Nina Simone

Nina Simone was one of the most important artists the United States produced in the twentieth century: an iconic jazz singer, reaching heights probably matched only by Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday; a woman with a tormented life who experienced firsthand the discrimination faced by Black people in the southern states, and who later became an advocate for that cause; a pianist of great flair, able to shine across multiple contexts thanks to the many layers of her cultural background.

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon (in Tryon, North Carolina, on February 21, 1933), the sixth of eight siblings, she took the stage name Nina Simone, officially as a tribute to French actress Simone Signoret, but pragmatically so that her mother, a Methodist minister, wouldn't find out that her daughter was playing immoral music. From childhood she showed great talent, which led her to play and sing in church with her two sisters under the name "Waymon Sisters". But the racial prejudice of the Deep South in the 1940s would weigh on her for a long time.

She took piano lessons, paid for by the local Black community, which promoted a foundation to allow her to continue her musical studies in New York. In the early 1950s she worked as a pianist-singer in various clubs, drawing inspiration from Billie Holiday; she performed with particular success "I Loves You, Porgy", a cover of a George Gershwin song (from "Porgy And Bess").

The rapid and unstoppable growth of her concert fame was followed by her debut in the recording world toward the end of the 1950s.

For her debut album, "Little Girl Blue" (Bethlehem, 1959), she naively chose to be paid a flat one-time fee, which cost her a considerable amount of lost earnings. The record includes songs that would go on to become classics, such as "I Loves You", "Porgy" and "My Baby Just Cares For Me".

Out of the frying pan and into the fire, she left the label and signed with Colpix, which agreed to sign her on condition of giving her total control over the material she would record. Keen to secure financial support so she could continue her academic path as a pianist, she accepted the condition and released nine albums, partly studio and partly live, up until 1964.

At the end of that experience, she moved to Philips, and there her true career began, although her newfound artistic freedom was matched, in private, by a period of abuse at the hands of Andy Stroud, her husband and manager, who had left his military career to better manage his wife's. Her output for Philips stands out for the political and social themes that had previously been off-limits to her, on top of extensive drawing from Black culture. With no more constraints, Simone performed — and sometimes wrote herself — songs that directly attacked the United States of racial segregation, in perfect sync with the peak of Black Power.

Among the seven albums recorded during this phase, without doubt the most brilliant is "Pastel Blues", produced by the famous Hal Mooney, an arranger hired by every jazz singer who recorded an album in the United States between the 1950s and Sixties.

It was during this period that she recorded some of her most incisive songs, such as "Old Jim Crow" and "Mississippi Goddam", which would become true civil rights anthems. During those years she also spent time with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, embracing their fight for Black rights.

Nina Simone left the United States towards the end of the 1960s, accusing both the FBI and the CIA of showing little interest in solving the problem of racism. In the years that followed she traveled the world, living in Barbados, Liberia, Egypt, Turkey, the Netherlands and Switzerland. In 1974 Simone stepped away from recording for several years, giving little news of herself. She returned in 1978 with an album named after a Randy Newman song, "Baltimore", before disappearing again until the 1980s.

After Chanel used her "My Baby Just Cares For Me" in a television commercial in the 1980s, many people discovered her music. In 1987, "My Baby Just Cares For Me" (a song nearly thirty years old by then) even stormed back into the British charts. Anthologies and reissues of her records multiplied as a result.

Following this success, she returned with a new album, "Nina's Back", in 1989, followed by "Live & Kickin'", a live record taped a few years earlier in San Francisco.

Nina Simone was married twice, had a daughter in 1964, and lived a difficult, troubled life. She had fraught relationships with powerful, violent men. She was also involved with Errol Barrow, Prime Minister of Barbados. In 1980, one of her lovers, C.C. Dennis, an important local politician, was killed by a criminal.

Nina Simone died on 21 April 2003 at her home in Carry-le-Rouet after a long battle with illness, from complications related to breast cancer.