Nina Simone

Eunice Kathleen Waymon, better known as Nina Simone (February 21, 1933 – April 21, 2003), was an American singer, songwriter, pianist and activist. She generally is classified as a jazz musician, although she disliked that categorisation herself; and her work also has been described as covering the blues, rhythm and blues, classical, and soul. Her vocal style is characterized by passion, breathiness, and tremolo. = Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon at 30 East Livingston Street in Tryon, North Carolina, one of eight children. Like a number of other African-American singers, she was inspired as a child by Marian Anderson and began singing at her local church, also showing prodigious talent as a pianist. Her public debut, a piano recital, was made at the age of ten. Her parents, who had taken seats in the front row, were forced to move to the back of the hall to make way for some white people. This incident contributed to her later involvement in the civil rights movement.

Simone's mother, Mary Kate Waymon (who lived into her late 90s) was a strict Methodist minister; her father, John Divine Waymon, was a handyman and sometime barber who su...