You know, usually when you go to a classical
music recital, there's... There's like a very
specific script you expect everyone to follow.
Oh, absolutely. It's a whole environment built
almost entirely around control. Right. You have
the velvet seats, the hushed silence of the crowd,
the pristine grand piano sitting dead center
on this empty stage. It's orderly. Yeah, it's
deeply refined. Yeah. I mean, it's about tradition
and rigorous discipline. You adhere to the notes
exactly as they were written by European masters
centuries ago. Exactly. You don't deviate. No,
you really don't. But so what happens when the
person sitting at that pristine grand piano isn't
allowed to exist within that tradition. Like
what happens when you take all of that meticulous
elite classical training and you are forced by
society to drag it out of the concert hall and
into a smoky dimly lit sticky floored nightclub?
Well the script doesn't just change in that scenario
it basically catches fire. And that fire is exactly
what we are walking into today. We are taking
a deep dive into the life of a woman whose story
is almost I mean it's almost too massive for
a single sitting. It really is. You probably
know her as the high priestess of soul. You know,
you've heard her voice in iconic movies, on television,
in high -end luxury commercials. Right, but the
woman behind that unforgettable voice lived a
life that was far more complex, tragic, and frankly
revolutionary than a simple streaming jazz playlist
might suggest. For sure. Today we're tracking
the life of Eunice Wayman. She was a classical
piano prodigy who was forced by circumstance
and by the structural racism of mid -century
America to become the global icon we know today
as Nina Simone. We're going to trace her journey
from a thwarted classical pianist to a fierce
civil rights icon and ultimately to a wandering,
fractured exile. And to really understand the
revolutionary artist she became for you listening,
you first have to understand the classical dreams
that were structurally denied to her. Her life
perfectly illustrates this between raw generational
talent and the incredibly heavy burden of political
awakening. Okay, let's unpack this and ground
in where she started. Born Eunice Wayman in 1933
in the small town of Trion, North Carolina. She's
the sixth of eight kids. Her mother is a Methodist
preacher, which means the church is basically
the center of their universe. Yeah, religion
was everything. And she is playing the piano
by age three. Entirely by ear, mind you. and
by age 12 she's giving her first formal classical
recital. And the way our sources describe this
specific day, it feels like the defining moment
of her entire childhood. It really does. I mean,
imagine being this 12 -year -old girl. You are
immensely talented. You've practiced for countless
hours, and you are finally sitting down at the
piano for your concert debut. It's a huge deal.
Huge. And her parents, naturally bursting with
pride, take their seats in the front row. But
you have to remember, this is the Jim Crow South
in the 1940s. Right. Before she could even strike
the first chord. and Usher forces her parents
to get up and move to the back of the hall, simply
to make room for white attendees who had arrived
late. Oh, man. And even at 12 years old, she
completely understands the sheer indignity of
that. Oh, absolutely. She completely refuses
to play. She just sits there, arms crossed, and
tells them she will not touch the keys until
her parents are moved back to the front row.
It's an incredibly potent early display of the
defiance that would really come to define her
entire public persona. Yeah, she forced them
to move her parents back. She did. But despite
that harsh early realization of how racial dynamics
were going to dictate her life, her ultimate
goal remained unchanged. She wanted to be the
first black female concert pianist in America.
And she was violently serious about it, too.
Her local community actually recognized this
once -in -a -generation talent and set up a fund
to support her education. Which is amazing. It
is. She goes to a private boarding school, Allen
High School for Girls, becomes valedictorian,
and then spends a grueling summer studying at
the prestigious Juilliard School in New York.
Just relentless drive. Exactly. And all of this
was just preparation for her ultimate goal, which
was an audition at the Curtis Institute of Music
in Philadelphia. Her entire family even relocated
to Philly, fully expecting her to get in. She
auditions, and she is rejected. Yeah. That rejection
was a blow from which she arguably never fully
recovered. Really? Yeah. For the rest of her
life, she maintained that she was denied admission
purely because of racial prejudice. Now, looking
objectively at the historical record. The Curtis
Institute has always denied this. Right. They
had a different explanation. They did. They've
noted that the year she auditioned, they only
accepted three out of 72 applicants. And they
did actually have black students enrolled at
the time. So it was insanely competitive. Exactly.
But whether it was a numbers game or prejudice,
the result for Eunice was the same. The door
to the classical concert hall was slammed completely
shut. But she still had to survive. She still
needed to fund her private piano lessons because
she completely refused to give up the dream.
Right. So she takes a job playing piano at the
Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City. It's
this gritty cocktail lounge environment. And
the owner there looks at her and says, look,
you can't just sit there and play Bach. If you
want to keep this job, you have to sing too.
