Eunice Kathleen Waymon, better known as Nina Simone (February
21, 1933 - April 21, 2003) was a singer, songwriter and pianist. She is
generally classified as being a jazz musician, but disliked that categorisation
herself, and her work has also been described as covering the blues, rhythm
and blues and soul.
Simone was born in Tryon, North Carolina, one of a family of eight children.
Like other African American singers, she was insprired as a child by Marian
Anderson and began singing at her local church, also showing prodigious
talent as a pianist. She gave her public debut playing the piano at the
age of ten - her parents, who had taken seats in the front row, were forced
to move to make way for whites. It has been speculated that this incident
planted a seed which later grew into her involvement in the civil rights
movement.
At 17, Simone moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, teaching the piano
and accompanying singers. She was able to study piano at New York City's
prestigious Juilliard School of Music thanks to the sponsorship of benefactors,
but lack of funds meant that she was unable to fulfill her dream to become
America's first African American concert pianist. She later had an interview
to study piano at the Curtis Institute but was rejected (it has been speculated
this was because she was black).
Simone turned instead to blues and jazz, taking the name "Nina Simone"
in 1954 - "Nina" was her boyfriend's nickname for her (from the Spanish
for "girl") and "Simone" was after the French actress Simone Signoret.
She first came into the public eye in 1959 with her somewhat melodramatic
version of George Gershwin's "I Loves You Porgy" (from Porgy and Bess)
which proved to be her only Top 40 hit in the United States. This was soon
followed by the single "My Baby Just Cares for Me" (this was also a hit
in the 1980s in the United Kingdom when used for television advertisements
for Chanel No. 5 perfume).
Throughout the 1960s she was involved in the civil rights movement and
recorded a number of political songs, including "To Be Young, Gifted and
Black" (later covered by Aretha Franklin), "Blacklash Blues", "Mississippi
Goddam" (a response to the murder of Medgar Evers and the bombing of a
church in Birmingham, Alabama killing four black children) and "I Wish
I Knew How it Would Feel to be Free".
In 1961, Simone recorded "House of the Rising Sun", which was later
recorded by Bob Dylan and was a hit for The Animals. Other songs she is
famous for include "I Put a Spell on You" (originally by Screamin' Jay
Hawkins) and "My Baby Just Cares for Me". In lesser-known numbers like
"For All We Know", which has a piano part reminiscent of Johann Sebastian
Bach, her classical training was clear.
In 1971 Simone left the United States following disagreements with agents,
record labels and the tax authorities, citing racism as the reason. She
returned in 1978 and was arrested for tax evasion (she had witheld several
years of income tax as a protest against the Vietnam War). She lived in
various countries in the Caribbean, Africa and Europe, continuing to perform
into her 60s. In the 1980s, she performed regularly at Ronnie Scott's jazz
club in London.
Attention has been drawn to some deterioration in Simone's vocal power
in later years (perhaps to be expected given her age), but she continued
to draw crowds. She also became known for a degree of eccentricity, apparently
shooting her neighbour's son in 1995 after his laughing disturbed her concentration.
In 1993, she settled in Bouc-Bel-Air near Aix-en-Provence in the south
of France, where she died in her sleep in 2003.
Simone's autobiography by Richard Williams, I Put a Spell on You
(ISBN 0306805251), was published in 1992.
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for details. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Nina_Simone
