Legendary jazz pianist and singer Nina Simone composed over 500 songs, recorded almost 60 albums. She was the first woman to win the Jazz Cultural Award and contributed through her music and activism to the Black Freedom Struggle of the 1960s. She lived from February 21, 1933 to April 21, 2003.
Her birth year is given variously as 1933, 1935 and 1938. 1933 seems most credible, as she was a high school senior in 1950-51 when she attended Juilliard.
When Nina Simone died on April 21, 2003, she left a timeless treasure trove of. That was the musical side of it I shied away from; I didn't like 'protest music'.
Also known as: 'Priestess of Soul'; birth name: Eunice Kathleen Waymon, Eunice Wayman
In 1993, Don Shewey wrote of Nina Simone in the Village Voice, 'She's not a pop singer, she's a diva, a hopeless eccentric ... who has so thoroughly co-mingled her odd talent and brooding temperament that she has turned herself into a force of nature, an exotic creature spied so infrequently that every appearance is legendary.'
Early Life and Education
Nina Simone was born as Eunice Kathleen Waymon in 1933(*) in Tryon, North Carolina, daughter of John D. Waylon and Mary Kate Waymon, an ordained Methodist minister. The house was filled with music, Nina Simone later recalled, and she learned to play piano early, playing at church when she was only six. Her mother discouraged her from playing music that wasn't religious. When her mother took a job as a maid for extra money, the woman she worked for saw that young Eunice had special musical talent and sponsored a year of classical piano lessons for her. She studied with a Mrs. Miller and then with Muriel Mazzanovitch. Mazzanovich helped raise money for more lessons.
After graduating from the Allen High School for Girls in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1950 (she was valedictorian), Nina Simone attended Juilliard School of Music, as part of her plan to prepare to attend the Curtis Institute of Music. She took the entrance exam for the Curtis Institute's classical piano program, but was not accepted. Nina Simone believed that she was good enough for the program, but that she was rejected because she was black. She studied privately with Vladimir Sokoloff, an instructor at the Curtis Institute.
Music Career
Her family by that time had moved to Philadelphia, and she began to give piano lessons. When she discovered that one of her students was playing in a bar in Atlantic City—and being paid more than she was from her piano teaching—she decided to try this route herself. Armed with music from many genres —classical, jazz, popular—she began playing piano in 1954 at the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City. She adopted the name of Nina Simone to avoid her mother's religious disapproval of playing in a bar.
The bar owner demanded that she add vocals to her piano playing, and Nina Simone began to draw large audiences of younger people who were fascinated by her eclectic musical repertoire and style. Soon she was playing in better nightclubs, and moved into the Greenwich Village scene.
By 1957, Nina Simone had found an agent, and the next year issued her first album, 'Little Girl Blue.' Her first single, 'I Loves You Porgy,' was a George Gershwin song from Porgy and Bess that had been a popular number for Billie Holiday. It sold well, and her recording career was launched. Unfortunately, the contract she signed gave away her rights, a mistake she came to bitterly regret. For her next album she signed with Colpix and released 'The Amazing Nina Simone.' With this album came more critical interest.
Husband and Daughter
Nina Simone briefly married Don Ross in 1958, and divorced him the next year. She married Andy Stroud in 1960 —a former police detective who became her recording agent—and they had a daughter, Lisa Celeste, in 1961. This daughter, separated from her mother for long periods in her childhood, eventually launched her own career with the stage name of, simply, Simone. Nina Simone and Andy Stroud drifted apart with her career and political interests, and their marriage ended in divorce in 1970.
Involvement with Civil Rights Movement
In the 1960s, Nina Simone was part of the civil rights movement and later the black power movement. Her songs are considered by some as anthems of those movements, and their evolution shows the growing hopelessness that American racial problems would be solved.
Nina Simone wrote 'Mississippi Goddam' after the bombing of a Baptist church in Alabama killed four children and after Medgar Evers was assassinated in Mississipppi. This song, often sung in civil rights contexts, was not often played on radio. She introduced this song in performances as a show tune for a show that hadn't yet been written.
Other Nina Simone songs adopted by the civil rights movement as anthems included 'Backlash Blues,' 'Old Jim Crow,' 'Four Women' and 'To Be Young, Gifted and Black.' The latter was composed in honor of her friend Lorraine Hansberry, godmother to Nina's daughter, and became an anthem for the growing black power movement with its line, 'Say it clear, say it loud, I am black and I am proud!'
With the growing women's movement, 'Four Women' and her cover of Sinatra's 'My Way' became feminist anthems as well.
But just a few years later, Nina Simone's friends Lorraine Hansberry and Langston Hughes were dead. Black heroes Martin Luther King, jr., and Malcolm X, were assassinated. In the late 1970s, a dispute with the Internal Revenue Service found Nina Simone accused of tax evasion; she lost her home to the IRS.
Moving
Nina Simone's growing bitterness over America's racism, her disputes with the record companies she called 'pirates,' her troubles with the IRS all led to her decision to leave the United States. She first moved to Barbados, and then, with the encouragement of Miriam Makeba and others, moved to Liberia.
A later move to Switzerland for the sake of her daughter's education was followed by a comeback attempt in London which failed when she put her faith in a sponsor who turned out to be a con man who robbed and beat her and abandoned her. She tried to commit suicide, but when that failed, found her faith in the future renewed. She built her career slowly, moving to Paris in 1978, having small successes.
In 1985, Nina Simone returned to the United States to record and perform, choosing to pursue fame in her native land. She focused on what would be popular, de-emphasizing her political views, and won growing acclaim. Her career soared when a British commercial for Chanel used her 1958 recording of 'My Baby Just Cares for Me,' which then became a hit in Europe.
Nina Simone moved back to Europe—first to the Netherlands then to the South of France in 1991. She published her biography, I Put a Spell on You, and continued to record and perform.
Later Career and Life
There were several run-ins with the law in the 90s in France, as Nina Simone shot a rifle at rowdy neighbors and left the scene of an accident in which two motorcyclists were injured. She paid fines and was put on probation, and was required to seek psychological counseling.
In 1995, she won ownership of 52 of her master recordings in a San Francisco court, and in 94-95 she had what she described as 'a very intense love affair'—'it was like a volcano.' In her last years, Nina Simone was sometimes seen in a wheelchair between performances. She died April 21, 2003, in her adopted homeland, France.
In a 1969 interview with Phyl Garland, Nina Simone said:
There's no other purpose, so far as I'm concerned, for us except to reflect the times, the situations around us and the things we're able to say through our art, the things that millions of people can't say. I think that's the function of an artist and, of course, those of us who are lucky leave a legacy so that when we're dead, we also live on. That's people like Billie Holiday and I hope that I will be that lucky, but meanwhile, the function, so far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times, whatever that might be.
Jazz
Nina Simone is often classified as a jazz singer, but this is what she had to say in 1997 (in an interview with Brantley Bardin):
To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt and that's not what I play. I play black classical music. That's why I don't like the term 'jazz,' and Duke Ellington didn't like it either—it's a term that's simply used to identify black people.'
Selected Quotations
- Jazz is not just music, it's a way of life, it's a way of being, a way of thinking.
- I tell you what freedom is to me: no fear.
- What kept me sane was knowing that things would change, and it was a question of keeping myself together until they did.
- Talent is a burden not a joy. I am not of this planet. I do not come from you. I am not like you.
- Music is an art and art has its own rules. And one of them is that you must pay more attention to it than anything else in the world, if you are going to be true to yourself. And if you don't do it—and you are an artist—it punishes you.
- There's no excuse for the young people not knowing who the heroes and heroines are or were.
Discography
- 'Nuff Said
- Ain't Got No - I Got Life
- Amazing Nina Simone
- And Piano!
- At Carnegie Hall
- At Newport
- At The Village Gate
- At Town Hall
- Baltimore
- Best of the Colpix Years
- Black Gold
- Black Soul
- Broadway-Blues-Ballads
- Eclectic Collection
- Fodder on My Wings
- Folksy Nina
- Forbidden Fruit
- Gifted & Black
- Heart & Soul
- Here Comes the Sun
- High Priestess of Soul
- I Put a Spell on You
- In Concert & I Put A Spell On You
- It Is Finished
- Jazz as Played in an Exclusive Side Street Club
- Let It All Out
- Let It Be Me
- Live
- Live & Kickin' - In Europe and the Caribbean
- Live at Ronnie Scott's
- Live in Europe
- Live in Paris
- My Baby Just Cares for Me
- Ne Me Quitte Pas
- Nina's Back
- Nina's Choice
- Nina Simone and Her Friends
- Nina Simone and Piano
- Nina Simone at Carnegie Hall
- Nina Simone at Newport
- Nina Simone at the Village Gate
- Nina Simone at Town Hall
- Pastel Blues
- Rising Sun Collection
- Silk & Soul
- Single Woman
- Sings Ellington
- Sings the Blues
- To Love Somebody
- A Very Rare Evening with Nina Simone
- Wild Is The Wind
- With Strings
Print Bibliography
- Nina Simone with Stephen Cleary. I Put a Spell on You.
