Nina Simone Biography
Beyond her status as one of jazz’s most distinctive and dynamic vocalists, iconic singer/pianist Nina Simone (1933-2003) won attention and respect for her feisty, commanding personality. Performing her own emotion-charged compositions as well as a broad array of material drawn from the worlds of jazz, pop, soul, blues, folk, gospel and Broadway, Simone resisted easy categorization but put a fiercely personal stamp upon every song she sang. Her iconoclastic, uncompromising approach to her work helped to make her an icon and a role model.
Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, SImone was one of eight children of a strict Methodist minister, and began playing piano in church at the age of 10. She originally intended to pursue a career as a classical pianist, and studied at New York’s prestigious Juilliard School of Music—an impressive achievement for an African-American woman in the 1950s. She paid her tuition by giving piano lessons and working as a pianist in bars and nightclubs. In 1954, the owner of an Atlantic City nightspot insisted that she sing as well as play, and soon she’d developed a reputation for her impassioned, assertive vocals. The same year, she adopted the stage name of Nina Simone, reportedly to prevent her parents from finding out that she was playing secular music.
Simone—whose admirers would nickname her the High Priestess of Soul—began recording in the late 1950s, and scored a Top 20 pop hit early on with her reading of George Gershwin’s “I Loves You Porgy.” She continued to record prolifically for various labels through the ’60s. An outspoken critic of the era’s racial injustice, Simone steered her music into increasingly topical territory through that decade, with many of her most memorable compositions addressing the Civil Rights and Black Pride movements. In 1967, Simone moved to the RCA Victor label, where she released nine albums, including such highly regarded works as Nina Simone Sings the Blues, which included her classics “Do I Move You?” and “Backlash Blues”; and Silk & Soul, featuring Simone’s moving reading of “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.” Soon after, Simone turned Lorraine Hansberry’s play To Be Young, Gifted and Black into a civil-rights anthem of the same title; the song became one of Simone’s most-covered compositions, and was later featured as the leadoff track of the Simone compilation Forever Young, Gifted and Black: Songs of Freedom and Spirit.
After experiencing some business and financial problems in the ’70s, Simone spent much of that decade traveling the world, settling at various times in England, France, Switzerland, Barbados, Liberia and the Netherlands. She broke a four-year recording hiatus with 1978’s acclaimed Baltimore, her lone album for the CTI label. She published her autobiography, I Put a Spell on You, in 1991, and continued to record sporadically through the ’90s. Simone passed away in 2003, but she remains a source of inspiration for multiple generations of young artists.
Recent Comments