The story of Nina Simone

A prodigy in Tryon

The story begins in Tryon, a small town in the hills of western North Carolina. On the twenty first of February 1933, a girl named Eunice Kathleen Waymon was born in a three room clapboard house of about six hundred and fifty square feet. She was the sixth of eight children. Her father, John Divine Waymon, had been an entertainer and worked as a barber and dry cleaner, but he lost his business in the Depression and was later laid low by a serious illness. Her mother, Mary Kate, was a Methodist preacher who also cleaned house for a white family in town. The Waymons were descendants of enslaved people and pillars of Tryon's small Black community, and even in hard times they made a good home.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Music filled the Waymon house and the church across the street. According to one telling, nobody noticed little Eunice climbing onto the organ bench until, at about two and a half, she played the hymn God Be With You Till We Meet Again straight through. By six she was playing regularly in church. Her mother took her along to tent revivals around North Carolina, and there, long before any formal lesson, she learned to improvise, to read a crowd and to lift it higher. One song from those revival meetings stayed with her all her life. It was Sinnerman, which her mother's congregations used to urge sinners to confess. Decades later it became one of her most famous recordings.[1] [2] [3] [4]

When she was about six, Eunice played piano for the community choir at the Tryon Theater, and two white women took notice. Her mother's employer, a Mrs. Miller, offered to pay for classical lessons. The teacher was Muriel Mazzanovich, a British born woman married to a Russian painter. Every Saturday Eunice crossed the railway tracks to study Bach, Beethoven and Brahms with the woman she called Miz Mazzy, and later her white momma. Bach became her lifelong love, and her dream took shape. She would be the first Black woman concert pianist in America. Mazzanovich organised the Eunice Waymon Fund, and the townspeople gave money so that her schooling could continue.[1] [2] [3]

To thank the people who had supported the fund, Eunice gave a recital at the Tryon library when she was around eleven. Her parents sat in the front row, but they were made to move to the back so that a white couple could have their seats. The young pianist stood up and said she would not play until her parents were brought back to the front. Some people laughed, but her parents got their seats. She later said the incident left her feeling flayed, and that it planted a seed for her later activism. The fund then sent her to board at Allen High School for Girls in Asheville. She practised piano for hours each day and graduated as valedictorian.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The rejection that made Nina Simone

After high school, Eunice spent the summer of 1950 at the Juilliard School in New York, studying with the pianist Carl Friedberg. Everything was aimed at one goal, a place at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Curtis was fiercely competitive, but tuition there was free. Her family was so sure she would get in that they moved to Philadelphia before she even took the exam. The whole plan rested on one audition. For a girl who had carried the hopes of a whole town since she was small, there was no real plan B, and nobody in the family had prepared her for the possibility that the classical world might not want her.[1] [2] [3]

The audition took place on the seventh of April 1951. That year, according to the school's archive, seventy two pianists applied to Curtis and only three were accepted. Eunice Waymon was not one of them. The blow was devastating. She said later that it took her about six months to realise, as she saw it, that she had been turned down because she was Black, and that she never really got over what she called that jolt of racism. Curtis has always denied that race played any part. The question has followed the story ever since, but the result was the same. The career she had trained for since childhood was closed to her.[1] [2] [3]

She did not give up at once. She took private lessons with Vladimir Sokoloff, a professor at Curtis, with the idea of trying again. But in those days Curtis did not take students over twenty one, and as that birthday came and went, the dream slipped away. To support herself and her lessons she worked as a photographer's assistant, played accompaniment at a vocal studio run by Arlene Smith, and taught piano to children from her home in Philadelphia. She still called classical music her first love, and she brushed aside Sokoloff when he heard her play jazz and suggested she might follow that path instead.[1] [2] [3]

The turn came through one of her own students, who had a summer job playing piano in Atlantic City for ninety dollars a week. That was double what Eunice earned, and she figured that if a student could do it, so could she. In the summer of 1954 she started at the Midtown Bar and Grill on Pacific Avenue. The owner told her she would have to sing as well as play. Terrified that her strict, religious mother would find out she was playing the devil's music in a bar, she invented a stage name. Nina came from niña, the Spanish word for little girl, a pet name from a boyfriend called Chico. Simone came from the French actress Simone Signoret, whom she had admired in the film Casque d'Or.[1] [2] [3]

At the Midtown she played as much classical music as she could get away with, weaving Bach style counterpoint and romantic flourishes into popular songs, and singing in a deep, husky contralto she had never trained. What began as a way to pay for lessons slowly became a pleasure almost as deep as classical music itself. She built a small, loyal following, and many of her first fans were gay. One of them, a waiter at the club named Ted Axelrod, introduced her to Billie Holiday's recording of I Loves You, Porgy from Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. She learned it as a favour to him. It would soon change her life.[1] [2]

