9 questions · Music
She never wanted to be a singer. Eunice Waymon, born in a small North Carolina town in 1933, played piano by ear at three and accompanied her mother's church at six. A white piano teacher taught her for nothing, the neighbourhood raised money: the child was to become America's first Black concert pianist. At her first recital, aged eleven, her parents were asked to move from the front row to the back. She refused to play until they were allowed back. Then came the rejection that changed everything. The prestigious Curtis Institute in Philadelphia turned her down. She was convinced it was because of her colour, and she never let it go. To pay for lessons she played a bar in Atlantic City and learned on the first night that she would have to sing too. She invented her stage name on the spot, so that her devout mother would never find out she was playing „devil's music“ in bars: Nina from a pet name, Simone from the French actress Simone Signoret. What came out of it fitted no category. Bach fugues that tipped into blues halfway through, jazz standards, gospel, chansons, folk songs: she called it Black classical music and hated the label jazz. In 1964 it stopped being unpolitical. After the murder of the activist Medgar Evers and the church bombing in Birmingham that killed four girls, she wrote „Mississippi Goddam“ in under an hour. The South boycotted the record; radio stations sent copies back snapped in half. She went on singing for the movement, lost part of her audience over it, and left the United States in anger in the early 1970s. Years in Barbados, Liberia, Switzerland and finally the south of France followed, often in difficult circumstances; only late in life was she diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated. She died in France in 2003. Shortly before, the Curtis Institute had awarded her an honorary degree: fifty years after the rejection, two days before her death.
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Eunice Waymon
She adopted the stage name so her devout mother would not hear about the bar performances.
💡 Did you know? „Simone“ came from the French actress Simone Signoret, whom she had just seen in a film.
The piano
She played by ear at three and accompanied church services at six.
💡 Did you know? You can still hear it in her recordings: Bach fugues and classical runs surface in the middle of a song.
The Curtis Institute
She was convinced her skin colour had decided it.
💡 Did you know? Two days before her death, that same school gave her an honorary doctorate.
She refused to play
It was her first public concert.
💡 Did you know? She said later that this was the evening she first understood what segregation meant in daily life.
Mississippi Goddam
She wrote it in under an hour after four girls were killed in the bombing.
💡 Did you know? Southern radio stations returned the record to the label snapped in half.
Jazz
She called what she played Black classical music: jazz, she said, was a word white people had invented for Black music.
💡 Did you know? Her repertoire backs her up: Bach, gospel, blues, chanson, Broadway and West African rhythms in one set.
She left the country
Barbados, Liberia, Switzerland, the Netherlands and finally the south of France.
💡 Did you know? She spent three years in Liberia and said later that it was the first place where she had not felt like a stranger.
To Be Young, Gifted and Black
She wrote it in memory of her friend, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who had died at 34.
💡 Did you know? The civil rights organisation CORE declared it the Black national anthem.
Foto: Ron Kroon for Anefo Restored by Bammesk · CC0 · Wikimedia Commons
Nina Simone
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