Which was terrifying for her, actually, not just
because she wasn't a trained singer, but because
of her mother. Right. She knows her deeply religious
mother would absolutely disown her for playing
in a bar, let alone playing the devil's music,
which is how the church viewed this secular cocktail
jazz and blues. Oh, for sure. So to hide her
identity, she completely changes her name. She
takes Nina from a nickname a former boyfriend
gave her, meaning little one in Spanish, and
Simone. from the French actress, Simone Signore,
who she admired. And just like that, Eunice Wayman
disappears into the shadows and Nina Simone is
born. It's a complete reinvention out of sheer
financial necessity. I always think of her early
Atlantic City gigs like this. Imagine you have
a classically trained Michelin star chef. She
has spent her whole life mastering complex French
techniques, but she gets locked out of the fine
dining world. Okay. To pay the rent, she's forced
to cook late night diner food, like burgers and
fries. But because she literally can't help herself,
she starts applying those Michelin star techniques
to the diner food. And without meaning to, she
accidentally invents an entirely new, world -changing
cuisine. That is actually a brilliant way to
frame it. She isn't just playing standard blues.
She's taking rigid European classical styling
and folding it directly into American jazz, creating
a sonic synthesis nobody had ever heard before.
Yeah. She's serving complex, multi -layered musical
reductions on paper plates, essentially. And
the patrons at this gritty bar are realizing
it's the most incredible thing they've ever heard.
Totally. It quickly earned her a rabid following.
But unfortunately, that sudden success walked
her right into an immense financial tragedy.
Ugh, yes. This part of her biography physically
hurts to read. It's brutal. Her debut album,
Little Girl Blue, comes out in 1959. It features
her first huge hit, I Loves You, Porgy. Because
she didn't view herself as a pop star, like...
She still thought of herself as a classical pianist
just trying to make a quick buck to fund her
real lessons. She sold the rights to that entire
album outright for just $3 ,000. Which is just
a staggering mistake. Because she gave up those
publishing and recording rights, she lost out
on well over $1 million in royalties over the
next few decades. Wow. Yeah. And that financial
loss compounded in a brutal way in the late 1980s.
Another song from that exact same debut album,
My baby just cares for me, became a massive global
hit after being featured in a Chanel number five
television commercial in Europe. Right, I remember
that. Yeah, top the charts. But because of that
$3 ,000 deal she made in her 20s, she never saw
a dime of the financial windfall from the very
foundation of her career. it really sets up this
lifelong narrative of exploitation by the music
industry. But eventually she does sign with Colpix
Records where she demands and gets total creative
control and she starts building this incredibly
lucrative career. She does, yeah. But I have
to ask, here's where it gets really interesting
to me. If her career as a pop and jazz artist
was finally taking off and she's finally making
real money, Why risk it all with a sudden sharp
pivot into radical politics? Was it just a pure
emotional reaction to the news or did she know
exactly what she was sacrificing? Honestly, it
wasn't a calculated career move at all. It was
an unavoidable moral imperative for her. You
have to look at the timeline. The turning point
is 1963. OK. In June, civil rights activist Medgar
Evers is assassinated in his own driveway in
Mississippi. Right. Then in September, you have
the horrific bombing of the 16th Street Baptist
Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four
young black girls who were just getting ready
for Sunday service. It was. And the sheer unvarnished
brutality of those two events shattered whatever
barrier Simone had tried to keep between her
palatable music and her identity as a black woman
in America. And the result of that shattering
is arguably her most famous protest song, Mississippi
Goddamn. Yes. She described writing that song
as an eruption. She said it came to her in a
rush of fury, hatred, and determination. It was
a completely visceral reaction. She famously
said that releasing that song was like throwing
10 bullets back at them. And if you listen to
the song, it is so subversive. She plays it at
this upbeat, almost bouncy show tune tempo. Right.
It's very fast. It sounds like something you'd
hear in a bright Broadway musical. But then the
lyrics kick in and she is just searing the American
South with absolute venom. It completely obliterated
her safe, palatable pop image. Overnight. Promotional
copies of the record were literally snapped in
half by a radio station in the Carolinas and
mailed back to her record label. Southern stations
boycotted her entirely. They did. instead of
apologizing or backing down to save her record
sales, she leaned further in. And her political
evolution during this time is really striking,
especially when you compare it to the mainstream
civil rights movement that was being broadcast
on television. Right, because looking at the
historical texts, she completely diverged from
Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent approach.
Malcolm X was actually her neighbor when she
lived in Mount Vernon, New York. He was, yeah.
