Nina Simone 1933-2003

The music world was today mourning the death of Nina Simone, one of the outstanding talents of the past 50 years. Simone, who had been ill for some time, died at her home in the south of France on Easter Monday. She was 70.

Born on February 21st. 1933, her family name was Eunice Waymon. Reared in Tryon, North Carolina, the sixth of seven children, she was a child prodigy, playing the piano from the age of four and being recognised from that early age as a musician of rare ability.

Among her earliest gigs was working in an Irish bar in Atlantic City. She subsequently changed her name to Nina Simone, borrowing the surname from the French actress Simone Sigournet, and signed a deal with the Bethlehem label – for whom she recorded the classic ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’. It was a source of bitterness for her that the deal was so one-sided that she never received any royalties for that recording, nor for the album of which it was part.

‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’ was used in an ad for Chanel in 1987 and became a worldwide hit.

In the interim, Nina Simone had enjoyed a stormy career, making great records and falling foul of the establishment in equal measure. Following the bombing of a church in Birmingham in 1963, she recorded ‘Mississippi Goddam’ – an angry denunciation of racism. In 1966, she recorded ‘Four Women’, a song that depicted degrees of racism through describing the experiences of four black women – and which led to criticisms from within the black community. Following the death of Martin Luther King, she wrote and recorded ‘The King Is Dead’ as a tribute– but at this stage her political views were closer to the militancy of Malcolm X.

Shunned and occasionally censored in the United States, she felt increasingly isolated and estranged, and in 1974, she left for Barbados, where her ancestors had come from.

Dubbed the High Priestess of Soul, she never received the recognition in the US that her extraordinary talents deserved. While she was best known to the world for her interpretations of ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’ and ‘I Loves You Porgy’, she had a way with modern pop too, delivering unforgettable renditions of ‘I Got Life’, from the musical Hair, ‘To Love Somebody’, and Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’, among other contemporary classics.

In 1999, she was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Hot Press Awards and travelled to Ireland for the occasion. The award was presented by Sinead O’Connor, who described it as the greatest honour of her life, to share a stage with the great diva.

"She was a strong and powerful woman with a somewhat forbidding presence, " Hot Press Editor, Niall Stokes, recalls. "But she felt a very strong affinity with Ireland and with the Irish – she had been told that there was a bit of Irish in her background, which deepened that sense of shared experience and belonging.

"It was a genuinely beautiful and moving moment when the Award was presented. What Sinead said really struck a chord and everyone in the room stood up to give Nina Simone a prolonged standing ovation. The people in the room, to my memory, included David Holmes, for whom she was a hero, Neil Hannon, Paul Brady, members of Ash, The Corrs, Altan and a host of other great musicians and it was brilliant for us – and for Nina – to feel the respect and reverence in which she was held. It was an unforgettable occasion for me and for everyone who was involved.

"I’m really glad that we made the decision to honour her at the time, and that she accepted the invitation," Stokes considers. "It’s strange that this was one of the only, if not the only honour of its type bestowed on a woman who was such an inspiration to so many artists. But that, I guess, is the way it sometimes goes."