The Full Biography
Nina Simone. Pianist. Singer. The Tryon girl who wanted Bach and gave a country Mississippi Goddam.
This is her story.
The image most people still carry is a woman at a piano, spine straight, a voice that does not ask permission, naming Mississippi in a room that had come for Gershwin. The year was 1964. The song had been written in a rush after a murder in Jackson and a bombing in Birmingham. What the still cannot show is Eunice Kathleen Waymon of Tryon, North Carolina, a child who played hymns by ear at three, a Curtis applicant who believed race had closed the door, and a woman who would leave the United States rather than keep performing the polite version of herself.
She was born on February 21, 1933, in a three-room clapboard house in Tryon, the sixth of eight children. Her father, John Divine Waymon, cut hair, cleaned clothes, and could entertain a room. Her mother, Mary Kate Irvin, preached in the Methodist church. The first pressure was the keyboard. She learned “God Be With You Till We Meet Again” before she could read a score. An Englishwoman in town, Muriel Mazzanovich, took her for Bach, Chopin, and the idea that a Black girl from the hills might sit on a concert stage and be heard as a pianist, not as a novelty. At twelve she gave a recital. White patrons asked her parents to move from the front row. She refused to play until they were seated again. That is the first civic fact, and it sits under every record that followed.
The town raised money. She went to Allen High School for Girls in Asheville and graduated valedictorian. In the summer of 1950 she studied at Juilliard, under Carl Friedberg, preparing a Curtis audition. The family had already moved to Philadelphia on the expectation of a scholarship. Curtis did not take her. She believed the reason was race. The institute has denied it. The wound did not wait for a committee. She took private lessons with Vladimir Sokoloff, taught piano, assisted in a photographer’s studio, and went looking for a wage that would pay for the next hour of Bach.
The door was Atlantic City, 1954. The Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue hired a pianist and then told her she would have to sing. The money rose to ninety dollars a week. She took a stage name so her mother would not hear that a preacher’s daughter was working a bar: Nina, from a boyfriend’s niña; Simone, from Simone Signoret in Casque d’Or. Eunice Waymon stayed in the church. Nina Simone sat down in the fires of hell, as the household would have put it, and made Gershwin, Porter, and Bach share a bench.
Bethlehem Records issued Little Girl Blue in 1959. “I Loves You, Porgy,” learned from a Billie Holiday side and sung as a favor, became her only American Top 20 pop hit. She had sold the rights for three thousand dollars. The album, and the Chanel commercial that would resurrect “My Baby Just Cares for Me” decades on, would make other people rich. Colpix gave her control of the material. Town Hall, 1959, put the arpeggio in the room. Greenwich Village kept her. She still treated popular work as the tuition for a classical life she had not agreed to abandon.
Medgar Evers was killed in Jackson on June 12, 1963. On September 15 the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was bombed; four girls died. She wrote “Mississippi Goddam” in a fury she described as ten bullets thrown back. Philips released it on Nina Simone in Concert in 1964. Southern stations smashed the disc and mailed the pieces home. Carnegie Hall heard her that year. “Four Women” named the cages the country built for Black women and refused to make them pretty. “Feeling Good” and “I Put a Spell on You” showed the other weather: a voice that could seduce a room and still sound like judgment. Lorraine Hansberry, who talked revolution instead of clothes, died too young. With Weldon Irvine, Simone turned Hansberry’s unfinished title into “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” Aretha Franklin would take it into a classroom anthem. The first throat was Nina’s.
I’ll tell you what freedom is to me: no fear.Nina Simone
That is the turn, and it is easy to file as a protest catalog. The turn is the decision that an artist’s job was not to decorate a movement but to reflect the times, even if the industry punished the reflection. She said the duty out loud. She meant it as work, not as a ribbon. After King was killed she sang “Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)” at Westbury three days on. Harlem’s Cultural Festival, 1969, held her in the park. Then the country she had named became a place she would not stay.
The Philips and RCA years are a pile the playlists flatten into two or three titles. Pastel Blues (1965) holds “Sinnerman,” a long cut that film and sample culture would live on for decades. Wild Is the Wind (1966) and High Priestess of Soul (1967) are the billing the industry finally printed. Silk & Soul (1967). ’Nuff Said! (1968) is the Westbury night, King still in the air. To Love Somebody (1969) took Bee Gees and Dylan material and refused to make them polite. Black Gold (1970) is the live room that sent “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” into classrooms. “Four Women,” “Old Jim Crow,” “Backlash Blues” — Langston Hughes’s poem set as a lash — are not a sidebar. They are the job as she understood the job after 1963. Carnegie Hall heard her. Southern stations smashed the single. She kept the Bach in the left hand and the judgment in the throat.
The industry wanted the Gershwin and the spell. She gave them the times. Money that should have arrived from Little Girl Blue did not, because she had sold the first album outright. Managers and husbands blurred. Andrew Stroud booked the calendar as if a pianist were a route. She said the house held violence. The temper that audiences remember as a downbeat she owned was also, in private rooms, a weather Lisa would have to describe without perfume. By 1970 the Internal Revenue Service and the country she had named were both in the file. She left. The leaving is not a tour story. It is the rest of the life.
