Nina Simone
 Born in Tryon, North Carolina on 21 February 1933, Nina (real name
Eunice Kathleen Waymon) attended the New York Juillard Music
School and began recording in the late 50s, singing jazzy ballads.
Her early career was a typical tale of music-biz exploitation and
copyright theft which would not be redressed until she regained
her rights in a 1990s court ruling.
Eunice never wanted to be a singer - she wanted to be the first
black classical concert pianist. On her first professional
engagement in 1954 at the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City,
she sat at the piano playing classical pieces until closing time
without once opening her mouth.
At the end of the evening the
owner told her, "Tomorrow night you're a singer or you're
out of a job!". She returned the following night to announce
that she would sing, but that henceforth she was to be known as
Nina Simone.
By 1957 she had made such an impression that she was performing
at Carnegie Hall. "I'm where you always wanted me to be,
but I'm not playing Bach," she wrote to her parents.
Her debut album, Little Girl Blue, was released
the following year. It included her first hit, I Loves You
Porgy. It also included My Baby Just Cares For Me,
which would eventually chart 30 years later when it was used in a
Chanel advertisement. Yet from the outset she also used songs like
Mississippi Goddam and Old Jim Crow to express
her outrage at the indignities being handed out daily to
African-Americans.
By the mid-60s she was singing with a distinctive soul tinge as
on Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood - which The
Animals later recorded successfully - and I Put A Spell On You.
In 1967 she moved to RCA where she enjoyed her most commercially
successful period with pop hits such as Aint Got No/I Got Life
(her first British hit single success) and a cover of The Bee
Gees' To Love Somebody. She also penned To Be Young,
Gifted and Black but by the end of the decade she had quit
America and relocated to France
She claimed her relocation was to get away from "record
company pirates", racism and tax problems, and rejected the
notion of ever returning to live in America, claiming that "you get racism crossing the street,
it's in the very
fabric of American society".
But there were other demons
too, particularly a volatile temperament that proved both
professionally and personally problematic for her.
Over the next two decades she moved restlessly around the
world, living in Barbados, Liberia, Egypt, Turkey, Holland and
Switzerland before settling for the last decade of her life in the
south of France.
Her later years were characterised by Jekyll and
Hyde mood swings, depending on whether or not she had taken her
medication. She once shot a French neighbour's son with a rifle
because his rowdiness disturbed her, and her last manager, Raymond
Gonzalez, revealed that she pulled a blade on him when they first
met.
Nina Simone passed away in 2003.
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