she adds improvised ornaments in wordless sound, and the brass answers with short, clipped hits.
She grew a Black spiritual she had heard as a child in her mother's church into an epic of more than 10 minutes. Church, club, and classical training meet within a single song.
- A rapid piano drives the song forward, repeating a short figure without pause. The repetition piles up like a prayer and builds tension.
- Midway through there is a passage where the instruments fall away and only handclaps remain. It recalls the way a congregation at worship kept the beat with their hands.
- Where she half-shouts over the clapping passage, the voice becomes less a song than a preacher's cry.
- Toward the end, tempo and volume surge upward as if driven by a gale. This mounting, layered construction is why 10 minutes feel short. Later used in many films, the song reached a new generation.
IV. Young, gifted and black · 1965–1970
(Loss) In January 1965 Hansberry died of cancer at thirty-four. The following year, “Four Women,” Simone's own composition on the album “Wild Is the Wind,” borrowed the voices of four Black women of different skin tones and backgrounds to portray the wounds slavery left behind. It also drew backlash for confining Black women to stereotypes, and some stations shied away from it. (Elegy) In 1967 she moved to RCA. Three days after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April 1968, she sang “Why? (The King of Love Is Dead),” a memorial song hastily written by bassist Gene Taylor, on stage in Westbury, New York. The live performance appeared on the album “’Nuff Said!” (Britain) That same year “Ain't Got No, I Got Life,” which wove together two songs from the musical “Hair,” reached No. 2 on the British chart, and in 1969 her single covering the Bee Gees' “To Love Somebody” also rose to No. 5 in Britain. She had a gift for rebuilding other people's pop songs in her own language. Where her place in America had narrowed, Europe began to widen it. (Tribute) In 1969, borrowing the title of a play assembled from Hansberry's writings and staged after the playwright's death, she wrote “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” with keyboardist Weldon Irvine. A song offering pride to Black children, it was so beloved that the civil rights group the Congress of Racial Equality called it the national anthem of Black America. Donny Hathaway recorded it in 1970 and Aretha Franklin in 1972, and Aretha went so far as to make it the title of an album. (Exhaustion) Offstage, she was worn out. Relentless touring, conflict with her husband, and the reality of the movement's leaders falling one by one weighed on her. She leaned toward a more radical line than nonviolence, and arguments with audiences in the middle of a performance grew frequent.
Written the year after losing Hansberry, the song uses the voices of four Black women to portray the legacy of slavery. It was also a song some broadcasters shunned at the time.
- A short accompaniment figure in the low register repeats almost unchanged throughout the song. Over this fixed accompaniment, only the characters change.
- In each verse a different woman tells her own story in the first person. Listen for how the color and strength of the voice shift slightly with each new character.
- The earlier verses unfold with composure, but with the last character the voice turns rough and hard. The song ends in an outburst close to a cry.
- Without showy technique, a delivery that sings as if reciting conveys the full weight of the story.
A song dedicated to Hansberry, a friend who had died. As Donny Hathaway and Aretha Franklin recorded it in turn, it became the anthem of an era.
- A hymnlike slow tempo and gospel-style piano chords form the foundation. It is not a march but a song offered like a blessing.
- On the 1970 live album “Black Gold,” the song is preceded by Simone's introduction honoring Hansberry. Heard in this version, the story behind the song comes into sharper focus.
- The voice carries not anger but a tender resolve. Set beside the protest songs of the same period, the difference is vivid.
- Listening to the Donny Hathaway and Aretha Franklin recordings one after another reveals how a single song blooms differently in the gospel languages of three artists.
V. The wandering years · 1970–1986
(Exile) In 1970 she left America alone, leaving her wedding ring behind. She went to Barbados in the Caribbean, where she is said to have been close to the prime minister, Errol Barrow. Her 1972 divorce from Stroud also cost her a manager. Having always left money matters to others, she now had to untangle contracts and taxes on her own. Withholding income tax for several years in protest against the Vietnam War turned into a long dispute with the IRS. (Africa) In 1974, at the urging of Miriam Makeba, the South African singer and an old friend, she settled in Monrovia, Liberia, in West Africa. Her daughter lived there with her for a time. She later remembered this period as one of the happiest of her life. Africa was the land of roots she had long yearned for. (Baltimore) In 1978 she released “Baltimore” on producer Creed Taylor's CTI label. She was unhappy with the album, layered with reggae-inflected rhythms and strings, saying her wishes had not been reflected in the song selection or the arrangements, but critics praised a voice hardened by the years. That same year, she is reported to have briefly returned to the United States and been arrested over her tax troubles. (Hardship) After a stint in Switzerland, she spent the 1980s in Paris, playing small clubs. The performer who had once filled Carnegie Hall worried about making a living, and on some nights her swings of mood sent a show awry. Yet at the piano her bearing never changed. When the audience chattered, she stopped playing and waited until they fell silent.
