Nina Simone (1933-2003) was an iconic singer, songwriter, musician, and civil rights activist who earned the moniker the “High Priestess of Soul.”
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Today’s activist was an iconic singer, songwriter, musician, and civil rights activist who earned the moniker the “High Priestess of Soul.” Though she is perhaps best remembered as a jazz musician, her music, much like her activism, confounded traditional labels in spanning a range of styles including classical, jazz, blues, gospel, pop, soul, R&B and folk music. She used her immense talents to create a body of work that was heavily focused on themes of liberation, Black empowerment, and love, and used her public platform to insistently shine a light on the racism and racial inequality running rampant in the United States. Please welcome Nina Simone.
Eunice Kathleen Waymon was born on February 21, 1933, in the small town of Tryon, North Carolina. She was the sixth of eight children in a poor family. Her mother Mary was a Methodist minister who worked a second job as a housekeeper, and her father John was a preacher and handyman.
From a very early age, Eunice showed prodigious musical talent. She learned to play the piano by ear at the age of three, and played piano and organ at her church as a child.
When Eunice was 12, she gave a recital at a local library. When her parents took seats at the front of the recital room to watch their daughter play, they were asked to move to the back to make room for white audience members. Eunice was furious at their treatment and refused to play until her parents were moved back to the front. She later considered this experience an early call to activism.
Eunice’s piano teacher was so impressed with her talent that she set up a community scholarship fund to send her to the private Allen High School for Girls in Asheville, North Carolina. Eunice excelled at school and graduated as valedictorian of her class.
After her graduation, Eunice spent the summer of 1950 at the Juilliard School studying classical piano with Carl Friedberg. She was preparing for an audition at the highly prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Unfortunately, Eunice was not accepted to Curtis after her audition, which she believed was a result of racism. This was a particularly difficult situation because her family had moved up to Philadelphia in anticipation of her attending school there. Instead of attending a different school, Eunice started taking lessons with a famous piano instructor at Curtis and taught piano lessons out of her home to pay the bills.
In 1954, Eunice took a job at a nightclub in Atlantic City. When the owner realized she only played the piano, he threatened to fire her if she didn’t start singing as well. Knowing that her religious mother would be quite upset if she found out her daughter was singing in a nightclub, Eunice adopted the stage name by which she would be known from then on- Nina Simone.
Performing at the nightclub in Atlantic City, and eventually on the local nightclub circuit, Nina grew a small but loyal following of fans who loved her mix of classically trained precision piano playing and her jazzy, highly expressive vocals.
In 1957, while still singing in clubs, Nina recorded her first single, George Gershwin’s “I Loves You, Porgy.” When it was released in 1959, it became a major hit, and was Nina’s only song to reach the Billboard Top 20 in the U.S. That same year, Nina signed with Bethlehem Records and released her first album “Little Girl Blue.”
In late 1959, Nina moved to New York City to further her music career. She signed a new contract with Colpix Records, which offered her full creative control over her music to sweeten the deal. She also started performing at venues around New York City, and soon earned a reputation for spontaneous and engaging live performances. Realizing the sales potential, Colpix started releasing recordings of a number of these live performances, like her 1960 set at the legendary Newport Jazz Festival.
While living in New York, Nina ran with a high-profile crowd of brilliant creatives. She became close friends with writers and activists Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, and James Baldwin, and specifically credited Hansberry with helping to develop her social and political consciousness. In the early 1960s, as Nina became increasingly involved in the Civil Rights Movement, she also became friends with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, who would later become her neighbor in Mount Vernon, New York.
In 1961, Nina married a New York police detective named Andrew Stroud who would go on to become her manager throughout the ‘60s. He turned out to be physically and emotionally abusive, and tried to discourage Nina’s civil rights work.
In 1964, Nina switched from Colpix Records to Philips Records, a Dutch company. Because Philips was not American, Nina had a lot more freedom in the kind of content she could include on her records. Nina had always recorded music about her Black heritage, but now she was able to put out music that directly addressed the issues of racism and racial inequality that were so important to her.
That year Nina released a song she had written herself called “Mississippi Goddamn.” It was her response to the 1963 16thStreet Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four young Black girls, and the 1963 murder of Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers. Backlash to the song was intense. It was boycotted in areas throughout the South and promotional records of the song were smashed by Southern radio stations.
In discussing her initial reluctance to perform music about civil rights, Nina said,
“Nightclubs were dirty, making records was dirty, popular music was dirty and to mix all that with politics seemed senseless and demeaning. And until songs like ‘Mississippi Goddam’ just burst out of me, I had musical problems as well. How can you take the memory of a man like [Civil Rights activist] Medgar Evers and reduce all that he was to three and a half minutes and a simple tune? That was the musical side of it I shied away from; I didn’t like ‘protest music’ because a lot of it was so simple and unimaginative it stripped the dignity away from the people it was trying to celebrate. But the Alabama church bombing and the murder of Medgar Evers stopped that argument and with ‘Mississippi Goddam,’ I realized there was no turning back.”
After the release of “Mississippi Goddamn,” Nina began regularly including civil rights-related messaging and content in all of her performances and recordings. Other protest songs she recorded during this period included “Backlash Blues,” based on a poem by Langston Hughes, and “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” which Nina and composer Weldon Irvine adapted from an unfinished play of the same name by Lorraine Hansberry.
Nina also began performing at civil rights marches and events. Though she was friends with both Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, by the mid-1960s her politics aligned more clearly with Malcom X in her support of Black Nationalism and violent revolution over methods of nonviolent protest, which she saw as ineffective.
In a 1970 interview, Nina stated that the release of “Mississippi Goddamn” had a deleterious impact on her career and led the music industry to boycott her music for being so outspoken and politically controversial. It was the fear of a similar reaction that led many other artists of the period to shy away from including such blatant activist messaging in their music or discussing social and political issues from the stage.
In 1973, angered by American racism that she saw as only getting worse, Nina left the United States and moved to Barbados, Liberia, Switzerland and eventually France. She continued recording and releasing albums intermittently over the subsequent two decades and played regularly at small jazz clubs in London and Paris. These club performances were often brilliant, and also filled with erratic behavior, mood swings, and anger at the audience for not paying enough attention. In the late 1980s, Nina was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
The late 1980s and 1990s saw a major resurgence in the popularity of Nina’s music. The CD versions of her earlier albums became best sellers. In 1993, Nina moved to a house in the south of France. She continued to perform throughout the 1990s.
On April 21, 2003, Nina passed away in her sleep. She was 70 years old.
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