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Portrait of Nina Simone

Popular music · Soul, funk & R&B

Nina Simone

1933–2003 · American

Soul, jazz and civil-rights protest song

Nina Simone, born Eunice Waymon, trained as a classical pianist and never stopped resenting that she had to make a living any other way. Calling herself the High Priestess of Soul, she moved between jazz, blues, gospel, folk and European art song, and from 1964 became one of the most uncompromising musical voices of the civil-rights movement.

How to spot them

  • ▸Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon; the stage name hid her nightclub work from her mother
  • ▸Classical training — Bach counterpoint worked into the piano parts behind a dark contralto voice
  • ▸Self-styled the High Priestess of Soul; refuses to be called a jazz singer
  • ▸Civil-rights protest songs written in anger and often banned; long exile from the United States after 1970
  • ▸Rejected by the Curtis Institute of Music, a wound she nursed all her life

Songs & albums

A 1958 recording of a Gershwin aria from a folk opera, her only American top-twenty pop hit (1958)

'I Loves You, Porgy', from Porgy and Bess, on her debut album Little Girl Blue.

A song from her debut album revived by a 1987 perfume advertisement into a UK top five hit with a claymation video (1958)

'My Baby Just Cares for Me', used for Chanel No. 5 — she had sold the rights outright for a flat fee.

A 1964 song written in under an hour after a Birmingham church bombing and the murder of Medgar Evers, and banned across the South (1964)

'Mississippi Goddam' — promotional copies were returned to her label snapped in half.

A ten-minute 1965 arrangement of a spiritual in which a man begs the rock and the river to hide him on judgement day (1965)

'Sinnerman', on the album Pastel Blues; much used in films and adverts since.

A 1967 recording of a Billy Taylor song expressing a longing to know what liberty would be like (1967)

'I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free' — adopted as a civil-rights anthem.

A 1969 song completing a phrase left by her late friend, the author of A Raisin in the Sun (1969)

'To Be Young, Gifted and Black', written for Lorraine Hansberry, who had died in 1965.

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in Tryon, North Carolina, in 1933, the sixth of eight children; she played piano in her mother's church from the age of about three
  • •At a childhood recital she refused to play until her parents, moved to the back of the hall to make room for white listeners, were returned to the front row
  • •She was turned down by Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music in 1951 and always believed the reason was racial; the institute gave her an honorary degree two days before her death
  • •She took her stage name from 'niña' and from the French actress Simone Signoret
  • •She left the United States around 1970 and lived in Barbados, Liberia, Switzerland, the Netherlands and finally France
  • •She died at Carry-le-Rouet in southern France on 21 April 2003
  • •She received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017 and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018, inducted by Mary J. Blige
  • •Kanye West's 'Blood on the Leaves' (2013) is built on her version of 'Strange Fruit'
  • •The 2015 documentary about her, What Happened, Miss Simone?, takes its title from a question posed by Maya Angelou

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources