SPEAKER_00: Reboot your credit card with Apple Card. It gives you unlimited daily cash back that can earn 4.15% annual percentage yield when you open a savings account. A high yield, low effort way to grow your money with no fees. Apply for Apple Card now in the Wallet app on iPhone to start earning and growing your daily cash with savings today. Apple Card subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Savings accounts by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Member FDIC, terms apply.
SPEAKER_11: Warning, the following message contains an app recommendation you won't be able to resist.
SPEAKER_01: Girl, how do you keep getting all these things for free? Coffee, makeup, and now lunch?
SPEAKER_06: You haven't heard of the Drop app? Drop is a free app that rewards you for shopping at places like Ulta, Adidas, and Sam's Club. I've already earned $100 this month.
SPEAKER_10: Download the Drop app and get $5. Use invite code GETDROP222.
SPEAKER_08: My name is Diana Hock and I'm an operations manager at Morgan & Morgan. At Morgan & Morgan, we've made it really easy. Anything that we need from you, you're able to do from the comfort of your home. You can just dial pound law and you talk to someone like me.
SPEAKER_05: If you or any one of your family has been injured, call Morgan & Morgan, America's largest injury law firm. We've collected over $15 billion for our clients. It's easy. Visit forthepeople.com for an office near you.
SPEAKER_02: And 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. Young people, black and white, know this. That's why they're so involved in politics. We will shape and mold this country or it will not be molded and shaped at all anymore. So I don't think you have a choice. How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?
SPEAKER_07: From Wonder Media Network, I'm Jenny Kaplan, and this is Encyclopedia Wamanica. Today's activist was an iconic singer, songwriter, musician, and civil rights activist who earned the moniker the High Priestess of Soul. Though she's perhaps best remembered as a jazz musician, her music, much like her activism, confounded traditional labels in spanning a range of styles, including classical, jazz, blues, gospel, pop, soul, R&B, and folk music. She used her immense talents to create a body of work that was heavily focused on themes of liberation, black empowerment, and love, and used her public platform to insistently shine a light on the racism and racial inequality running rampant in the United States. Please welcome Nina Simone.
SPEAKER_02: An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times.
SPEAKER_07: Eunice Kathleen Wayman was born on February 21st, 1933 in the small town of Tryon, North Carolina. She was the sixth of eight children in a poor family. Her mother, Mary, was a Methodist minister who also worked as a housekeeper, and her father, John, was a preacher and handyman. From a very early age, Eunice showed prodigious musical talent. She learned to play the piano by ear at the age of three and played piano and organ at her church as a child. When Eunice was 12, she gave a recital at a local library. When her parents took seats at the front of the recital room to watch their daughter play, they were asked to move to the back to make room for white audience members. Eunice was furious at their treatment and refused to play until her parents were moved back to the front. She later considered this experience an early call to activism. Eunice's piano teacher was so impressed with her talent that she set up a community scholarship fund to send Eunice to the private Allen High School for Girls in Asheville, North Carolina. Eunice excelled at school and graduated as valedictorian of her class. After her graduation, Eunice spent the summer of 1950 at the Juilliard School, studying classical piano with Carl Friedberg. She was preparing for an audition at the highly prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. But Eunice was not accepted to Curtis after her audition. She believed it was a result of racism. This was a particularly difficult situation because her family had moved up to Philadelphia in anticipation of her attending school there. Instead of attending a different school, Eunice started taking lessons with the famous piano instructor at Curtis and taught piano lessons out of her home to pay the bills. In 1954, Eunice took a job at a nightclub in Atlantic City. When the owner realized she only played the piano, he threatened to fire her if she didn't start singing as well. Knowing that her religious mother would be quite upset if she found out her daughter was singing in a nightclub, Eunice adopted the stage name by which she would be known from then on, Nina Simone. Performing at the nightclub in Atlantic City and eventually on the local nightclub circuit, Nina grew a small but loyal following of fans who loved her mix of classically trained precision piano playing and her jazzy, highly expressive vocals. In 1957, while still singing in clubs, Nina recorded her first single, George Gershwin's, I Loves You Porgy. When it was released in 1959, it became a major hit and was Nina's only song to reach the Billboard Top 20 in the US. That same year, Nina signed with Bethlehem Records and released her first album called Little Girl Blue. In late 1959, Nina moved to New York City to further her music career. She signed a new contract with Colpix Records, which offered her full creative control over her music. She also started performing at venues around New York City and soon earned a reputation for spontaneous and engaging live performances. Realizing the sales potential, Colpix started releasing recordings of a number of these live performances, including her 1960 set at the legendary Newport Jazz Festival. While living in New York, Nina ran with a high profile crowd of brilliant creatives. She became close friends with writers and activists Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, and James Baldwin, and specifically credited Hansberry with helping to develop her social and political consciousness. In the early 1960s, as Nina became increasingly involved in the civil rights movement, she also became friends with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, who would later become her neighbor in Mount Vernon, New York. In 1961, Nina married a New York police detective named Andrew Stroud, who would go on to become her manager throughout the 60s. He turned out to be physically and emotionally abusive and tried to discourage Nina's civil rights work. In 1964, Nina switched from Colpix Records to Phillips Records, a Dutch company. Because Phillips was not American, Nina had a lot more freedom in the kind of content she could include on her records. Nina had always recorded music about her black heritage, but now she was able to put out music that directly addressed the issues of racism and racial inequality that were so important to her. That year, Nina released a song she'd written herself called Mississippi Goddamn. It was her response to the 1963 16th Street Baptist church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four young black girls and the 1963 murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers.
