29/10/2023
Nina Simone In a motel room in Buffalo, New York. December 1964.
When I used to get blue years ago, James Baldwin would say the same thing to me each time: ‘This is the world you have made for yourself, Nina, now you have to live in it,’” Nina Simone muses in the opening lines of her 1992 autobiography, I Put a Spell on You.
Simone was recognized as a musical genius almost from birth. At just six months, her mother realized that her toddler could recognize musical notes on paper, and “it scared her,” Simone said. By the age of three, Simone was already playing complete songs on the piano — blues and gospel tunes at church. But it was really the works of Johann Sebastian Bach and other classical composers that captured the young pianist’s imagination as she began her formal piano lessons.
In 1950, Simone began studying at New York’s famed Juilliard music school and a year later auditioned for a scholarship to attend Philadelphia’s prestigious Curtis Institute of Music. She was rejected. Simone maintained it was racism pure and simple. “I knew I was good enough, but they turned me down. And it took me about six months to realize it was because I was Black. I never really got over that jolt of racism at the time,” Simone relayed in the documentary, “What Happened, Miss Simone?”
The truth of this matter is less certain. In fact, Curtis had accepted Black students to the piano department before 1951, including an 11-year-old prodigy, Blanche Burton-Lyles, who was recommended for early admission in 1944 and 10 years later became the first Black female pianist to graduate, according to the Institute. Nevertheless, the rejection crushed Simone, who vowed to re-audition and started teaching piano while taking her own piano lessons in Philadelphia.
It was an interaction with one of her students that altered Simone’s path forever. That student had a summer gig playing piano in Atlantic City that paid $90 a week. “90 dollars was double what I earned,” Simone later wrote in her autobiography, “I Put a Spell on You,” and so she ended up in Atlantic City in the summer of 1954, “figuring if one of my students could get a job as a pianist, so could I.”
Liz Fields / PBS
Photo by Alfred Wertheimer