Artist: Nina Simone

Nina Simone (born Eunice Kathleen Waymon) was an American singer, songwriter, pianist, and civil rights activist. Her music spanned styles including  classical, folk,  gospel, blues, jazz,  R&B, and pop. 

She recorded more than 40 albums between 1958 and 1974. She released her first hit single in the United States in 1958 with "I Loves You, Porgy". Her piano playing was strongly influenced by baroque and classical music, especially Johann Sebastian Bach, and accompanied expressive, jazz-like singing in her contralto voice. 

Her debut album Little Girl Blue was released in 1959 on Bethlehem Records. After the success of Little Girl Blue, Simone signed a contract with Colpix Records  and recorded a multitude of studio and live albums.

On her debut album for Philips, Nina Simone in Concert (1964), for the first time she addressed racial inequality in the United States in the song "Mississippi Goddam". This was her response to the June 12, 1963, murder of Medgar Evers and the September 15, 1963, bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church  in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young black girls and partly blinded a fifth. She later recalled how "Mississippi Goddam" was her "first civil rights song."

In 1967, Simone moved from Philips to RCA Victor. She sang "Backlash Blues" written by her friend, Harlem Renaissance leader Langston Hughes, on her first RCA album, Nina Simone Sings the Blues (1967). On Silk & Soul (1967), she recorded Billy Taylor's "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" and "Turning Point". The album 'Nuff Said! (1968) contained live recordings from the Westbury Music Fair of April 7, 1968, three days after the  assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. She dedicated the performance to him and sang "Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)," a song written by her bass player, Gene Taylor. In 1969, she performed at the Harlem Cultural Festival in Harlem's Mount Morris Park, which was recorded in Questlove's 2021 documentary Summer of Soul. 

Simone and  Irvine turned the unfinished play To Be Young, Gifted and Black by Lorraine Hansberry into a civil rights song of the same name. She credited her friend Hansberry with cultivating her social and political consciousness. She performed the song live on the album Black Gold (1970). A studio recording was released as a single, and renditions of the song have been recorded by Aretha Franklin (on her 1972 album Young, Gifted and Black) and Donny Hathaway. When reflecting on this period, she wrote in her autobiography, "I felt more alive then than I feel now because I was needed, and I could sing something to help my people". 

During the 1980s, Simone performed regularly at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London, where she recorded the album Live at Ronnie Scott's in 1984. Although her early on-stage style could be somewhat haughty and aloof, in later years, Simone particularly seemed to enjoy engaging with her audiences sometimes, by recounting humorous anecdotes related to her career and music and by soliciting requests. By this time she stayed everywhere and nowhere. She lived in Liberia, Barbados and Switzerland and eventually ended up in Paris. There she regularly performed in a small jazz club called  Aux Trois Mailletz.

In the spring of 1988, Simone moved to Nijmegen in the Netherlands. She bought an apartment next to the Belvoir Hotel with view of the Waalbrug and Ooijpolder. In 1991 she exchanged Nijmegen for Amsterdam, where she lived for two years. 

In 1993, Simone settled near Aix-en-Provence in southern France (Bouches-du-Rhône). In the same year, her final album, A Single Woman, was released. She suffered from breast cancer for several years before she died in her sleep at her home in Carry-le-Rouet (Bouches-du-Rhône), in 2003. Her Catholic funeral service at the local parish was attended by singers Miriam Makeba and Patti LaBelle, poet Sonia Sanchez, actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and hundreds of others.