Eunice Kathleen Waymon was born in Tryon, North Carolina, in 1933, and was recognised early on as a child prodigy at the piano. Supporters in her home town started a fund to help her become the first female black concert pianist in the US, but when she applied for a scholarship at the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, she was rejected, which she suspected was due to racial discrimination (and considering this was Fifties America, it’s no great stretch to go along with that).
Eunice had to get a job, and she used her skills at the piano keyboard to get a residency at the Midtown Bar & Grill, Atlantic City. To ensure her Methodist minister mother wouldn’t find out she was playing “the devil’s music”, she adopted a stage name: Nina Simone. The bar owner said she had to sing as well as play if she wanted to keep her job and thus Simone’s deliciously dolorous voice was bestowed upon the world. And what a voice! She quickly built up a repertoire and a steady following, and was snapped up by Bethlehem Records, with whom she released her first album, Little Girl Blue.
There is much that could be written about Nina Simone: her disinclination towards the recording industry and refusal to be pigeonholed; her involvement in the civil rights movement (listen to the impassioned and provocative social commentary in her song Mississippi Goddam); her itinerant life, living in Barbados, Liberia, Switzerland, the Netherlands and France; her fiery temperament and regrettable legacy of abuse towards her daughter, Lisa.
However, it’s the fusion of that silky voice with her virtuoso piano playing that we’re interested in here. I have selected this clip from French TV show Tilt Magazine in 1967, in which Simone performs I Want a Little Sugar in my Bowl. She is beguiling to watch as well as to listen to. Incidentally, in 2003, just days before her death, the Curtis Institute of Music bestowed on her a belated honorary degree.
