biography
| name: |
Simone, Nina
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originally Eunice Kathleen Waymon
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pronunciation:
[simohn]
| sex:
| female
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| lived:
| (1933– )
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| biography:
| Jazz singer, pianist, and composer, born in Tryon, North Carolina, USA. After studying piano and teaching music as a teenager, she attended Juilliard for a year, but failed to gain admission to Curtis Institute (Philadelphia), she believed, on account of her race. She turned to playing the piano and singing in Atlanta, GA nightclubs, first using the name ‘Nina Simone’ in 1954, and first won national acclaim with her 1959 recording of Gershwin's ‘I Loves You, Porgy’ She toured the USA and Europe in the 1960s, and by this time she had taken up the cause of civil rights and began to write and perform protest songs such as ‘To Be Young, Gifted and Black’ and ‘Four Women’. In the early 1970s, she expatriated herself, angrily denouncing the treatment of African-Americans in the USA and eventually settled in the S of France. For many years she was distracted by quarrels with agents, recording companies, and the Internal Revenue Service over money matters, and her occasional performances in the USA were unevenly given and received. By the late 1980s, however, she seemed to mellow somewhat, and she returned to the USA (1993) to promote a new album, A Woman Alone, and her autobiography, I Put a Spell on You (1992). Called the ‘high priestess of soul’, she remains distinctive for her blending of jazz, pop, and soul with emotional intensity and a classical amplitude. |
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