Nina Simone The Legend

· Composed over 500 songs, recorded almost 60 albums

· First woman to win the Jazz Cultural Award

· "Woman of the Year" 1966, Jazz at Home Club

· Female Jazz Singer of the Year, 1967, National Association of Television and Radio Announcers

In 1993, Don Shewey wrote of Nina Simone in the Village Voice, "She's not a pop singer, she's a diva, a hopeless eccentric ... who has so thoroughly co-mingled her odd talent and brooding temperament that she has turned herself into a force of nature, an exotic creature spied so infrequently that every appearance is legendary."
Nina Simone was born as Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, daughter of John D. Waylon and Mary Kate Waymon, an ordained Methodist minister. she learned to play piano early. She studied with a Mrs. Miller and then with Muriel Massinovitch.For her last year of high school, Nina Simone attended Juilliard School of Music, as part of her plan to prepare to attend the Curtis Institute of Music. She took the entrance exam for the Curtis Institute's classical piano program, but was not accepted. Nina Simone believed that she was good enough for the program, but that she was rejected because she was black.She began playing piano in 1954 at the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City. She adopted the name of Nina Simone to avoid her mother's religious disapproval of playing in a bar. The bar owner demanded soon that she add vocals to her piano playing, and Nina Simone began to draw large audiences of younger people who were fascinated by her eclectic musical repertoire and style. Soon she was playing in better nightclubs, and moved into the Greenwich Village scene.
By 1957, Nina Simone had found an agent, and the next year issued her first album, "Little Girl Blue." Her first single, "I Loves You Porgy," was a George Gershwin song from Porgy and Bess that had been a popular number for Billie Holiday. It sold well, and her recording career was launched.Nina Simone wrote "Mississippi Goddam" after the bombing of a Baptist church in Alabama killed four children and after Medgar Evers was assassinated in Mississipppi. Othere songs by Nina Sinmone are "Backlash Blues," "Old Jim Crow," "Four Women" and "To Be Young, Gifted and Black", "Four Women" ,her cover of Sinatra's "My Way”.
Nina Simone's growing bitterness over America's racism, her disputes with the record companies and her troubles with the IRS all led to her decision to leave the United States. She first moved to Barbados, and then, with the encouragement of Miriam Makeba and others, moved to Liberia. She later moved to Switzerland then followed by a comeback attempt in London which failed when she put her faith in a sponsor who turned out to be a con man who robbed and beat her and abandoned her. She tried to commit suicide, but when that failed, found her faith in the future renewed. She built her career slowly, moving to Paris in 1978, having small successes.
In 1985, Nina Simone returned to the United States to record and perform. Her career soared when a British commercial for Chanel used her 1958 recording of "My Baby Just Cares for Me," .
In 1991 and released ,” I Put a Spell on You”, and continued to record and perform.
She died April 21, 2003, in her adopted homeland, France.

My Top three Favourite Nina Simone Tracks are " Ne Me Quitte Pas", I Put A Spell On You", I'm Feeling Good", and "My baby Just Cares For Me" just to mention a few.

Nina Simone is often classified as a jazz singer, but this is what she had to say in 1997 (in an interview with Brantley Bardin): “To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt and that's not what I play. I play black classical music. That's why I don't like the term "jazz," and Duke Ellington didn't like it either -- it's a term that's simply used to identify black people."