Nina Simone, the pianist who answered a locked door with the sound of a century

Nina Simone

Photo: Ron Kroon for Anefo Restored by Bammesk / CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 21, 1933 Tryon
Died	April 21, 2003 (70)
Occupation	Singer-Songwriter
Awards	Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

The plan was Carnegie Hall. Not the Newport Jazz Festival, not the downtown clubs where pianists played for tips and good intentions, but Carnegie Hall itself, with a classical program and her name printed without apology. That plan collapsed not because Eunice Kathleen Waymon lacked the technique — she had it in extraordinary measure — but because the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia turned down her application. She was seventeen years old. The institute did not explain why. Everyone understood.

She was born in Tryon, North Carolina, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the sixth of eight children raised by a Methodist minister and a domestic worker who also preached. She began playing piano at three, picking out hymns by ear. A local patron, Muriel Mazzanovich, organized a scholarship fund to pay for classical training. She studied Bach and Beethoven with single-minded discipline, attended Juilliard in New York for further training, then submitted her application to Curtis. The rejection arrived. What came next was Nina Simone.

To pay rent, Eunice Waymon took a job playing piano at a bar on the Atlantic City boardwalk. The establishment required her to sing as well as play. She called herself Nina Simone — “Nina” from a pet name, “Simone” from the French actress Simone Signoret — to hide the work from her Baptist mother. The audiences had no category for what they were hearing: Bach counterpoint threaded through blues chord voicings, a mezzo-soprano capable of dropping without warning into something older and rawer. When her recording of I Love You, Porgy became an unexpected hit in 1958, the jazz world moved immediately to claim her. She resisted the label, as she resisted all labels, for the remainder of her career.

Through the early 1960s she released records — Pastel Blues, I Put a Spell on You, Wild Is the Wind — that moved through jazz, blues, gospel, folk, and traces of the German art-song tradition with an authority that made genre boundaries look provisional. But it was a single composition, written in roughly one hour on the night of September 15, 1963, that changed everything. A bomb had just destroyed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four Black girls during Sunday school. Simone sat at the piano and wrote Mississippi Goddam — so direct and furious that radio stations across the South returned the promotional copies to her label, physically broken. It was the beginning of a body of civil rights music now recognized as one of the most sustained bodies of political composition in American history: Four Women, which traced four portraits of Black womanhood across centuries of American history; To Be Young, Gifted and Black, written in 1969 after the death of her friend Lorraine Hansberry; Why? (The King of Love Is Dead), improvised onstage in Mississippi within hours of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

Her political commitments aligned her with the more militant currents of the movement — with Stokely Carmichael, with Black Power politics, with a militancy that made concert promoters and booking agents uneasy at exactly the moment when unease was expensive. She was simultaneously fighting the Internal Revenue Service over back taxes, arguing with record companies over royalties she maintained she had never received, and watching the movement fracture after the killings of King, Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy in rapid succession. In September 1970, she boarded a plane and left the United States. She was thirty-seven years old.

The decades that followed were marked by a restlessness she documented herself in concert recordings and in her 1991 memoir, also called I Put a Spell on You. She lived in Barbados, spent three years in Liberia, moved through Switzerland and the Netherlands, and eventually settled near Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. The voice aged — rougher at the edges, less reliably centered — but the intelligence behind it only deepened. She recorded A Single Woman in 1993, her last studio album, a collection of ballads that felt both intimate and exhausted, and continued performing in European venues until her health declined in the early 2000s. She died on April 21, 2003, in Carry-le-Rouet, France.

The narrative most often told about Nina Simone frames her as an undimmed triumph: the rejected girl who became the High Priestess of Soul and proved every institution wrong. The actual record is more complicated. She was not always an easy presence — concert promoters and producers occasionally encountered the other side of that self-possession, and some late-career performances were painful affairs that those around her attributed to untreated bipolar disorder. Her relationship with her daughter Lisa, documented in Liz Garbus’s 2015 documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?, was fractured and candid in roughly equal measure. The film drew discomfort because it declined to separate the music from the person who made it at considerable personal cost. Simone herself had said she wanted people to feel exactly what she felt when she performed. She rarely softened that demand.

She was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2000. A Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award followed posthumously in 2017, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted her in 2018. In 2025, Omnivore Recordings released a definitive reissue of A Single Woman with eleven bonus tracks, including four previously unreleased recordings. Her daughter Lisa Simone, a Grammy-nominated vocalist, performs tribute concerts regularly, anchoring sets around I Put a Spell on You, Feelin’ Good, and Mississippi Goddam. The catalogue remains in steady circulation on streaming platforms, where Sinnerman and Ain’t Got No/I Got Life are regularly discovered by listeners who find them years after the cover version that first pointed them there.

What Simone composed and recorded constitutes a body of work that has not finished arguing its case. Every generation that finds Feelin’ Good or Four Women locates a different argument inside those songs, shaped by what that particular moment needs. That is not a quality most music achieves. It is a quality almost no music sustains for more than sixty years.

Selected Recordings

• Little Girl Blue (1958)
• The Amazing Nina Simone (1959)
• Broadway Blues Ballads (1964)
• I Put a Spell on You (1965)
• Pastel Blues (1965)
• Wild Is the Wind (1966)
• Nina Simone Sings the Blues (1967)
• High Priestess of Soul (1967)
• To Love Somebody (1969)
• Fodder on My Wings (1982)
• Nina’s Back (1985)
• A Single Woman (1993)

Tags: singers, Nina Simone, civil rights music, Feelin' Good, Four Women, jazz singers

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