SPEAKER_13: Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddamn. Alabama's got me so upset. Tennessee made me lose my rest. Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddamn. Can't you see it? I know you can feel it. It's all in the air.
SPEAKER_07: I can't stand the practice. Backlash to the song was intense. It was boycotted in areas throughout the South and promotional records of the song were smashed by Southern radio stations. In discussing her initial reluctance to perform music about civil rights, Nina said, nightclubs were dirty, making records was dirty, popular music was dirty, and to mix all that with politics seemed senseless and demeaning. And until songs like Mississippi Goddamn just burst out of me, I had musical problems as well. How can you take the memory of a man like Medgar Evers and reduce all that he was to three and a half minutes in a simple tune? That was the musical side of it I shied away from. I didn't like protest music because a lot of it was so simple and unimaginative. It stripped the dignity away from the people it was trying to celebrate. But the Alabama church bombing and the murder of Medgar Evers stopped that argument and with Mississippi Goddamn, I realized there was no turning back. After the release of Mississippi Goddamn, Nina began regularly including civil rights-related messaging and content in all of her performances and recordings. Other protest songs she recorded during this period included Backlash Blues, based on a poem by Langston Hughes and To Be Young Gifted in Black, which Nina and composer Weldon Irvine adapted from an unfinished play of the same name by Lorraine Hansberry. Nina also began performing at civil rights marches and events. Though she was friends with both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, by the mid 1960s, her politics aligned more clearly with Malcolm X and her support of black nationalism and violent revolution over methods of non-violent protest, which she saw as ineffective. In a 1970s interview, Nina stated that the release of Mississippi Goddamn had a negative impact on her career and led the music industry to boycott her music for being so outspoken and politically controversial. It was the fear of a similar reaction that led many other artists of the period to shy away from including such blatant activist messaging in their music or from discussing social and political issues from the stage. In 1973, angered by American racism that she saw as only getting worse, Nina left the United States and moved to Barbados, Liberia, Switzerland, and eventually France. She continued recording and releasing albums intermittently over the subsequent two decades and played regularly at small jazz clubs in London and Paris. These club performances were often brilliant and also filled with erratic behavior, mood swings, and anger at the audience for not paying enough attention. In the late 1980s, Nina was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The late 1980s and 1990s saw a major resurgence in the popularity of Nina's music. The CD versions of her earlier albums became best sellers. In 1993, Nina moved to a house in the south of France. She continued to perform throughout the 1990s. On April 21st, 2003, Nina passed away in her sleep. All month, we're talking about activists. For more on why we're doing what we're doing, check out our newsletter, Womanica Weekly. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Encyclopedia Womanica, and follow me directly on Twitter at Jenny M. Kaplan. Special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister and co-creator. Talk to you tomorrow.
SPEAKER_04: Bye.
SPEAKER_03: 50% paid off, upgrade ends financing and any promo credits. See T-Mobile.com.
SPEAKER_12: An epic matchup between your two favorite teams, and you're at the game getting the most from what it means to be here with American Express. You breeze through the card member entrance, stop by the lounge, now it's almost tip-off, and everyone's already on their feet. This is gonna be good. See how to elevate your live sports experience at AmericanExpress.com slash with Amex. Don't live life without it. Eligible American Express card required. Benefits vary by card and by venue. Terms apply.
SPEAKER_09: With millions of books on Amazon, there's a reading feeling for everyone. For example, Juan's. Ah. As he drifts away to Nirvana after only the first chapter, is different to Maya's. Ah. When she discovered the narrator was, in fact, the evil twin, which is also different to Noah's. Aw. Anytime the cute cyberpunk is mentioned, even though in reality he'd be totally out of his league. From. To. Aw. Amazon books. That reading feeling awaits.