Before the leaving there is still a pianist’s week. Town Hall in 1959. Newport. The Village Gate. European halls that paid her as a serious act while American radio wanted the one hit. She recorded Ellington, she recorded spirituals, she recorded a child’s song and a murder ballad on the same bill. “I Put a Spell on You” and “Feeling Good” are the weather a streaming generation knows. “Four Women” and “Mississippi Goddam” are the civic objects. “I Loves You, Porgy” is the only American Top 20, sold too cheap. A complete night was never only one of those rooms. The left hand still wanted Bach. The throat still wanted the times named. That combination is why the Midtown Bar became a monument and why the monument could not live in the country that had hired it.
Six things most people never knew
- The stage name was a daughter’s cover. Nina from niña. Simone from Signoret. The Midtown Bar paid for Sokoloff. The church was not supposed to hear the set list.
- Curtis rejected her; she never stopped believing race was why. The family had already moved to Philadelphia. Two days before she died, the same institute voted her an honorary degree.
- She sold Little Girl Blue outright for three thousand dollars. “Porgy” and the Chanel resurrection of “My Baby Just Cares for Me” enriched a catalog she did not own.
- “Mississippi Goddam” was her first civil-rights song, written after Evers and the church bombing. She called it bullets. Carolina radio sent the single back in pieces.
- “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” is Hansberry’s title, finished as a song. Weldon Irvine helped. The friendship, not a committee, is why the anthem exists.
- She left the United States and did not come home to live. Barbados, Liberia, Switzerland, the Netherlands, France. In 1998, in Newark, she told a room that if they wanted her again they would have to come to France.
She married Don Ross, a fairground barker, in 1958, and left the marriage almost as soon as she had made it. In December 1961 she married Andrew Stroud, a New York detective who became her manager and the father of their daughter, Lisa. Simone said he treated her like a workhorse and that the house held violence. They divorced in 1971. Lisa would become a singer in her own right, billed as Simone, and would tell, without perfume, that exile and temper were not only public weather. Friends from the Village and the European rooms describe a professional who could hold a silence until a drunk table understood who owned the downbeat, and a woman whose mind would not sit still.
The later years
She left in 1970. Barbados first, then Liberia at Miriam Makeba’s urging, then the long European drift: Switzerland, England, Belgium, Paris clubs that paid too little, Nijmegen, Amsterdam, and at last the southern French light. She said the industry had boycotted her after “Mississippi Goddam.” There were tax troubles and a warrant. There was money that did not arrive. There were nights at Aux Trois Mailletz when the set lasted fifteen minutes and nights when the old electricity hung in the air. Liberia gave her a stretch of air and a calypso she would put on a record. Switzerland gave her a mountain quiet that did not hold. The Netherlands gave her rooms that still knew the name. France, in the end, gave her an address.
Baltimore, for Creed Taylor in 1978, was a quiet return on record — Randy Newman’s title song, a voice that had narrowed and was still a measuring stick. Fodder on My Wings, cut in Paris in 1982, is the exile album: “Liberian Calypso,” “I Sing Just to Know That I’m Alive,” a woman filing the years the American industry had stopped paying for. In 1987 a Chanel advertisement made “My Baby Just Cares for Me” a British hit she had cut in 1958 and never been paid for as an owner. The check went elsewhere. The face on the commercial was a ghost of Midtown. In 1991 she published the autobiography I Put a Spell on You. In 1993 she settled at Carry-le-Rouet, near Aix-en-Provence, and released A Single Woman, her last studio album. She toured into the 1990s. The temper stayed. So did the Bach in the left hand.
The French years were not a sunset postcard. In 1995 she fired a gun at two teenage boys she said had made noise near the house; the file is a conviction, a fine, and a probation, not a legend. Friends who sat with her describe a professional who could still hold a silence until a drunk table understood the downbeat, and a woman whose mind would not sit still. Doctors put names on the weather. Lisa, billed as Simone, kept a daughter’s ledger without perfume. The honorary machinery of the old country began to move only when the girl from Tryon was almost out of time.
She died in her sleep at home in Carry-le-Rouet on April 21, 2003. She was seventy. Breast cancer had been in the file. Two days earlier, Curtis Institute had voted the honorary degree the audition of 1950 had been denied. The funeral drew Miriam Makeba, Patti LaBelle, Sonia Sanchez, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee. Elton John sent flowers. Her ashes were scattered in several African countries. Lisa remained. The last address was a Mediterranean town, not Tryon, not Atlantic City, not Carnegie Hall. The last job was still the piano.
After she was gone
The records did not stop working. Film and sample culture found “Sinnerman,” “Feeling Good,” and “Four Women” for a generation that had not sat in the Midtown Bar. The High Priestess of Soul is a billing. The civic objects are the 1964 concert, the Hansberry song, and a piano that never agreed to be only jazz or only classical. Lisa keeps the name on a stage.
An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times.Nina Simone
She came out of Tryon, played for a church, learned Bach from a neighbor, was turned away from Curtis, named herself so a mother would not hear the bar, sold a first album too cheap, wrote the song the South smashed, made four women stand in one room, left the country that had made her necessary and then unwelcome, and died in France with the honorary paper arriving too late to change the girl it had refused. The still at the piano will last. It should. The life behind it was a recital interrupted, a nightclub wage, a fury in 1964, and an exile that did not end.
If you only remember “Feeling Good,” you have the playlist. If you remember Tryon, Curtis, Atlantic City, Mississippi, Liberia, and the woman who defined freedom as no fear, you have her.
Portrait: Gerrit de Bruin · CC BY 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons