1933–1954: Early life Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon on February 21, 1933, in
Tryon, North Carolina; the sixth of eight children in a respected family. Her father, John Divine Waymon, worked as a
barber and
dry-cleaner as well as an entertainer. Her mother, Mary Kate Irvin, was a Methodist preacher. Simone began playing piano at the age of three or four; the first song she learned was "God Be With You, Till We Meet Again". Demonstrating a talent with the piano, she performed at her local church. Her concert debut, a classical
recital, was given when she was 12. Simone later said that during this performance, her parents, who had taken seats in the front row, were forced to move to the back of the hall to make way for white people. She said that she refused to play until her parents were moved back to the front, and that the incident contributed to her later involvement in the
civil rights movement. Simone's music teacher helped establish a special fund to pay for her education. Subsequently, a local fund was set up to assist her continued education. With the help of this scholarship money, she was able to attend
Allen High School for Girls in
Asheville, North Carolina where she graduated as the valedictorian. After her graduation, Simone spent the summer of 1950 at the
Juilliard School as a student of
Carl Friedberg, preparing for an audition at the
Curtis Institute of Music in
Philadelphia. but as her family had relocated to Philadelphia in the expectation of her entry to Curtis, the blow to her aspirations was particularly heavy. For the rest of her life, she claimed that her application had been denied because of racial prejudice, a charge the staff at Curtis have denied, and "Simone" was taken from the French actress
Simone Signoret, whom she had seen in the 1952 movie ''
Casque d'Or''. Knowing her mother would not approve of her playing "the Devil's music", she used her new stage name to remain undetected. Simone's mixture of jazz,
blues, and classical music in her performances at the bar earned her a small but loyal fan base. In 1958, she befriended and married Don Ross, a
beatnik who worked as a
fairground barker, but quickly regretted their marriage. After leaving Ross, Simone moved to New York. While playing in small clubs, she recorded her debut album
Little Girl Blue which was released in February 1959 through
Bethlehem Records. It included
George Gershwin's "
I Loves You, Porgy" (from
Porgy and Bess), which she learned from a
Billie Holiday album and performed as a favor to a friend. It was subsequently released as a single and became her only
Billboard top 20 single in the United States.
1959–1964: Burgeoning popularity After the success of
Little Girl Blue, Simone signed a contract with producer
Hecky Krasnow at
Colpix Records and recorded a multitude of
studio and
live albums. Colpix relinquished all
creative control to her, including the choice of material that would be recorded, in exchange for her signing the contract with them. After the release of her live album
Nina Simone at Town Hall, Simone became a favorite performer in
Greenwich Village. By this time, Simone performed
pop music only to make money to continue her classical music studies and was indifferent about having a recording contract. She kept this attitude toward the record industry for most of her career. While in New York, Simone became friends with civil rights and gay rights activists and artists such as
James Baldwin,
Langston Hughes, and
Lorraine Hansberry, with whom she would also collaborate professionally (see below). She had a number of same-sex affairs and at least one relationship with a woman whom she was in love with; she noted being attracted to men and women in her diary and was
bisexual, but never
came out as such. In December 1961 Simone married Andrew Stroud, a
detective with the
New York Police Department. In a few years he became her
manager and the father of her daughter
Lisa, but Simone later claimed that he abused her psychologically and physically. Simone said that Stroud treated her "like a
work horse" in an interview with the BBC in 1999. leading Simone scholar
Jordan Alexander Stein to argue that basing "nearly the entire biographical account of Simone's sexuality" on "her ex-husband's speculative report of what she may have done with other people" does give an adequate account of the complexities of attraction, desire, and self-understanding that Simone may have experienced.