- Richard Williams. Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood.
More About Nina Simone
- Categories: jazz, blues, soul music, classical music, African American musician, protest singer, civil rights, black power
- Places: United States, France, Liberia, North Carolina, Atlantic City, Greenwich Village, New York
- Period: 20th century century
My mummy never cared for me: Drunk, depressed - and a terrifying monster of a mother, the only child of Nina Simone gives a painful account of life with the singer
Published: 22:00 BST, 12 July 2014 | Updated: 22:00 BST, 12 July 2014
She was known as the high priestess of soul, but the late American musician, adored for hits such as My Baby Just Cares For Me, was a hugely troubled figure
'My mother could be a monster,' said Lisa, talking for the first time about life with Nina Simone
She was known as the high priestess of soul, but the late American singer Nina Simone, adored for her hits of the Fifties and Sixties such as My Baby Just Cares For Me, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood and I Put a Spell on You, was a hugely troubled figure.
She battled depression and alcoholism, and had a tortured relationship with her only child, Lisa.
‘My mother could be a monster,’ says Lisa, talking for the first time about life with Nina.
‘I was not a happy child when I was alone with her.
'My mum shot me down a lot, attacked me in public. It is easy to attack children, they are small and depend on you.’
Nina’s death in 2003, aged 70, unleashed family resentments and a battle in courts across America over her multi-million-pound estate.
‘Ugly truths have come out and relationships have died because people treated me as a commodity,’ Lisa tells me.
‘Too many people had ulterior motives.’
Throughout her life Lisa, a professional singer and musician, was dragged across the world by her mother.
When she complained or refused, she was blackmailed and beaten. It is a mark of her erratic and peripatetic life that she had 13 governesses by the age of seven, was working at ten and was her mother’s chauffeur by 12. She walked out at 14 after a beating.
Nina refused to support her career in the U.S. Air Force or her entry into music, and disinherited Lisa from her will.
‘I’d like to think if she had taken two seconds to think about her behaviour she would have done things differently but I’m not sure.
'My mother was angry with the world and often the only person around to blame was me.
Throughout her life Lisa was dragged across the world by her mother
'When my parents were together my mother was more giving and open but with the divorce she turned into someone you didn’t want to know.
'I had nothing to do with my father before his death.’
That father, Andy Stroud, who Nina married in 1961, died in 2012.
A former detective, he was a muscular, handsome but violent man who set himself up as Nina’s manager in the Sixties and kept her in line with beatings.
Simone’s life is now the subject of an eagerly anticipated Hollywood biopic, Nina, starring Zoe Saldana.
It was due out in March, but the release date was postponed when writer and director Cynthia Mort became locked in a protracted legal dispute with the producers.
Mort says she’s been cut out of the final editing process and is demanding to be reinstated.
Even in death, it seems, the life of Nina Simone remains the subject of intense controversy.
Born Eunice Way-mon in America’s Deep South, Nina was a child prodigy whose parents were determined to realise her ambition of becoming the first black concert pianist.
Denied a place at a distinguished white music school, Simone would craft what she called ‘black classical music’, a mix of jazz, gospel, blues, folk and soul.
During the Sixties, Simone, who had seen how racists made her parents sit at the back of the hall during her early recitals, would become an icon to the civil rights movement, although she clashed with Martin Luther King over his non-violent approach to reform.
She channelled her anger into songs such as Mississippi Goddam, composed in response to the killing of a black man in 1963, and Four Women, which deals with the issue of how black women are treated in society.
During the Sixties, Nina would become an icon to the civil rights movement
In 1970, with the peak of her career behind her, Nina and Lisa fled from the abusive Stroud for Barbados, where Nina began an affair with the married Prime Minister Errol Barrow.
When Barrow discarded the tempestuous and impoverished singer, her daughter felt the consequences.
