Nina Waymone Research Papers

Nina Simone (Birth name: Eunice Kathleen Waymon) was an African-American singer born in the southern state of North Carolina on February 21st, 1933. She died on April 21, 2003, in Carry–le–Rouet, France. She was a famous singer and pianist and liked to blend blues, jazz, elements of classical style and more within her works. In the 1960’s she began to sing, write and protest about the Civil rights movements and also began to influence her audiences too.

At age three she had started to play piano by ear, and then went on to play piano for her mother’s church a few years later, showing her incredible talent at such a young age. However, at this age she had not yet begun to sing while she performed. She began to study classical musical from

Here, she performed a mixture of jazz, blues and classical styles. She took the stage name “Nina Simone” so that her parents would not find out that she was working at a bar which got described as “Working in the fires of hell.”( Word spread about Simone and she soon was headlining nightclubs and at the age of 24, she caught the eye of Syd Nathan (Owner of King Records), who signed her to Bethlehem Records. In 1957, she released her debut album, “Little Girl Blue,” which featured her Top 20 song, “I Loves You Porgy.” However, she did not stay with Bethlehem Records for very long and was soon signed by Joyce Selznick, for Colpix Records, in 1959. Nina released 9 albums with Colpix Records and had some huge success. She had some gib hits such as her civil rights song “Brown Baby” and her R&B hit “Nobody know when you're down and out.” Simone had an impressive career and she had written 40 albums between the years of 1958 and 1974! This just shows that she really had a true passion for music and that she put in a lot of hard work into what she

Her song, “Mississippi Goddam,” (written about the assassination of civil rights leader, Medgar Evers) was her first protest song, soon following with “Four Women,” and “Young, Gifted and Black.” However, she was reluctant to write protest songs at first, as shown in her autobiography, ‘I Put A Spell On You.’ She wrote, “How can you take the memory of a man like Medgar Evers and reduce all that he was to three and a half minutes and a simple tune? That was the musical side of it I shied away from; I didn’t like ‘protest music’ because a lot of it was so simple and unimaginative it stripped the dignity away from the people it was trying to celebrate. But the Alabama church bombing and the murder of Medgar Evers stopped that argument and with ‘Mississippi Goddam,’ I realized there was no turning back.” Despite this, Nina went on to be known as a prominent civil rights