Eunice Kathleen Waymon was born on February 21, 1933 in Tryon, North Carolina, USA., the sixth of eight children, four boys and four girls. Early on in life she revealed a prodigious musical talent playing the piano and singing in the local church with her sisters in their mother's choir. At the age of six, in 1939, a benefactor paid for her first piano lessons.
Eunice made so much progress that in 1943, when she was 10, she gave her first piano recital at the town library. There she not only experienced her first applause, but also had her first encounter with racism: during the recital her parents were removed from the first row to accommodate some whites. This episode was a traumatic experience for her and may be the origin of her commitment to the fight for freedom and civil rights.
With the financial help of some local supporters, Eunice left North Carolina in 1950 to continue her musical education at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, the same school that Miles Davis attended. After New York her family moved to Philadelphia. She tested for a scholarship at the prestigious Curtis Institute in Philadelphia but was rejected, ostensibly for musical reasons, but probably for her color.
Feeling discouraged, in order to support herself and pay for further lessons she became an accompanist for a singing teacher. Later, in 1954, she took a job as a singer-pianist in the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City, adopting the stage name of Nina Simone. Nina (niņa means "girl" in Spanish) from a pet name that a boyfriend gave her, and Simone (from the French actress Simone Signoret) for its dignified sound.
It was at Midtown Bar, where Nina Simone sang, played and improvised, that her career took off. Subsequently she played in several Philadelphia clubs. Recognized as a talented pianist, she was given a recording session with Bethlehem Records in 1957; in this session she records 14 tracks.
Simone's first album Jazz as played in an Exclusive Side Street Club (11 tracks), published in 1958 and by then also know as Little Girl Blue, was a great success, first in Philadelphia and New York and then in the whole US. The single released from that recording (featuring "I Loves You Porgy" and "He Needs Me") became a national rhythm & blues (placing 13th) hit in the summer of 1959, selling over a million copies.
(Thirty years later, in 1987, "My Baby Just Cares for Me" another selection from the same album, was adopted as the theme for a British television advert for Chanel No 5 perfume, and reached the 5th place on the English pop charts.)
Bethlehem make use of the remaining three tracks recorded by Nina for the collective album And He...
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