Little Girl Blue and a star in the Village

In 1957, while playing clubs around Philadelphia, Simone made a demo that reached Bethlehem Records, a small New York jazz label. In December 1957 she went into a New York studio with the bassist Jimmy Bond and the drummer Albert Tootie Heath and recorded fourteen songs, essentially her club set, in a session said to have lasted about thirteen hours. Still dreaming of the concert hall, she sold the rights outright for three thousand dollars. Back in Philadelphia she immersed herself in Beethoven for three days straight. The deal would haunt her. Those Bethlehem recordings went on selling for decades, and she lost well over a million dollars in royalties that she never saw.[1] [2]

Bethlehem was in financial trouble and sat on the tapes for over a year. The album, Little Girl Blue, finally came out in February 1959 without a single to promote it, and Simone was so frustrated that in April she signed with Colpix Records, which gave her full creative control, including the choice of songs. Then something happened in Philadelphia. The disc jockey Sid Mark at the station WHAT started playing her I Loves You, Porgy on the air, sometimes several times in a row. Bethlehem rushed it out as a single in May 1959. It climbed to number eighteen on the pop chart and number two on the R and B chart. It remains her only American top twenty hit.[1] [2] [3]

Her personal life was already complicated. In 1958 she married Don Ross, a white beatnik who worked as a fairground barker, and regretted it almost at once. She left him and moved to New York. On the twelfth of September 1959 she made her concert debut at Town Hall, headlining a bill with the Horace Silver and J. J. Johnson groups. She had never rehearsed with, or even met, the bassist Wilbur Ware and the drummer Ben Riley before the curtain rose. The New York Times critic John S. Wilson loved it, joking that by the time she had finished turning a song inside out, it had been Simonized. Colpix released the concert as her first live album.[1] [2] [3]

Simone became a favourite in Greenwich Village, the mixed bohemian scene of folk clubs and jazz cellars. At the Village Gate on Bleecker Street she mixed African songs, folk tunes and even Hebrew songs, and a young comedian named Richard Pryor had one of his first nights opening for her there. She enforced recital hall manners in a nightclub. Anyone who talked while she played could expect a cold stare or a tongue lashing, and the club's owner, Art D'Lugoff, hired bodyguards to protect customers from her temper. Jazz critics were often baffled by her, but audiences were not, and her early Colpix albums built her a devoted following.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1961 she met Andrew Stroud, a light skinned, broad shouldered police detective sergeant from Harlem. This part of the story is dark. It is told in Alan Light's biography, drawn from several accounts. According to that telling, after their engagement party, Stroud, who had been drinking all evening, beat her in the street, then took her home, held a gun to her head, tied her to the bed and raped her. She consulted two psychiatrists about whether to go ahead, and in December 1961 she married him anyway. Their only child, Lisa Celeste, was born on the twelfth of September 1962. Stroud quit the police to become her manager, and she later said he abused her physically and psychologically and treated her like a work horse.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Birmingham and a song of fury

Under Stroud's management the family moved to a large house in Mount Vernon, just outside New York City, and Simone's circle widened. The poet Langston Hughes and the writer James Baldwin took her under their wings, and she travelled to Lagos with them. Her closest friend was the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun, who lived nearby and became godmother to Lisa. Simone later joked that the two of them never talked about men or clothes, only about Marx, Lenin and revolution. Until then the nearest she had come to a protest song was Oscar Brown Junior's lullaby Brown Baby. Hansberry was about to push her much further.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the twelfth of April 1963 Simone gave a solo concert at Carnegie Hall, a dream come true for a classically trained pianist. That same day Martin Luther King Junior was arrested with other protesters in Birmingham, Alabama. Hansberry phoned after the show, and she was not calling to offer praise. She wanted to know how her friend could ignore what was happening. Two months later Simone played a benefit for the NAACP. In August she sang at the football stadium of a Black college outside Birmingham, in what was said to be the first integrated concert in the area, while armed guards with dogs patrolled the field.[1]

On the twelfth of June 1963 the civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot dead outside his home in Mississippi. Then, on the fifteenth of September 1963, a bomb planted by Ku Klux Klan members tore through the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and killed four young girls. Simone said her first impulse was to go into the garage and try to build a homemade gun to kill someone. Her husband told her she could not kill anyone, that she was a musician and should do what she did. She sat at the piano and, in less than an hour, wrote Mississippi Goddam. She called it her first civil rights song, and said it poured out of her faster than she could write it down.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The song's title alone was a shock. As the comedian and activist Dick Gregory put it, everyone wanted to say it, but she said it. It named the states where Emmett Till and Medgar Evers had been murdered and mocked the advice to go slow. She first sang it at the Village Gate, and in March 1964 she performed it at Carnegie Hall to a mostly white audience, who laughed uneasily at first. That recording appeared on Nina Simone in Concert, her first album for the Dutch label Philips. Released as a single, it was banned in several southern states, and one Carolina radio station snapped a box of promotional copies in half and sent them back.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Simone kept the song alive by updating it. On The Steve Allen Show in September 1964 she swapped in the name of St. Augustine, Florida, where civil rights protests had just made headlines. Early 1965 brought two blows. In January Lorraine Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer at thirty four. Then on the twenty first of February, Simone's thirty second birthday, Malcolm X, her neighbour in Mount Vernon, was assassinated. Weeks later she went to Alabama for the end of the Selma to Montgomery march. The rally stage was built on stacks of empty coffins lent by local funeral homes. Accompanied only by her guitarist Al Schackman, she sang to tens of thousands, and when she met King she told him bluntly that she was not nonviolent.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The High Priestess of Soul

The Philips years, from 1964 to 1967, produced much of her best loved music. Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood was written for her and appeared on Broadway Blues Ballads in 1964, before the Animals turned it into a transatlantic hit. The 1965 album I Put a Spell on You gathered the Screamin' Jay Hawkins title song, Jacques Brel's Ne me quitte pas, and Feeling Good, a show tune by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse that she recorded in New York in January 1965. It was not even a single at the time. Pastel Blues followed in October 1965, closing with a frantic ten minute Sinnerman, and she also recorded a harrowing Strange Fruit, the anti lynching song Billie Holiday had made famous.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In 1966 Philips assembled Wild Is the Wind from leftover sessions, and it became one of her most admired albums. It held Lilac Wine, the title song and Four Women, her own portrait of four Black women with different skin tones, each shaped by slavery and its long aftermath. The last of them, Peaches, erupts in fury. Some listeners heard the song as an insult to Black women, and it was pulled by radio stations in New York and Philadelphia, including the jazz station WLIB. The ban was lifted when it caused more outrage than the song itself. Her husband worried about the damage to her career, but Simone said the goal was to help Black women define beauty for themselves.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1967 she moved to RCA Victor. Her first album there, Nina Simone Sings the Blues, included Backlash Blues, with words by her friend Langston Hughes, and a raw, earthy sound that surprised fans who knew her as a cabaret pianist. Silk and Soul followed, with Billy Taylor's I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free. Her song Go to Hell earned her first Grammy nomination, but the award went to Aretha Franklin for Respect. By now she was billed as the High Priestess of Soul, a title that began as a record company publicity idea but one she carried with total conviction, in African gowns and towering braided hairstyles.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Behind the scenes, her mind was beginning to fracture. Before a concert in early 1967, Stroud found her in her dressing room putting makeup in her hair. She did not recognise him and hardly knew who she was. She later wrote of visions of laser beams and heaven, with skin always somewhere in them. There were violent rages, blackouts and hallucinations. It would be many years before anyone called it bipolar disorder, and her husband's answer was to keep her working. In her diary she wrote of feeling stuck between desire for both sexes, and in a letter she told Stroud she did not think she would ever lose her fear of him.[1] [2] [3]

On the fourth of April 1968 Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated in Memphis. Three days later, on the seventh of April, Simone played the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island and dedicated the whole show to him. Her bass player Gene Taylor had written a new song, Why? The King of Love Is Dead, and she performed it for the first time that night, breaking into long, grieving monologues. The concert became the album 'Nuff Said! It also carried a surprise hit, a medley of two songs from the musical Hair that she recast as a declaration of what Black people still possessed. Ain't Got No, I Got Life reached number two in Britain and number one in the Netherlands.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the seventeenth of August 1969 she played the Harlem Cultural Festival in Mount Morris Park, the event later called the Black Woodstock, before a crowd of some fifty thousand. She sang Four Women and Backlash Blues, then read a poem by David Nelson of the Last Poets, asking the crowd whether they were ready to smash things and burn buildings. That same afternoon she introduced a new song, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, written with Weldon Irvine in memory of Lorraine Hansberry. She had asked him for words that would make Black children everywhere feel good about themselves. Released as a single, it reached number eight on the R and B chart, and she even lip synced it on Sesame Street with four children.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Collapse and exile

