How Eunice Waymon became Nina Simone

November 6, 2022 E Jazz Reporter

Analysis: the barriers which prevented Waymon entering the classical world instead led her to becoming the High Priestess of Soul

By Anika Babel, UCD

Nina Simone seduced millions of listeners with her idiosyncratic blend of singing and piano playing. A fearless voice in the American Civil Rights Movement, her songs ‘Mississippi Goddam’ and ‘Young, Gifted and Black’ still rouse the afflicted, while ‘Feeling Good’ and ‘I Ain’t Got No, I’ve Got Life’ maintain a timeless appeal. As a child, Simone was set to champion a career as “the first black American classical concert pianist”, but the barriers she faced in trying to enter the classical music world instead led her to become the legendary High Priestess of Soul.

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Nina Simone performing ‘Young, Gifted and Black’ at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival

In 1933, baby Eunice Kathleen Waymon could allegedly recall hymns with pitch-perfect accuracy. Recognising these Mozartian abilities, her North Carolina hometown funded her studies. Thanks to lessons with Mrs “Mazzy” Massinovitch, Waymon quickly came to grips with Beethoven, Czerny, Liszt and Bach. “Once I understood Bach’s music I never wanted to be anything other than a concert pianist; Bach made me dedicate my life to music.”

Mazzy’s instructions in stage deportment and musical reverence remained with Simone. Whether performing at dive bars or salubrious venues, she was a performer who always demanded an attentive audience (much to the detriment of rowdy fans on the receiving end of her notorious glares and quips).

In her autobiography I Put a Spell on You, Simone recalls her first encounter of racism at the age of 11. Armed with Miz Mazzy’s “trained elegance,” Waymon was poised at the town hall piano when she noticed her parents being “thrown out of their front row seats in favour of a white family I had never seen before.” She thought “to hell” with her performative decorum and declared: “if anyone expected to hear me play, then they’d better make sure that my family was sitting right there in the front row.” From then “every slight, real or imagined, cut me raw. But the skin grew back again a little tougher, a little less innocent, and a little more black.”

Nina Simone on an artist’s duty

After graduating from high school, Waymon’s pursuit of classical music led her to New York, where she received a summer scholarship to the Juilliard School. From here, her sights were focused on the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music. Despite a strong audition, she was refused entry.

Taking private lessons with Vladimir Sokoloff, a Curtis faculty member, Waymon prepared to reapply the following year. “I knew this was what I was born to do, what all those hours of practice had been about, and it was leading to my destiny, the classical concert stage.”

But even with Sokoloff’s advocation and a redoubled audition, she was again rejected. Her despair ushered a crisis of identity. “It was the end of everything.” Through the grapevine, Waymon was led to believe that meritocracy did not extend to those who were too unknown, poor and black, though Curtis had accepted a black woman before.

Nina Simone performing Mississippi Goddam at the Antibes Juan-les-Pins Jazz Festival in 1965

In the following years, Waymon looked to self-finance her training. After the teaching season left her bereft of piano students (a job from which she derived little pleasure), she headed to Atlanta to perform at upmarket restaurants for the summer.

She found herself in “a seedy little bar” playing through the night to an audience of “drunken Irish bums.” She got through it by closing her eyes and pretending she was “somewhere else, like Carnegie Hall.” While complimentary of her playing, the manager told her “tomorrow night you’re either a singer or you’re out of a job.” So, she sang and Nina Simone was born. Her stage name helped prevent her religious mother from discovering her new occupation, a job that appeared no different to “working in the fires of hell.”

This time marked a shift from classical music towards popular styles that Simone openly despised. She would fantasise that “If someone had walked up to me in the street and given me $100,000 I would have given up popular music and enrolled at Juilliard and never played in a club again. And I wouldn’t have missed the life because I hated it anyway; the cheap crooks, the disrespectful audiences, the way most people were so easily satisfied by dumb, stupid tunes.”

From BBC Hardtalk, a 1999 interview with Nina Simone

With her growing success as a singer, “classical music became a part of my past almost without my realizing it.” Yet Waymon’s classical heritage would never be fully removed from Nina Simone’s repertoire: “the only way I could stand playing … was to make my set as close to classical music as possible.”

Imprints of Simone’s “beloved Bach” can be heard throughout her songs. Bach’s music is characterised by its use of counterpoint — a musical texture featuring multiple melodic lines weaving in, out of, and against each other via compositional structures known as fugues, inventions and canons. This kind of interplay features in the piano solo section of ‘My Baby,’ where Simone’s left and right hands are in playful dialogue with one another. Such contrapuntal stylising is even more apparent in her improvisatory version at the 1987 Montreux Jazz Festival.

If born in a white man in neighbouring Canada, one wonders whether Simone’s virtuosity would have seen her signed to Columbia Record’s classical label, like Glenn Gould, just one year her senior, famed for his recordings of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations“. Simone felt the path to becoming a concert pianist was closed to her.

Nina Simone performing I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival

Was this to be one of classical music’s greatest losses? Or was it the monumental gain of popular culture? Though her heartbreak and self-identification as a classical musician never faded, Simone later reflected that her “music was dedicated to a purpose more important than classical music’s pursuit of excellence; it was dedicated to the fight for freedom and the historical destiny of my people.”

In 2003, two days before her death, she received an honorary doctorate from Curtis. She may have never played Carnegie Hall as Eunice Waymon but, as Nina Simone, she immortalised the fury, tenderness, ingenuity, pride and musical prowess that continues to enliven generations of listeners and artists alike.

Anika Babel is a PhD Candidate at the School of Music at UCD

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