‘I got my first job in Barbados. I was ten or 11, old enough to file papers. I had no option.’
Nina lost her home and control of her business affairs after court battles with the U.S. Inland Revenue Service.
Her response was to move to Liberia at the invitation of exiled South African musical icon Miriam Makeba.
Lisa remembers Liberia’s capital Monrovia as a rare oasis of stability – as long as her mother was absent.
‘It was one of the happiest periods of my life’, she says.
‘I went to school there and I lived with a surrogate family. But then my mother decided to join me and it went downhill.
'At 12 I ended up driving around on my own in a Pontiac Catalina running errands. I had to grow up fast.’
In 1976 Nina moved again, this time to Geneva, where she enrolled Lisa in an international boarding school.
But Switzerland would become yet another family battleground, and Lisa eventually moved back to the U.S., as an engineer in the Air Force.
She quit the military in 1992, at 29, initially to become a backing singer, performing under the name Simone Kelly.
Nina was not impressed.
‘My mother had one word when I told her: “Why?” I said: “Why not?”
'I hoped she could tell me where the potholes were in the music industry but she gave me reasons why I shouldn’t do it.
'She had many experiences in her life that left her feeling sad and angry,' said Lisa
'She said the industry and critics would have a field day with me, and that I would be expected to be a piano virtuoso, like her, and be forever tied down to singing her songs.’
In 2001 Nina saw her daughter take to the stage as the lead in the Broadway production of Elton John’s musical hit Aida but two years later she would be dead from breast cancer.
Her will named tax adviser Mark Penniman as her executor. Lisa sued, claiming Nina had revoked the document before dying and that Penniman had mishandled her assets.
The pair were at war until 2006 when a Californian court found in her favour.
Soon after, an even more explosive fight erupted, this time with her father.
Court documents accuse him of trying to cash in on his ex-wife’s name by claiming ownership of hundreds of her recordings, allegedly gifted to him as part of their 1972 divorce settlement.
Lisa and her team have attempted to wrest them back for the estate – only to have Stroud sue Lisa for copyright infringement and punitive damages. They in turn claim his actions have devalued and diminished the true worth of Nina’s legacy.
‘My mother did not make all those sacrifices for her estate to be thrown away,’ Lisa says today.
‘I did not go through what I did to have her contribution forgotten.
'I had no relationship with my father. He thought he could use me to get control of my mother’s estate and when I decided to stand my ground he decided to make my life a living hell.’
The unfolding anarchy surrounding the new Saldana film Nina seems an appropriate reflection of her chaotic life, and it produces a wry smile from Lisa.
‘They did not ask me or the Nina Simone estate to participate in the film at all. It is based on a lie because it is based on the life of my mother’s assistant, Clifton Henderson.
'Clifton was gay so he could not have had an affair with my mother, which is what the film implies.
‘And my mother was raised at a time when she was told her nose was too wide, her skin was too dark…
‘She was rejected by the U.S. She loved classical music and wanted to become the first black classical pianist but her dreams turned to dust because of the colour of her skin.
'She was rejected by the U.S. She loved classical music and wanted to become the first black classical pianist but her dreams turned to dust because of the colour of her skin,' said Lisa
‘Zoe Saldana portraying her is a bad joke because there are more gifted actresses who are more in keeping with my mother’s appearance.
'I know how my mother would feel about Zoe, so they are making a mockery of her experiences to construct their own truth.
‘The goal seems to be to bleed me dry of everything my mother stood for, of everything she sacrificed.
‘She had many experiences in her life that left her feeling sad and angry. They approached the estate for permission to use some of the songs but as administrator I refused.
'I had the biggest laugh when I heard that Cynthia Mort had been pushed out of the film. You could call it karma. There is most certainly a divine order at work.’
Now aged 51 and living at her mother’s house outside Marseilles, Lisa believes she has finally found a degree of professional and personal satisfaction.
This autumn she is bringing out a new album, All Is Well, and has embarked on a tour of Europe.
A judgment is expected in a Californian court later this summer that will help determine whether Lisa will finally win control over her late mother’s estate.
The contrast with Nina couldn’t be sharper.
‘I have been married 18 years, I have a good relationship with my children and I hope I’ll get to die with a smile on my face surrounded by my family.
'My mother never got that. She passed away still in search of comfort and love. Perhaps if she had them, she might, in the end, have known peace.’