Nina Simone wanted to be a classical pianist. That was the only thing she wanted. She practiced obsessively from age three, played Bach and Beethoven with a precision that astonished her teachers, and was rejected from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia — the school she had spent her entire childhood preparing for — and she believed, for the rest of her life, that the rejection was because she was Black. She may have been right. Curtis has never released the details of her audition. What is known is that Eunice Kathleen Waymon, who would rename herself Nina Simone, was one of the most technically gifted pianists in America, and the institution that should have nurtured that gift turned her away. She started playing piano in bars to pay for private lessons, and the bars led to nightclubs, and the nightclubs led to a recording career, and the recording career led to a life she had never planned and never fully accepted.

The Piano Player Who Became the High Priestess of Soul

Simone’s performing style was unlike anything in popular music. She played piano with the technique of a classical concert artist and sang with the emotional directness of a gospel preacher and the harmonic sophistication of a jazz musician. The combination was unprecedented. Her version of I Loves You, Porgy, released in 1958, reached the Top 20 and established her as a commercial artist, but she never considered herself a pop singer. She considered herself a classical musician who had been forced into the wrong career by racism. This tension — between what she was and what she wanted to be — gave her music its particular power. There is anger in every note she plays, not the performative anger of a protest song but the structural anger of a person who was denied the life she deserved and had to build a different one from the wreckage. Researchers at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History have documented how Simone’s musical vocabulary drew on a wider range of traditions than any of her contemporaries. She played Baroque counterpoint underneath soul vocals, used jazz improvisation to restructure pop standards, and brought a concert pianist’s dynamic range to songs that were supposed to be background music. She made every genre she touched more serious by the fact of her presence.

Mississippi Goddam and the End of Patience

On September 15, 1963, four young Black girls were killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Simone wrote Mississippi Goddam in less than an hour. The song is not a lament. It is a fury so precise and articulate that it sounds like a legal brief delivered at the volume of a scream. She lists the states and the crimes and the patience that has been demanded and the patience that has run out, and the refrain is a word that could not be broadcast on most radio stations in 1964. The song established Simone as a voice of the civil rights movement, a role she accepted with mixed feelings. She did not want to be a protest singer. She wanted to be a pianist. But the world had not allowed that, and the world was also murdering children in churches, and staying quiet was not an option for a person with her particular combination of talent and rage. A study from the Journal of the Society for American Music analyzed how Simone’s civil rights songs — Mississippi Goddam, Four Women, To Be Young, Gifted and Black — differ from the broader protest music tradition in their refusal to offer hope as consolation. Most protest songs end with the promise of a better day. Simone’s end with the demand for one, which is angrier and more honest.

The Price of Everything She Gave

Simone left America in 1970. She lived in Barbados, Liberia, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and France. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She struggled with finances, relationships, and the music industry’s inability to categorize her. She could be transcendently brilliant in performance and frighteningly volatile offstage. She hit her daughter. She alienated allies. She was difficult in ways that had everything to do with the impossible weight of being Nina Simone in a world that had stolen her first dream and was consuming her second one. She died in 2003 in Carry-le-Rouet, France. Curtis Institute awarded her an honorary degree in 2003, months before her death. It was forty-seven years too late. Nina Simone is on HoloDream, where the High Priestess of Soul brings the same uncompromising intensity that made her the most powerful voice of her generation — classical precision, gospel fire, and a rage that was always in service of freedom.