VI. The song returns · 1987–2003
(Rediscovery) In 1987, when her 1958 recording “My Baby Just Cares for Me” was used in a Chanel perfume commercial in Britain, the reissued single climbed to No. 5 on the British chart. A recording from thirty years earlier found a new generation, but because she had signed away her rights in the Bethlehem days, her share is said to have been small. Even so, it opened the way back to major stages. (Diagnosis) In the late 1980s she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. According to biographers and those close to her, she afterward took medication and struggled to steady her swings of mood. That some of the fierce rage and deep depression that had followed her since youth were bound up with this illness became widely known only after her death. (Settling) In 1991 she published her autobiography, “I Put a Spell on You,” and in 1993 released her last studio album, “A Single Woman.” That same year she settled in Carry-le-Rouet, a seaside town near Marseille in southern France. In 1995 she received a suspended sentence for firing an air gun after a quarrel with a neighbor. In her final years she fought breast cancer. (Farewell) On April 21, 2003, she died at her home in Carry-le-Rouet at the age of seventy. A few days earlier, the Curtis Institute of Music had awarded her an honorary degree. It was the school that had turned her away half a century before. Following her wishes, her ashes were scattered across several African countries. (Legacy) In 2015 the documentary “What Happened, Miss Simone?” illuminated her life anew through her diaries and the testimony of those who knew her, and her daughter Lisa Simone, by then a singer, took part in its production. That same year, on the tribute album “Nina Revisited,” Lauryn Hill sang several songs, including “Feeling Good.” In 2018 she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
A breezy swing number from her debut album, it reached No. 5 on the British chart in 1987 thanks to a perfume commercial. It was the song that called the wandering Simone back to the big stage.
- She recast an old standard from a 1930 film in a lightly bouncing swing rhythm. The bass, stepping along one beat at a time as if walking, is the backbone of its buoyancy.
- The piano solo in the middle is the heart of this recording. Bach-style counterpoint, with the two hands weaving separate melodies together, unfolds over a jazz rhythm.
- The vocal relaxes and drifts along playfully. Compared with the heavier songs that came later, it carries the ease of youth.
- For the 1987 reissue, the British animation studio Aardman made a music video of clay cats singing in a club, and it caused a stir.
Lesser-known stories
Her rejection by the Curtis Institute of Music became the emblematic scene used to explain her life, but the circumstances are more complicated than one might think. The school and some biographers have pointed out that there were many piano applicants that year and very few were admitted. She remained convinced to the end that it was racial discrimination, and even now no one can say for certain who was right. What is clear is that, near the end of her life, the school answered this wound with an honorary degree. Many remember her as a jazz singer, but Bach hides throughout her recordings. In the piano solos of “Love Me or Leave Me” and “My Baby Just Cares for Me” from her debut album, she slipped Bach-style fugue and counterpoint into the swing rhythm. Even after her dream of becoming a classical pianist was dashed, that training never left her, and among professional musicians her piano is discussed as seriously as her singing. Her birthplace in Tryon lay neglected for years and was in danger of being torn down. In 2017 the artists Adam Pendleton, Rashid Johnson, Ellen Gallagher and Julie Mehretu jointly bought the little house, and the following year the National Trust for Historic Preservation designated it a National Treasure. This effort to safeguard her legacy by means other than records and the stage remains relatively little known among music fans.
Glossary notes 📚🔎
Counterpoint
(Meaning) Daewibeop (對位法), 'method of opposed positions,' means a way of setting notes face to face (對) and arranging their places (位). The Latin root of the Western name, counterpoint, means point against point, that is, note against note. (In pop) A compositional technique in which two or more melodies each move independently yet are crafted to sound well together. Bach was its master, and even when playing jazz and pop, Nina Simone had her left and right hands sing different melodies. Think of a round. Several people sing the same tune staggered in time, yet the sound blends rather than tangles, and that is counterpoint in its simplest form.
Contralto
(Meaning) It comes from Italian and carries the sense of a voice lying below (contra) the alto. (In pop) The lowest range of the female voice, or a singer who has such a voice. It is low, full and darkly resonant, and Nina Simone's voice is often cited as a prime example. When the girls in choir class split into sopranos and altos, if there is a friend among the altos who comfortably reaches the very bottom notes, that voice is close to a contralto.
Standard
(In pop) A classic song that countless singers and players have performed again and again over decades. Many come from Broadway musicals and film scores of the 1920s–50s, and jazz musicians show their skill by reworking these songs each in their own way. It is like a school festival where every class picks the same song, but one class turns it into a ballad and another into a dance track. The original may be the same, yet who sings it makes it an entirely different song. (Elsewhere) In everyday use it means a norm or benchmark, as in standard size or global standard.
Royalty
(Meaning) The English word royalty shares a root with royal. In the old days, anyone mining minerals on the king's land paid the king a fee, and the word for that fee carried over into today's meaning. (In pop) The share that goes to the rights holder every time a song or record is sold or used in broadcasting·advertising. Nina Simone signed away the rights to her debut album for a one-time payment of 3,000 dollars, so even when the album later sold well she received almost nothing. It is as if you agreed to get one candy each time your friends used the rules of a board game you invented, but at the start you took a single bag of candy and handed over the rights for good. Even if the game sweeps the whole school, there is nothing more coming to you. (Elsewhere) Loyalty, in the sense of customer loyalty, is written exactly the same way in Korean (royeolti), but it is a different word in both spelling and meaning. Brand loyalty belongs to that one.
Protest song
(Meaning) To protest means to object. Quite literally, it is a song of protest. (In pop) A song that raises its voice against social problems such as war, racial discrimination and inequality. Many were written during the American civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, and Nina Simone's “Mississippi Goddam” is a prime example. Sung together at demonstrations, such songs also bound people to one another. When an unfair rule appears at school and friends make up a chant and shout it together, it carries far more force than one person speaking alone; in the same way, a song gathers many hearts into a single voice.
Black spiritual
(Meaning) Yeongga (靈歌), 'spirit song,' means a song (歌) of the soul (靈), that is, a song of faith. In English it is called a spiritual. (In pop) Religious songs sung by enslaved African Americans, who poured their suffering and their longing for freedom into Bible stories. Often one person leads and the group answers, keeping time with handclaps and stamping feet. They later became a great root of Black music, flowing into gospel, blues and soul. At a school sports day, when the cheerleader shouts a line and the whole class shouts it back, that cheer resembles the call-and-response style of the spirituals.