And I want to step in here really quickly to
be very clear. As we're looking at these sources,
we are impartially reporting the historical facts
of her life. We aren't endorsing any specific
political ideologies or taking sides, but the
biography states very clearly that she supported
black nationalism. Okay. Got it. Yeah. And she
actively advocated for a violent revolution,
and she believed that African Americans should
use armed combat to form a separate independent
state. Again, just neutrally reporting what the
historical source material says. Of course. But
that is a massive departure from the we shall
overcome narrative that dominated the mainstream
press at the time. It is a huge departure. She
viewed nonviolence as a deeply flawed strategy
against an opponent that was actively bombing
children. And much of this intense political
consciousness was cultivated through her incredibly
close friendship with the brilliant playwright
Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote A Raisin in the
Sun. Oh, wow. Simone used to say that when they
hung out, it wasn't superficial chatter. She
described it as... real girls talk, but their
version of girls talk was like sitting around
debating Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and the mechanics
of global revolution. Exactly. It was rigorous
intellectual cross -pollination. And sadly, after
Hansberry died tragically young of cancer, Simone
honored her by taking the title of one of Hansberry's
unfinished plays and turning it into the monumental
anthem. To be young, gifted and black. Which
is such an incredible tribute. But you know,
her activism wasn't just loud, explosive anger
like Mississippi Goddamn or broad, uplifting
anthems. She started using her classical precision
to surgically dissect race and gender. Yes, she
really did. And that brings us to the song For
Women. This song blew my mind. She's expanding
the protest beyond just voting rights and turning
the lens onto identity and intersectionality
long before that word was being used in universities.
Yeah, Four Women is an absolute master class
in narrative songwriting. She systematically
dismantles Eurocentric beauty standards by exploring
the internalized trauma of four black women,
each with a different skin tone and a different
brutal history. Right. But she goes further than
just skin color. She is exposing the restrictive
historical stereotypes that have been forced
onto black women for centuries. Yeah, she gives
each woman a verse. She starts with Aunt Sarah,
representing the mammy archetype, the woman whose
back is bent from scrubbing floors and carrying
the physical labor of white society. Then there's
Sophronia, representing the tragic mulatto, the
mixed race woman who is the product of a white
father forcing himself on a black mother, leaving
her trapped between two worlds. Then she moves
to Sweet Thing, representing the sex worker,
forced to commodify her own body just to survive.
And finally, she ends with Peaches, representing
the angry black woman whose bitterness is the
direct inheritance of generations of slavery
and segregation. It's so intense. She essentially
forces the audience to look directly at the psychological
scars of American history. It's almost like she
was smuggling radical social theory and elite
classical architecture inside a Trojan horse
of pop and blues. Like you think you're just
tapping your foot to a catchy tune, but you're
actually getting an Ivy League lecture on intersectionality
and Johann Sebastian Bach. That phrase, classical
architecture, is actually the perfect way to
describe her playing because she absolutely hated
being called a jazz singer. Really? Yeah, she
saw herself as a composer and an arranger. She
brought the specific ruling virtuosity of the
19th century romantic piano repertoire, so I
think Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, directly into
our popular music. And when you look at her sheet
music, she's actually using Bach -style counterpoint
in these nightclub songs. She is. For anyone
who might not be a music theory nerd, counterpoint
is essentially playing two or more completely
independent melodies at the exact same time and
making them harmonize. Which is incredibly difficult.
Oh, yeah. Imagine your left hand playing a heavy
rhythmic glues bass line while your right hand
is playing an intricate, soaring, mathematically
perfect classical back melody. It takes immense
brain power to not let them bleed into each other.
Jazz legend Miles Davis was apparently in awe
of her ability to play three -part counterpoint
while improvising. It was a staggering technical
skill. But you know, her piano playing also served
a secondary, almost defensive purpose regarding
her vocals. We all think of Nina Simone's voice
as this deeply iconic, rich sound, but she never
actually trained as a singer. Zero formal voice
training. She studied piano for 14 years, practicing
six hours a day. But the voice was just raw,
unprained instinct. Which made her very self
-conscious, actually. But she utilized her profound
musical intelligence to mask what she felt were
her vocal limitations. Oh, that's clever. Yeah,
her voice naturally sat in the contralto range,
which is the lowest female singing voice. Yeah.
Because she had perfect pitch, she would transpose
any song into the absolute easiest key for her
specific range. Makes sense. Right. And by doing
that, nobody could detect that her vocal flexibility
was limited. Instead of doing flashy vocal acrobatics,
her signature became this incredible dynamic
tension. She would elongate a single note, holding
it perfectly still while her hands played a hurricane
of notes underneath it. You can actually hear
that tension in almost all her live recordings.
But carrying the immense weight of that musical
tension, combined with being the uncompromising
political voice for so much pain and anger, It
eventually broke her down. It did. And the later
half of her life story paints a really dark,
fractured reality. Yeah. By 1970, the psychological
toll of her genius and her activism became too
much. The civil rights movement was fracturing,
many of its leaders had been assassinated, and
she felt completely disillusioned with America.
