Nina Simone

She was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon on February 21, 1933, in Tryon, North Carolina, the sixth of eight children of a barber and sometime entertainer and a mother who preached at the local Methodist church. She was picking out hymns on the piano by three or four and playing for the congregation soon after. Local patrons paid for lessons and, later, for a year at Juilliard in the summer of 1950. Curtis Institute in Philadelphia turned her down for admission that same year. Curtis said the decision had nothing to do with race. Simone never believed that, and the school's staff spent the rest of her life being asked about it.

A nightclub job in Atlantic City required her to sing along with her playing, and the pianist who had trained for the concert hall became, out of necessity, a singer too. She took the name Nina Simone partly to keep the work from her mother. Little Girl Blue in 1959 gave her a Billboard hit with "I Loves You, Porgy." A friendship with the playwright Lorraine Hansberry pulled her toward the civil rights movement, and after the murder of Medgar Evers and the bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963 she wrote "Mississippi Goddam" in under an hour. She performed at Selma, set Langston Hughes's words to music for "Backlash Blues," and recorded more than 40 albums before she was 45.

Her second husband, the police detective Andrew Stroud, became her manager in 1961 and, by her own later account, abused her for years, physically and otherwise, while running her career like a business he owned. She left the United States after Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968 and eventually settled in Liberia, taking her young daughter Lisa with her before, in 1970, leaving the child behind there for a stretch that Lisa has described as an abandonment. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the late 1980s, Simone fired a gun at a record executive she believed had cheated her in 1985, and wounded a neighbor's son with an air rifle over a noise complaint in 1995, drawing a suspended sentence and psychiatric evaluation.

She died of breast cancer in Carry-le-Rouet, France, on April 21, 2003, at 70. Two days before her death, Curtis Institute gave her the honorary degree it had never offered when she actually applied. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018 and the National Rhythm and Blues Hall of Fame in 2021, and in 2019 the Library of Congress added "Mississippi Goddam" to the National Recording Registry. Documentaries and a biopic followed, along with arguments, still unresolved, over how much of her volatility the industry provoked and how much of the record she made herself.

Nina Simone's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Little Girl Blue album
  Included the hit "I Loves You, Porgy" 1959
• Mississippi Goddam song
  Written in under an hour after the Birmingham church bombing 1964
• Backlash Blues song
  Lyrics by Langston Hughes 1967
• To Be Young, Gifted and Black song
  With Weldon Irvine 1969
• I Put a Spell on You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone book 1991

• February 21, 1933 aged 0 Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina
• 1950 aged ~17 Studies at Juilliard, then is denied admission to the Curtis Institute
• 1958 aged ~25 Takes a nightclub job in Atlantic City and becomes a singer
• 1959 aged ~26 Little Girl Blue is released
• December 1961 aged 28 Marries Andrew Stroud
• 1964 aged ~31 Writes "Mississippi Goddam"
• 1968 aged ~35 Leaves the United States after King's assassination
• 1970 aged ~37 Settles in Liberia
• April 21, 2003 aged 70 Dies of breast cancer in France

• Lorraine Hansberry 1930–1965
  Playwright whose 'A Raisin in the Sun' brought Black family life, housing discrimination, and aspiration to Broadway. friend who politicized her
• Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968
  Baptist minister and civil rights leader whose nonviolent activism ended legal segregation in America. his assassination prompted her exile
• Medgar Evers 1925–1963
  NAACP field secretary whose 1963 assassination galvanized the civil rights movement. subject of "Mississippi Goddam"
• Langston Hughes 1901–1967
  Harlem Renaissance poet and writer whose work celebrated Black life and challenged racial injustice. wrote the lyrics to "Backlash Blues"
• Malcolm X 1925–1965
  Civil-rights leader whose critique of racism and advocacy of Black dignity reshaped American political thought. contemporary of the movement she scored