By 1970 both her marriage and the movement that had given her purpose were falling apart. Her friends and heroes were dead, jailed or scattered, and she felt, as she put it, that the movement had walked out on her. In September 1970 she flew to Barbados without warning, leaving her wedding ring behind. Stroud took it as a sign she wanted a divorce, and by 1971 the marriage was over. Without him she had also lost the man who ran her finances and schedule. When she went back to the United States she found a warrant out for her arrest over unpaid taxes, and she returned to Barbados. She later described America as a cancer and took to calling it the United Snakes.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The music of these years was still bold. Here Comes the Sun in 1971 turned songs by the Beatles and Bob Dylan into something new. At an anti war show at Fort Dix, New Jersey, on the eighteenth of November 1971, she fused George Harrison's My Sweet Lord with a poem by David Nelson into an eighteen minute gospel storm. It became the heart of the album Emergency Ward!, where her nine year old daughter Lisa was credited with polyrhythms. That same year she visited the jailed activist Angela Davis, bringing a red helium balloon. In 1974 more than ten thousand people honoured her at Human Kindness Day in Washington. Her last RCA album was titled, fittingly, It Is Finished.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In Barbados she began a relationship that she later described as an affair with the country's prime minister, Errol Barrow. Then her close friend, the South African singer Miriam Makeba, persuaded her to move to Liberia. When Simone first fled America, Lisa was left behind with family friends, and Lisa says it was about a year before they were reunited. By the time of the move to Liberia, around 1974, Lisa was with her. Simone stayed there for about two years, performing hardly at all. She danced naked at a club one night, and celebrated it in a song called Liberian Calypso. Her guitarist Al Schackman later said that people in Africa could not stand her. From Liberia she moved to Switzerland, so that Lisa could attend the International School of Geneva.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

This is the hardest part of the story, and it comes from Lisa herself. After the divorce, the mother who had been her comfort became, in Lisa's words, the monster in her life. Simone beat her, and when Lisa refused to cry, she called her Robot. She mocked her light skin, inherited from her father. By her early teens Lisa was thinking about suicide. At fourteen she flew to New York to see her father, and one night, alone in his apartment, she searched the medicine cabinet for pills. She phoned a family friend, the designer Carolee Prince, who talked her through it. Lisa stayed in America. On her sixteenth birthday her mother sent a card cursing the day she was born.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Around this time Simone's temper spilled into public view. The singer Janis Ian, a friend in the early and middle seventies, recalled her forcing a Los Angeles street vendor at gunpoint to take back a pair of sandals she had already worn, and ripping a payphone off a wall backstage when Ian would not pay her royalties for recording one of Ian's songs. Simone had also recorded Ian's song Stars, and she made it devastating at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival, her tense comeback show. She opened by telling the audience that they did not understand her and that this was her last jazz concert. In 1977 Amherst College gave her an honorary doctorate, and from then on she insisted on being called Doctor Nina Simone.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Lost years and a surprise comeback

The producer Creed Taylor saw her perform in London in 1977 and signed her to his label CTI. The sessions for Baltimore were tense. When Taylor pushed a reggae groove, she asked what this corny stuff was, and she ended up recording all her vocals in a single sitting of about an hour. She later said none of the songs were her choice and remembered the studio as a basement in Belgium where she had to sing to get out, though it was actually an old barn. Baltimore sold poorly but earned respect. That same year she gave a disastrous show at the Royal Albert Hall and walked off declaring she was not of this planet. When she returned to America to face tax charges, she could not pay her hotel bill.[1] [2] [3]

The late seventies and early eighties were her lowest point. At a 1979 show at the Village Gate she launched into a hysterical rant against Jews, and her old friend James Baldwin came to the rescue, sitting beside her at the piano and begging her to sing. She told a music industry conference they were all crooks. In 1985 she fired a gun at a record company executive she accused of stealing her royalties, and said afterwards that she had meant to kill him but missed. In these troubled years she was once found wandering a hotel corridor naked with a knife, and she set fire to her house in France. In 1986 she was taken to hospital in a straitjacket. She recorded rarely, though Fodder on My Wings in 1982 held some of her most personal writing.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

She drifted through Barbados, Liberia, Switzerland and Paris, playing a tiny Paris jazz club called Aux Trois Mailletz for little money. Some nights were brilliant. On others she quit after fifteen minutes, was too drunk to play, or scolded the audience. Her guitarist Al Schackman, her manager Raymond Gonzalez and a Dutch friend, Gerrit de Bruin, finally stepped in. She still found warmth at Ronnie Scott's club in London, where she recorded a live album in 1984, telling stories and taking requests. And in the late eighties, a friend of de Bruin's diagnosed what had tormented her for decades. It was bipolar disorder, and she was given an antipsychotic drug called Trilafon.[1] [2] [3]