So she fled the country entirely. And she was
fleeing on multiple fronts, right? She left behind
her husband and manager, Andrew Stroud. She later
claimed he abused her both psychologically and
physically, treating her, in her own words, like
a workhorse to generate money. A very dark situation.
But she was also fleeing the IRS. There was a
warrant for her arrest regarding unpaid taxes,
which she had deliberately withheld as a protest
against the Vietnam War. Right. And this begins
a long, painful, and highly unstable period of
nomadic exile. She goes to Barbados First, where
she reportedly had a lengthy affair with the
Prime Minister. Wow. Yeah. Then, heavily persuaded
by her close friend, the South African singer,
Maryam Akaba, she relocates to Liberia, hoping
to find a sense of belonging in Africa. And this
is where the story gets incredibly difficult
to process. When she moved to Liberia, she abandoned
her young daughter, Lisa, back in New York. And
when Lisa eventually reunited with her mother
in Africa, Lisa reported that her mother was
so physically and mentally abusive that it drove
Lisa to become suicidal. Lisa actually had to
flee back to the United States just to survive
her own mother. It's horrific. It is. How do
we even begin to process that? Like, we love
to romanticize the tortured artist trope in our
culture. We love the rebellious civil rights
hero. But how do you, as a listener, reconcile
the musical genius who wrote to be young, gifted,
and black with a mother who caused such profound
harm to her own child? It is the crucial, uncomfortable
tension of her legacy. You really can't just
brush it away. But if you look at the broader
medical context of her life, you see a woman
who's underlying biology was constantly colliding
with immense trauma. What do you mean by biology?
Well, while she was living in the Netherlands
in the late 1980s, she was finally diagnosed
with bipolar disorder. For decades, she'd been
carrying the grief and rage of an entire marginalized
population on her shoulders while simultaneously
being exploited by the music industry, abused
by her partner, and suffering from severe, completely
untreated psychiatric illness. Wow. And because
the bipolar disorder went untreated for so long,
the people around her had to resort to extreme
measures. Her friends and caretakers were secretly
slipping her antipsychotic medication, Trilofon,
into her food just to keep her stabilized because
she refused to follow a treatment plan. Exactly.
It highlights the extreme, terrifying instability
she was living with. And that instability frequently
spilled over into erratic and sometimes very
real physical violence. Yeah, the incidents from
this era are alarming. In 1985, she fired a gun
at a record company executive who she accused
of stealing her royalties. She later admitted
in interviews that she was actively trying to
kill him but missed. Yeah. And then a decade
later, while living in France, she shot and wounded
her neighbor's teenage son with an air gun. Why?
Because his laughter was interrupting her piano
practice, and she perceived his response to her
as a racial insult. Right. And, you know, it
does not excuse the violence or the profound
harm she caused her daughter. full stop, but
it provides the tragic context of a brilliant
mind that was pushed far beyond its breaking
point, completely unsupported by the society
that consumed her art. It's a really heavy reality,
which I think makes the final chapter of her
life feel incredibly bittersweet. Two days before
she died in her sleep at her home in France in
2003, at the age of 70, she received a piece
of mail. It was an honorary degree. Yes. an honorary
degree from the Curtis Institute of Music in
Philadelphia. The exact same school that had
rejected her half a century earlier. The rejection
that literally altered the entire trajectory
of her life. Yeah. In her later years, she always
insisted on being called Dr. Nina Simone after
receiving various honorary degrees. But finally,
receiving that specific validation from Curtis
just 48 hours before the end of her life is an
incredibly poignant close to her story. It really
is. So to synthesize what we've unpacked today
for you listening, Nina Simone wasn't just a
jazz singer. She was a classical virtuoso who
was hijacked by history, denied the polite, orderly
world of the classical concert hall, She used
the only tool she had left, a piano and a raw,
untrained control to voice, to force the world
to look at its own ugliness. She weaponized her
talent to fight for liberation. even as that
fight and her own untreated illness consumed
her from the inside out. It leaves you with something
really profound to mull over. Like, we spent
this whole time talking about how the Curtis
Institute's rejection destroyed Eunice Wayman's
dream. But imagine for a second if they had accepted
her. Right. Imagine if society had just let her
be the classical concert pianist she wanted to
be. We would have gained a brilliant interpreter
of Bach and Chopin, sure. But we never would
have had Mississippi Goddamn. We never would
have had the soundtrack to the civil rights movement.
That's very true. It begs a really uncomfortable
question about how we consume art. Does society
sometimes require the complete breaking of a
marginalized person in order to forge the cultural
anthems we desperately need? A haunting, but
really necessary thought to leave on. Thank you
so much for joining us on this deep dive into
the extraordinary, turbulent life of Dr. Nina
Simone. We'll see you next time.