An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted 6/22/2020
"There's no excuse for the young people not knowing who the heroes and heroines are or were."
Musically gifted almost from the start, North Carolina-born Eunice Kathleen Waymon enjoyed enthusiastic support from her family and attended Julliard. From there she even applied to admission at the Curtis Institute of Music but fell short --the failure was ostensibly on a bureaucratic technicality but more realistically on racial grounds. Rather than seeing this as a setback, she turned it into an opportunity, took on the professional name Nina Simone and embarked on a jazz singing career that ulitmately produced more than 40 albums.
She also emerged an up-front, unapologetic voice in the civil rights movement --among her songs are "Young, Gifted and Black," and "Old Jim Crow," but the song you almost certainly know best is the accusatory "Mississippi Goddamn." (Go do yourself a favour and hunt that one up if you don't know it already.) Simone's deep disappointment with the United States wasn't limited just to her vocals; later she moved to Barbados, then to Liberia, and then ultimately France.
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