Then came an unlikely rescue. In 1987 Chanel used her breezy 1957 recording of My Baby Just Cares for Me in a television commercial for Chanel No. 5. Charly Records reissued it, and it entered the British chart on the thirty first of October 1987, peaking at number five. It went to number one in the Dutch Top 40, and Aardman Animations made a claymation video starring two cats. The song she had sold for a flat fee now made her famous to a new generation, though she never much liked the song and did not want to be remembered for it. In 1989 she hired a royalty lawyer, Steven Ames Brown, and sued Charly for two hundred thousand dollars. Charly countersued for defamation, and the case settled in the summer of 1990.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In the spring of 1988 she moved to Nijmegen in the Netherlands, where Gerrit de Bruin helped her buy an apartment near the Belvoir Hotel, overlooking the river Waal. With treatment, and in a town where most people had no idea who she was, she found a fairly calm and happy life. The city later named a street after her. In 1991 she moved on to Amsterdam, sold out the Paris Olympia for nearly a week, and recorded Eyes on Tomorrow with Miriam Makeba, Dizzy Gillespie and Hugh Masekela. She also published her autobiography, I Put a Spell on You, written with Stephen Cleary and named after her famous 1965 album. It gave her own account of Curtis, Stroud and the movement.[1] [2] [3]

France and the final curtain

In 1993 Simone settled in the south of France, near Aix en Provence, and released her final album, A Single Woman, for Elektra. Her illness did not disappear. In 1995 she shot and wounded her neighbour's teenage son with an air gun, after his laughter broke her concentration while she practised piano and she heard his reply as a racial insult. She was given an eight month sentence, suspended pending a psychiatric evaluation and treatment. According to her daughter, she had also attempted suicide at some point in these years. By the nineties she could earn tens of thousands of dollars for a single concert, and royalties from her old hits were finally reaching her.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The great healing of her last decade was with Lisa. Now in her thirties, a veteran of more than ten years in the United States Air Force and a rising Broadway singer, Lisa refused to be her mother's punchbag any more. She put Nina through what she called a training programme on how to love her, ending calls whenever her mother turned cruel. It lasted about ten years and it worked. Nina watched Lisa on Broadway and cheered, and they made music together again. In 1998 Nina invited Lisa to open for her at the Royal Albert Hall. She refused to watch her daughter's set and told Lisa not to watch hers. Lisa ignored her and watched anyway.[1] [2]

She kept touring in her final years. In 1998, at a show in Newark, she told the crowd that if they wanted to see her again they would have to come to France, because she was not coming back. That summer she shared a stage in Johannesburg with Nelson Mandela and Michael Jackson at Mandela's eightieth birthday celebration. In 1999 Sinead O'Connor presented her with a lifetime achievement award at the Irish Music Hall of Fame in Dublin. In Seattle in 2001, already ill with breast cancer, she worked an attack on President George W. Bush into Mississippi Goddam. Near the end she was often seen as a stooped figure answering standing ovations with a raised Black Power fist.[1] [2] [3]

Nina Simone had lived with breast cancer for several years. She died in her sleep at her home in Carry le Rouet, near Marseille, on the twenty first of April 2003. She was seventy. Just two days earlier she had learned that the Curtis Institute, the school that turned her away in 1951, would give her an honorary degree. The idea came from a Philadelphia women's group honouring her, and Curtis agreed. Her funeral at the local Catholic church drew Miriam Makeba, Patti LaBelle, the poet Sonia Sanchez, the actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and hundreds of others. Her ashes were scattered in several African countries. Looking back, she had once said there had been a lot of unhappiness in her life, but an equal amount of happiness.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Lisa marked her mother's death by taking the single stage name Simone. As she later put it, when Nina died, Lisa died too. Some years later she moved into her mother's old house in France and lived there for eight years, writing and recording, before reclaiming her own first name. In 2004 a book by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan, founders of her British fan club, revealed a secret. For years Simone had been prescribed the antipsychotic Trilafon, and when she refused to take it, friends and carers sometimes mixed it into her food without her knowledge. It was the first full public account of the illness that had shaped so much of her life.[1] [2] [3]

Legacy and the battle over her story

In 2015 two documentaries arrived. The first, What Happened, Miss Simone?, directed by Liz Garbus, opened the Sundance Film Festival in January, followed by a tribute performance from John Legend. It was the first documentary Netflix commissioned, and Lisa Simone was an executive producer. Its title came from a 1970 article by Maya Angelou. The film was unflinching about Stroud's violence and about Lisa's abuse, and Garbus said leaving out the hard parts would have been a disservice to Nina's fans. It was nominated for the Academy Award for best documentary feature and won an Emmy and a Peabody. A second film, The Amazing Nina Simone by Jeff L. Lieberman, was made with her siblings, especially her brother Sam Waymon.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A Hollywood biopic caused a storm. The writer Cynthia Mort optioned Simone's story in 2005. Mary J. Blige was announced in the lead in 2010 but dropped out, and in 2012 the role went to Zoe Saldana, an Afro Latina actress with much lighter skin. Photos of Saldana in dark makeup and a prosthetic nose drew fierce criticism. Lisa said her mother had been told all her life that her nose was too wide and her skin too dark. When the trailer came out, the estate told Saldana online to keep Nina's name out of her mouth. Mort even sued the producers. Nina finally opened in April 2016 to terrible reviews, and in 2020 Saldana apologised and said she should never have played the part.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Honours came thick and fast after her death. Her birthplace put up a statue of her on Trade Street in Tryon in 2010. In 2018 she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, introduced by Mary J. Blige. In 2019 the Library of Congress added Mississippi Goddam to the National Recording Registry, and in 2021 she entered the National Rhythm and Blues Hall of Fame. In 2023 Rolling Stone placed her twenty first on its list of the two hundred greatest singers of all time. The Proms at the Royal Albert Hall paid tribute to her in 2019, and the singer Ledisi built whole tours and an album around her songs.[1] [2] [3]

