The Brooklyn Rail

Born during the Great Depression in a small North Carolina town in the Blue Ridge Mountains where she shares a three-room clapboard house with her parents and seven siblings, a six-year-old girl impresses everyone when she accompanies a church choir (her mother is a Methodist preacher) on the piano. Friends convince her mother to have her daughter take piano lessons. As her talent quickly emerges, her piano teacher raises money in the community to support the young musician. After graduating from high school (at an all-girls boarding school paid for by the fund her teacher has set up), she attends a summer program at Julliard in New York City. Her plan to then attend the Curtis School of Music in Philadelphia is crushed when she fails her audition. (So certain is she of being accepted that she and her parents have already moved to Philadelphia.) Refusing to give up her dream of becoming a classical concert pianist, the 18-year-old supports herself for three years with odd jobs and by giving private piano lessons in a Philadelphia storefront while practicing whenever she has the time. Later she recalls the frustration of “trying to save enough money to stop working and dedicate myself to music and not getting anywhere near it.” The situation changes when one of her students tells her how much he makes playing piano in an Atlantic City hotel lounge ($90 a week, which is more than double what she has been making as a piano teacher). Soon she secures a job at a seedy bar and grill in Atlantic City (until this moment she has never even entered a bar) several blocks from the seafront boardwalk. At the end of the first night, after she has played from 9 PM to 4 AM, often letting songs stretch out for hours, the owner says he loves her playing but asks why she didn’t sing. “I’m a pianist, not a singer,” she explains. “Well, tomorrow night you’re either a singer or you’re out of a job,” replies the cigar-chomping bar owner. Desperate, the following night she gives singing a try. To her surprise, the combination of her brilliant piano playing and what turns out to be a distinctive singing voice that can encompass heartbreak and rage in a single song, soon brings music lovers from up and down the East Coast to this seaside dive. Before long, she has moved to New York City and been signed to the first of many recording contracts. By 30, she is world famous. The year she turns 70, the Curtis Institute, seeking to make up for its 1951 error, awards her an honorary degree. Too frail to travel from her home in the south of France, she misses the ceremony. Two days later, she is dead.

(Nina Simone, b. Eunice Kathleen Waymon)