reflecting the times

There was always something regal about the “High Priestess of Soul” Nina Simone, who, at one point, claimed to be a reincarnated Egyptian queen: Nadine Cohodas’s excellent biography is called Princess Noire. “She is loved or feared, adored or disliked, but few who have met her music or glimpsed her soul react with moderation,” Maya Angelou wrote in the 1970 magazine article [...]. “She is an extremist, extremely realised.”








Nina Simone was born in Tryon, North Carolina, in 1933. As young Eunice Waymon, playing piano in church, she felt that “I was a black girl and I knew about it.” After high school, the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia rejected her application because, she believed with good reason, she was black. “I never really got over that jolt of racism,” she said.

With her dream of becoming America’s first black, female concert pianist crushed, Simone turned to performing in bars to earn a living, a job she regarded as such a humiliating defeat that one reason she assumed a stage name was so that her mother wouldn’t find out what she was up to. Neither jazz nor blues nor folk nor soul, she became a musical anomaly, perhaps because all along she would rather have been playing Bach. Decades later she said: “I think I would have been happier. I’m not happy now.” She defined her indefinable style as “African-rooted classical music”.



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