Her recordings found new lives. A 1994 Volkswagen advert pushed Feeling Good into the British chart, and it has been covered by everyone from Muse to Michael Buble. Sinnerman soundtracked the art theft in The Thomas Crown Affair, and in 2008 Barack Obama named it one of his ten favourite songs. Kanye West sampled her Strange Fruit on Blood on the Leaves, and Jay Z built The Story of O.J. around Four Women, earning Simone a posthumous Grammy nomination for best rap song. Ain't Got No, I Got Life sold yoghurt on British television for years. She was often wary of rap and of its treatment of women, yet hip hop has done as much as anything to keep her voice in the air.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

The little house where it all started nearly disappeared. In 2016 the three room home in Tryon was in severe disrepair and up for sale. Four Black artists, Adam Pendleton, Rashid Johnson, Ellen Gallagher and Julie Mehretu, bought it together for ninety five thousand dollars. The National Trust for Historic Preservation declared it a national treasure and worked with them, with local residents and with Simone's brother Samuel Waymon to restore it. The restoration was completed in the autumn of 2025, although as of 2026 the house is not open to the public. As of 2026 the scholar Salamishah Tillet is preparing a major new book, Nina Simone and the World She Made, the result of two decades of research.[1] [2] [3]

The people around Nina Simone

Nina Simone and Andrew Stroud. The Harlem police detective she married in 1961 became her manager and the father of her only child. He built her career, renting Carnegie Hall for her, and under his management she recorded her classic albums for Philips and RCA, and it was he who told her to turn her rage over Birmingham into a song. But she said he beat and abused her, and Alan Light's biography recounts an alleged rape on the night of their engagement. The marriage collapsed around 1970, leaving her without money or management.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Nina Simone and Lisa Simone. Lisa Celeste Stroud, born in 1962, was her only child. Lisa loved playing dress up in her mother's bedroom, but after the divorce she was beaten, mocked and at times abandoned, and at fourteen she fled to her father. In her thirties she set out to teach her mother how to love her, and it worked. Nina cheered her on Broadway and invited her to open at the Royal Albert Hall. Lisa later produced the documentary about her.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Nina Simone and Lorraine Hansberry. The author of A Raisin in the Sun was her closest friend and her political teacher. They talked about Marx and revolution rather than men and clothes, and it was Hansberry who scolded her for playing Carnegie Hall on the day King was jailed. Hansberry was godmother to Lisa. Her death at thirty four in 1965 devastated Simone, who later wrote To Be Young, Gifted and Black in her memory and could barely sing it without breaking down.[1] [2] [3]

Nina Simone and James Baldwin. Baldwin appointed himself one of her mentors in Greenwich Village, feeding her literary references and political ideas, and they travelled to Lagos together. Their friendship lasted decades. When Simone collapsed into an ugly rant during a 1979 show at the Village Gate, it was Baldwin who sat down beside her at the piano and coaxed her back to singing. She also visited him in the south of France.[1] [2] [3]

Nina Simone and Langston Hughes. The great Harlem Renaissance poet was an early champion who wrote liner notes for her and called her strange in the same sense as Brecht and Genet. He suggested she record See Line Woman and gave her the words for Backlash Blues, one of her sharpest civil rights songs, which she recorded on her first RCA album in 1967.[1] [2] [3]

Nina Simone and Al Schackman. The guitarist met her around 1957 when he sat in with her in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and said playing with her felt like telepathy. He stayed for more than four decades as guitarist, arranger and musical director, played beside her at Selma, and calmed her during onstage outbursts by playing solo until she returned. He sometimes looked after young Lisa for long stretches.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Nina Simone and Miriam Makeba. The South African singer was a close friend from their New York days, and the two performed together at Carnegie Hall. Makeba later married Stokely Carmichael, one of Simone's political confidants. In the seventies she persuaded Simone to move to Liberia, and in 1991 they recorded Eyes on Tomorrow together with Dizzy Gillespie and Hugh Masekela. Makeba was among the mourners at Simone's funeral in 2003.[1] [2] [3]

