While only three of 72 applicants were accepted, Simone always felt that racial prejudice had a hand in that decision.īorn Eunice Kathleen Waymon, she took the name Nina Simone to avoid having her mother find out she was playing the devil’s music. She spent the summer of 1950 studying at Julliard, preparing for an audition at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her parents, sitting in the front row, were forced to move to the back so white people could sit in front. That event in many ways led her down the path of racial activism. The sixth of eight children, she began playing piano when she was just three or four, giving her first recital at the age of 12. In many respects she was a force of nature, someone who simply couldn’t be contained, let alone put into one particular box.
The impossibility of trying to reduce her career to 19 performances leaves out so much of what made Simone so creative and controversial. Her latest resurgence is due in part to her transcendent performance in Questlove’s 1969 festival documentary Summer of Soul. Dubbed the High Priestess of Soul, Nina Simone never seemed to phone in a performance, that much is clear on Feeling Good: Her Greatest Hits and Remixes.
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