The fiercely independent spirit of Nina Simone is summarised by her claim, “I've never changed my hair. I've never changed my colour. I have always been proud of myself.” A performer for the past four decades, and crowned the “high priestess of soul” for the soul-wrenching intensity of her singing, she is equally at home performing jazz, rhythm and blues (R&B), folk, gospel, protest songs, or material from Broadway musicals. Simone’s smoky, often hard-edged voice and genre-bending style have made her one of 20th-century popular music’s most provocative artists. “Her extraordinary faculty for communicating,” wrote jazz critic Leonard Feather, “is based in part on the urgent topicality of her songs, and in equal measure, on the power, sometimes tantamount to fury, with which she drives home her point.”
Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon on February 21, 1933, in Tryon, North Carolina, she was the sixth of eight children of a handyman (and ordained minister) and a housekeeper. Early on she displayed such a prodigious musical talent that, when she was six years old, a local benefactor paid for her first piano lessons. In 1943, ten-year-old Eunice gave her debut recital at the local library—and experienced racism firsthand when her parents were removed from the front row to make room for whites. This traumatic episode may have reinforced her lifelong commitment to the fight for racial equality.
In 1950, Eunice Waymon moved to New York to study classical music at Juilliard, but by 1954 the poor state of her finances forced her to take a summer job as pianist-singer at the Midtown Bar in Atlantic City, New Jersey. She took the stage name “Nina Simone,” afraid that her parents would find out she was performing in a bar. “Nina” was a nickname a boyfriend had given her, and the “Simone” came from the glamorous French actress Simone Signoret. When Simone was signed to Bethlehem Records in 1957, her first album yielded a million-selling single, George GERSHWIN’s “ I Loves You Porgy.” When Simone switched labels to Colpix in 1959, the five-year association produced ten eclectic albums (ranging from ELLINGTON standards to folk songs and movie themes) and hits such as “Wild Is the Wind” and “The House of the Rising Sun.”
Simone moved to Philips in 1964, where she recorded signature songs such as “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” and “I Put a Spell on You,” and composed her first protest tune, the fiery “Mississippi Goddam!” in response to the 1963 murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers.
In 1966 Simone joined RCA for an eight-year stay that produced some of her most commercial records—including “Ain’t Got No/I Got Life” (from the musical Hair), “To Love Somebody,” and her uplifting African-American pride anthem “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black.”
Embittered by racism, the self-proclaimed “rebel with a cause” left the U.S. in 1969. Since then she has lived in numerous places including Liberia, Barbados, Switzerland, Trinidad, Belgium, and the south of France. Returning to the U.S. in 1978, she was briefly arrested for having withheld income tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.
Simone’s recording of “My Baby Just Cares for Me” made it to No. 5 in the U.K. charts in 1987, and was used to advertise Chanel No. 5 perfume on television in America and Europe. Her music also featured prominently in the 1992 movie Point of No Return, a remake of the French thriller La femme Nikita, in which the heroine takes both Nina’s name and songs as inspiration. Simone’s passionate autobiography, I Put a Spell on You, was published in 1991.
Michael R. Ross
SEE ALSO:
BLUES; FOLK MUSIC; GOSPEL; JAZZ; SOUL.
FURTHER READING
Simone, Nina, and Stephen Geary.
I Put a Spell on You
(London: Penguin, 1992).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
The Colpix Years; Ihe Essential Nina Simone;
Wild Is the Wind/High Priestess of Soul.