Nina Simone and Martin Luther King Jr.. They were allies with very different methods. When she met him at the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965 she told him straight away that she was not nonviolent, and he calmly reassured her. After his murder in 1968 she dedicated her Westbury concert to him and premiered Why? The King of Love Is Dead. Decades later she told the BBC his nonviolence had not won much.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Nina Simone and Aretha Franklin. Their careers kept brushing against each other. Simone lost her first Grammy nomination in 1968 to Franklin's Respect, lost again in 1971, and then watched Franklin win in 1973 with her own song, Young, Gifted and Black. Simone had been dubbed the High Priestess of Soul just before Franklin was crowned the Queen of Soul.[1] [2]

Nina Simone and Muriel Mazzanovich. Miz Mazzy, the British born piano teacher in Tryon, introduced the young Eunice Waymon to Bach, Beethoven and Brahms and set her on the road to the concert hall. She organised the Eunice Waymon Fund that paid for her schooling. Simone later called her my white momma, though the lessons across the railway tracks also made her feel isolated from her own community.[1] [2] [3]

Nina Simone and Weldon Irvine. The young keyboardist became her bandleader in the late sixties. When she asked for words that would make Black children feel good about themselves, he wrote the lyrics to To Be Young, Gifted and Black. He also arranged the choirs on Emergency Ward! and later mentored hip hop artists such as Q Tip and Mos Def. Irvine died by suicide in 2002, a year before Simone.[1] [2] [3]

Nina Simone and Gerrit de Bruin. A Dutch friend who stepped in when her Paris performances were unravelling in the eighties. He helped her buy an apartment in Nijmegen in 1988 and lived with his family nearby, and it was a friend of his who finally diagnosed her bipolar disorder. Her years in Nijmegen were among the calmest of her later life.[1]

