An exceptional pianist and possessor of an incomparable voice, Nina Simone was born on February 21, 1933, 91 years ago.
One of the great and prolific exponents of black music of the 20th century was Nina Simone. Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon, the singer-songwriter adopted her stage name from a boy who called her “girl” and complemented it with her admiration for French actress Simone Signoret.
Her dream was to become the first black classical music pianist, but she finally ended up being one of the great exponents of soul and even more so, of those who defended civil rights.
He began singing in bars at an early age, which little by little crumbled his dream of studying classical music, but opened the doors to record companies, which in 1956 materialized in his first recording: Little Girl Blue.
However, not everything was easy for Simone. During the first years of her career she was scammed by her record label and later, she suffered mistreatment and overexploitation from her husband and her manager.
The historic milestone that led Simone to become the face of the fight for civil rights occurred in 1963, when in Birmingham, the largest city in the state of Alabama, two members of the Ku Klux Klan exploded a bomb inside a church where four teenagers between the ages of 11 and 14 died. The fight to eradicate racial segregation had been going on for a few years, but this fact made Simone compose “Mississippi Goddam”, his first song dedicated to the revolution.
From there Simone was one of the visible activists of the cause along with Malcolm X and the writer Lorraine Hansberry. In Eunice Kathleen Waymon’s book Victim of My Spell: Memoirs of Nina Simone, The singer says that “it was very exciting to be part of that movement at that time because they needed me. I could sing to help my people and that became the pillar of my life. It was no longer the piano or classical music. Not even popular music. “It was music for civil rights.”
However, becoming part of the fight closed many doors for her to perform live and coincided with several depressive episodes that the singer had. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, the empress of soul stopped being an activist for the cause and her career faded away.. She lived for many years in Africa and then in Switzerland, finally ending up in an apartment in Paris, forced to sing every day in a bar to survive. An end to his career very far from what was the splendor of the 60s.
But in the 80s he had a second chance, when a Channel Nº5 commercial decided to use the song My Baby Just Cares for Mea song composed in 1930 whose version Simone included on her debut album in 1957 Little Girl Blue.
As recounted in the documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?:
“When ‘My Baby Just Cares for Me’ happened I said: ‘I have to take advantage of this opportunity to travel the world because it’s the last one I have.’ So I tried really hard to take advantage of the resurgence because, for me, it was the last opportunity.”