1964–1974: Civil Rights era In 1964, Simone changed record distributors from Colpix, an American company, to the Dutch
Philips Records, which meant a change in the content of her recordings. She had always included songs in her repertoire that drew on her African-American heritage, such as "Brown Baby" by
Oscar Brown and "Zungo" by
Michael Olatunji on her album
Nina at the Village Gate in 1962. On her debut album for Philips,
Nina Simone in Concert (1964), for the first time she addressed racial inequality in the United States in the song "
Mississippi Goddam". This was her response to the June 12, 1963, murder of
Medgar Evers and the September 15, 1963,
bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young black girls and partly blinded a fifth. She said that the song was "like throwing ten bullets back at them", becoming one of many other protest songs written by Simone. The song was released as a single, and it was boycotted in some southern states. Promotional copies were smashed by a Carolina radio station and returned to Philips. She later recalled how "Mississippi Goddam" was her "first civil rights song" and that the song came to her "in a rush of fury, hatred and determination". The song challenged the belief that race relations could change gradually and called for more immediate developments: "me and my people are just about due." It was a key moment in her path to Civil Rights activism. "Old Jim Crow", on the same album, addressed the
Jim Crow laws. After "Mississippi Goddam", a
civil rights message was the norm in Simone's recordings and became part of her concerts. As her political activism rose, the rate of release of her music slowed. Simone performed and spoke at civil rights meetings, such as at the
Selma to Montgomery marches. Like
Malcolm X, her neighbor in
Mount Vernon, New York, she supported
black nationalism and advocated violent revolution rather than
Martin Luther King Jr.'s non-violent approach. She hoped that African Americans could use armed combat to form a separate state, though she wrote in her autobiography that she and her family regarded all races as equal. in
Amsterdam, Netherlands in March 1969 In 1967, Simone moved from Philips to
RCA Victor. She sang "Backlash Blues" written by her friend, Harlem Renaissance leader
Langston Hughes, on her first RCA Victor album,
Nina Simone Sings the Blues (1967). On
Silk & Soul (1967), she recorded
Billy Taylor's "
I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" and "Turning Point". The album ''
'Nuff Said!'' (1968) contained live recordings from the
Westbury Music Fair of April 7, 1968, three days after the
assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. She dedicated the performance to him and sang "Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)", a song written by her bass player,
Gene Taylor. In 1969, she performed at the
Harlem Cultural Festival in Harlem's
Mount Morris Park. The performance was recorded and is featured in
Questlove's 2021 documentary
Summer of Soul. Simone and
Weldon Irvine turned the unfinished play
To Be Young, Gifted and Black by
Lorraine Hansberry into a civil rights song of
the same name. She credited her friend Hansberry with cultivating her social and political consciousness. She performed the song live on the album
Black Gold (1970). A studio recording was released as a single, and renditions of the song have been recorded by
Aretha Franklin (on her 1972 album
Young, Gifted and Black) and
Donny Hathaway.
1974–1993: Later life In an interview for
Jet magazine, Simone stated that her controversial song "Mississippi Goddam" harmed her career. She claimed that the music industry punished her by boycotting her records. Hurt and disappointed, Simone left the US in September 1970, flying to
Barbados and expecting her husband and manager Stroud to communicate with her when she had to perform again. However, Stroud interpreted Simone's sudden disappearance, and the fact that she had left behind her wedding ring, as an indication of her desire for a divorce. As her manager, Stroud was in charge of Simone's income. When Simone returned to the United States, she learned that a warrant had been issued for her arrest for unpaid taxes (allegedly
unpaid as a protest against her country's involvement with the
Vietnam War) and fled to Barbados to evade the authorities and prosecution. Simone stayed in Barbados for quite some time and had a lengthy affair with the Prime Minister,
Errol Barrow. A close friend, singer
Miriam Makeba, then persuaded her to go to
Liberia. When Simone relocated, she abandoned her daughter Lisa in
Mount Vernon. Lisa eventually reunited with Simone in Liberia, but, according to Lisa, her mother was physically and mentally abusive. The
abuse was so unbearable that Lisa became suicidal and she moved back to New York to live with her father. Her choice of material retained its eclecticism, ranging from spiritual songs to
Hall & Oates' "
Rich Girl". Four years later, Simone recorded
Fodder on My Wings on a French label,
Studio Davout. During the 1980s, Simone performed regularly at
Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London, where she recorded the album ''
Live at Ronnie Scott's in 1984. Although her early on-stage style could be somewhat haughty and aloof, in later years, Simone particularly seemed to enjoy engaging with her audiences sometimes, by recounting humorous anecdotes related to her career and music and by soliciting requests. By this time, she stayed everywhere and nowhere. She lived in Liberia, Barbados and Switzerland and eventually ended up in Paris. There she regularly performed in a small jazz club called Aux Trois Mailletz'' for relatively small financial reward. The performances were sometimes brilliant and at other times Nina Simone gave up after fifteen minutes. Often she was too drunk to sing or play the piano properly. At other times, she scolded the audience, so that manager Raymond Gonzalez, guitarist Al Schackman and Gerrit de Bruin, a Dutch friend of hers, decided to intervene. In 1987, Simone scored a major European hit with the song "
My Baby Just Cares for Me". Recorded by her for the first time in 1958, the song was used in a commercial for
Chanel No. 5 perfume in Europe, leading to a re-release of the recording. The song reached number 4 on the UK's
NME singles chart, giving Simone a brief surge in popularity in the UK and elsewhere.
1993–2003: Final years, illness and death In 1993, Simone settled near
Aix-en-Provence in southern France (
Bouches-du-Rhône). In the same year, her final album,
A Single Woman, was released. She variously contended that she married or had a love affair with a
Tunisian around this time, but that their relationship ended because, "His family didn't want him to move to France, and France didn't want him because he's a North African." During a 1998 performance in
Newark, she announced: "If you're going to come see me again, you've got to come to France, because I am not coming back." She suffered from
breast cancer for several years before she died in her sleep at her home in
Carry-le-Rouet (Bouches-du-Rhône), on April 21, 2003, at the age of 70. Her Catholic funeral service at the local parish was attended by singers
Miriam Makeba and
Patti LaBelle, poet
Sonia Sanchez, actors
Ossie Davis and
Ruby Dee, and hundreds of others. Simone's ashes were scattered in several African countries. Her daughter
Lisa Celeste Stroud is an actress and singer who took the stage name Simone, and who has appeared on
Broadway in
Aida. == Activism ==