Rare facts about Nina Simone

• The first song she ever played was a hymn, God Be With You Till We Meet Again, when she was a toddler. According to accounts of her childhood, little Eunice climbed onto the organ bench at about two and a half and played the hymn straight through. Wikipedia gives her age as three or four when she began playing piano.[1] [2]
• Her stage name combined a boyfriend's pet name, niña, with the French actress Simone Signoret. A boyfriend named Chico called her niña, Spanish for little girl. The surname came from Simone Signoret, whom she had seen in the 1952 film Casque d'Or. She chose it to hide her bar job from her mother.[1] [2] [3]
• Her first bar job paid ninety dollars a week, twice what she earned teaching piano. She took the Atlantic City job after one of her own piano students landed a similar summer gig. The owner of the Midtown Bar and Grill insisted she sing as well as play.[1] [2]
• She sold her first album outright for three thousand dollars and lost over a million in royalties. Still planning a classical career, she signed away the rights to her 1957 Bethlehem session. Those recordings, including My Baby Just Cares for Me, kept selling for decades.[1] [2]
• A Philadelphia disc jockey forced her first hit single into existence. Sid Mark of the station WHAT kept playing I Loves You, Porgy from her album, sometimes several times in a row. Bethlehem noticed and rushed it out as a single in 1959.[1] [2]
• At her Town Hall debut in 1959 she had never met her bass player or drummer before the curtain rose. Wilbur Ware and Ben Riley, both veterans of Thelonious Monk's bands, accompanied her without a rehearsal. She said she would not have chosen to do it that way.[1]
• A New York Times critic said her versions of songs had been Simonized. John S. Wilson reviewed her 1959 Town Hall concert and joked that by the time she finished poking into a song, it had lost its original colours and been Simonized.[1]
• Richard Pryor had one of his first nights as a comedian opening for her at the Village Gate. The Greenwich Village club was where she recorded her 1962 live album, and the young Pryor was on the bill as her opening act.[1]
• She performed Hebrew songs at the Village Gate in the early sixties. Alongside African songs and folk tunes, her early club sets included songs in Hebrew, possibly linked to her acquaintance with the singing rabbi Shlomo Carlebach.[1]
• On the 1964 live album that introduced Mississippi Goddam, she forgot the words to another protest song and improvised. During Go Limp, a comic song about a girl joining the NAACP, she lost the lyrics halfway through and made up the rest. She got a standing ovation.[1]
• The Selma rally where she sang Mississippi Goddam was held on a stage built from empty coffins. Local funeral homes lent the coffins for the makeshift stage at the end of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march. The concert was organised by Harry Belafonte at King's request.[1]
• Radio stations did not just ban Mississippi Goddam, they sent the records back broken in half. A Carolina station smashed its box of promotional singles and returned them to Philips. Simone said on television that people had missed the whole point.[1] [2] [3]
• She kept rewriting Mississippi Goddam to name new trouble spots, from St. Augustine to Selma to Watts to Memphis. Each time violence flared somewhere new, she swapped the place name into the song, including after King's murder in Memphis in 1968.[1] [2]
• Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood was written for her, and its co writer used his girlfriend's name on the credits. Horace Ott was a BMI writer who could not officially collaborate with ASCAP members, so he credited Gloria Caldwell, who later became his wife.[1]
• The electronic artist Peaches took her name from the last woman in Four Women. Merrill Nisker has performed as Peaches since the late nineties, named after the fiercest of the four characters in Simone's 1966 song.[1]
• Her Grammy nomination for best rap song came fifteen years after her death. In 2018 she was nominated as a songwriter for Jay Z's The Story of O.J., which sampled Four Women.[1] [2]
• The High Priestess of Soul title began as a record company publicity idea. The label coined it in the sixties, shortly before Aretha Franklin was crowned the Queen of Soul, but Simone wore it with complete conviction.[1]
• She lip synced To Be Young, Gifted and Black on Sesame Street with four children. Wearing an African gown, she sat on the show's tenement steps as four young Black children raised their arms in victory near the end.[1]
• When she visited Angela Davis in prison in 1971, she brought a red helium balloon. Davis later said the balloon stayed in her cell, and that Simone had announced and played the changes of the movement.[1]
• At the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, the Black Panthers rather than the police provided security. Simone used that stage to read a poem asking the crowd if they were ready to smash things and burn buildings.[1]
• RCA sent radio stations a fake interview record so DJs could pretend she was in the studio. With Black Gold came an LP called Come Together with Nina Simone. DJs read out written questions and played her recorded answers as if she were live.[1]
• Her nine year old daughter was credited for polyrhythms on Emergency Ward! The 1972 album's notes credit Lisa Stroud for polyrhythms on My Sweet Lord, recorded at an anti war show at Fort Dix.[1]
• She recorded all the vocals for Baltimore in a single sitting of about an hour. Unhappy with Creed Taylor's reggae flavoured choices, she finally sang everything at once and later compared the studio to a basement she needed to escape.[1]
• Sammy Davis Jr. modelled his signature Mr. Bojangles on her version. Her tender take on Jerry Jeff Walker's song appeared on Here Comes the Sun in 1971.[1]
• She reportedly counted Nina Simone and Piano! as her favourite of her own albums. The 1969 album features her alone at the piano, and closes with a version of Jacques Brel's Les Desesperes.[1]
• She played the Montreux Jazz Festival five times, starting in 1968. Her shows there came in 1968, 1976, 1981, 1987 and 1990, and they were later collected on Nina Simone: The Montreux Years.[1]
• The Chanel commercial that revived her career in 1987 used a song she had recorded thirty years earlier. My Baby Just Cares for Me, from her 1957 session, went top five in Britain and number one in the Dutch Top 40. It went gold in France and platinum in Britain.[1] [2]
• Aardman Animations made a claymation video for My Baby Just Cares for Me. Directed by Peter Lord in 1987, it stars a singing cat in a club and the cat who loves her.[1]
• Feeling Good was not released as a single until a car advert made it a hit in 1994. After a Volkswagen commercial in Britain, her 1965 recording reached number forty. An official music video only appeared in 2021, fifty six years after she recorded it.[1]
• Ain't Got No, I Got Life was once the second most performed song in British TV advertising. PRS for Music found that in 2010, thanks to Muller yoghurt adverts that ran from 2004 to 2011.[1]
• The Dutch city of Nijmegen named a street after her in 2002. She lived there from 1988 to about 1990, a relatively calm period in which most locals did not know who she was.[1]
• After her Amherst honorary doctorate, she insisted on being called Doctor Nina Simone. Amherst College honoured her in 1977, and Malcolm X College later gave her a second honorary degree.[1] [2]
• David Bowie spent a month of late night phone calls reassuring her that she was not crazy. The story appears in Alan Light's biography. Bowie also covered Wild Is the Wind, a song she had recorded, on his 1976 album Station to Station.[1] [2]
• SNCC activists joked that the only time they forgot their nonviolent training was when someone stole their Simone records. The joke reflected how central her music was to the young organisers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.[1]
• Barack Obama named her Sinnerman one of his ten favourite songs in 2008. The ten minute track from Pastel Blues had already soundtracked the art heist in The Thomas Crown Affair in 1999.[1] [2] [3]
• Her childhood home in Tryon was bought by four artists for ninety five thousand dollars. Adam Pendleton, Rashid Johnson, Ellen Gallagher and Julie Mehretu saved the three room house from possible demolition after it went up for sale in 2016.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.