Eunice Kathleen Waymon professionally known as Nina Simone - singer, songwriter, musician, arranger, and civil rights activist.

Quotes by Nina Simone

“I’ll tell you what freedom is to me: no fear. I mean really, no fear!”

“At this crucial time in our lives, when everything is so desperate, when every day is a matter of survival, I don’t think you can help but be involved.”

“Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.”

“I’m a real rebel with a cause.”

“Sometimes I sound like gravel, and sometimes I sound like coffee and cream.”

“You get racism crossing the street; it’s in the very fabric of American society.”

“The worst thing about that kind of prejudice… is that while you feel hurt and angry and all the rest of it, it feeds you self-doubt. You start thinking, perhaps I am not good enough.”

“Slavery has never been abolished from America’s way of thinking.”

“I think that the artists who don’t get involved in preaching messages probably are happier—but you see, I have to live with Nina, and that is very difficult.”

“To me, we are the most beautiful creatures in the whole world. Black people. And I mean that in every sense.”

“You feel the shame, humiliation, and anger at being just another victim of prejudice, and at the same time, there’s the nagging worry that maybe… you’re just no good.”

“All the time, there was the weight of my community’s expectations on my shoulders.”

“The protest years were over, not just for me but for a whole generation, and in music, just like in politics, many of the greatest talents were dead or in exile, and their place was filled by third-rate imitators.”

“When I’m on that stage, I assume honor. I assume compensation, and I should.”

“It’s an artist’s duty to reflect the times in which we live.”

“I want to shake people up so bad, that when they leave a nightclub where I’ve performed, I just want them to be to pieces.”

“Did you know that the human voice is the only pure instrument? That it has notes no other instrument has? It’s like being between the keys of a piano. The notes are there, you can sing them, but they can’t be found on any instrument. That’s like me. I live in between this. I live in both worlds, the black and white world.”

“I had spent many years pursuing excellence because that is what classical music is all about… Now it was dedicated to freedom, and that was far more important.”

“Once I understood Bach’s music, I wanted to be a concert pianist. Bach made me dedicate my life to music, and it was that teacher who introduced me to his world.”

“There’s no excuse for the young people not knowing who the heroes and heroines are or were.”

“Greed has driven the world crazy. And I think I’m lucky that I have a place over here that I can call home.”

“What I was interested in was conveying an emotional message, which means using everything you’ve got inside you sometimes to barely make a note, or if you have to strain to sing, you sing.”

“I’m not a blues singer, I’m a diva.”

“As a political weapon, it has helped me for 30 years defend the rights of American blacks and third-world people all over the world, to defend them with protest songs. To move the audience to make them conscious of what has been done to my people around the world.”

“I have to be composed; I have to be poised. I have to remember what my first piano teacher told me: ‘You do not touch that piano until you are ready and until they are ready to listen to you.”

“I didn’t get interested in music. It was a gift from God.”

“When I was studying… there weren’t any black concert pianists. My choices were intuitive, and I had the technique to do it. People have heard my music and heard the classic in it, so I have become known as a black classical pianist.”

“I think the rich will eventually have to cave in too because the economic situation around the world is not gonna tolerate the United States being on top forever.”

Quote source: https://americansongwriter.com/the-32-best-nina.../...
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Below is an excerpt of a NYT article.

The Artists Turning Nina Simone’s Childhood Home Into a Creative Destination

Rashid Johnson, Julie Mehretu, Adam Pendleton and Ellen Gallagher are working both to preserve and transform the North Carolina house where she was born.

NINA SIMONE was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon on Feb. 21, 1933, in the 660-square-foot house at 30 East Livingston Street.

By Adam Bradley /NYT - March 16, 2022

Simone’s mother was an ordained minister and domestic worker; her father ran his own dry-cleaning business and worked as a handyman.

Modest though the home might seem today, back then it embodied the promise of prosperity. The Waymons’ plot of land afforded them room for a vegetable garden.

They enjoyed other small luxuries, as well, as described in Nadine Cohodas’s 2010 biography, “Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone”: a stove in two of the three rooms to keep the house warm during cold months and to heat water for bathing; a small pump organ where Eunice picked out her first notes; a swing in the yard; even a tennis court just across the street.

The exercise of segregation was more nuanced in Tryon than it was in large metropolitan areas like Charlotte and Atlanta, but it nonetheless exerted itself as a palpable lack. Simone, her parents and her siblings (she was the sixth of eight children) lived in the home until early 1937, when her father suffered an intestinal illness that left him incapacitated for a time.

The next several years were itinerant, the family moving to close to half a dozen now-forgotten homes in and around Tryon.

Those early years on Livingston Street established Simone’s foundation as an artist. “Everything that happened to me as a child involved music,” Simone wrote in her 1992 autobiography, “I Put a Spell on You.”

“It was part of everyday life, as automatic as breathing.”

Her mother, Mary Kate, sang church songs to her daughter; her father, John, introduced her to jazz and the blues.

By the time Eunice was 4, she was accompanying her mother on piano as she preached Sunday sermons at St. Luke C.M.E. Church.

The years that followed were quite literally the stuff of storybooks (two children’s books about Simone’s life have come out in the last five years): Recognized as a prodigy, Eunice studied under a White woman, whom she called Miss Mazzy, who schooled her in Beethoven and Bach;

the town rallied around Eunice and raised money to support her education, including time in New York City, at Juilliard; soon thereafter, she faced wrenching rejection from Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute, where she had hoped to continue her studies in classical music;

instead, she made a surprising star turn as a lounge singer at an Atlantic City, N.J., nightclub, leading to a recording contract; a string of hits followed for Eunice (now called Nina);

then, galvanized by the social and political upheavals of the 1960s, she achieved artistic complexity and individualism through what she would later call “civil rights music.”

Like Du Bois, Simone was an expat: When she died in 2003, after a protracted illness, she was living in Carry-le-Rouet, a small seaside town in the south of France, some 4,500 miles away from the house on East Livingston Street where she had been born 70 years earlier.

Even though she lived nearly half her life outside of the United States — from Liberia to the Netherlands and beyond before settling in France — she remained forever enlisted in the cause of racial justice in America.

Simone’s enduring power emanates from her art and from her activism, as well as from her activist art. Her biggest hits — “I Loves You, Porgy,” “Trouble in Mind,” “I Put a Spell on You” — are ingenious reinventions of other people’s songs grappling with love, loss and longing. But her most cherished recordings — “Four Women,” “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” “Mississippi Goddam” — are original compositions that give voice to an insurgent Black pride and defiance.

It is these qualities, this complexity of vision, to which the four artists respond.

-End of excerpt-

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/.../nina-simone-childhood-home.html