By Nadine Cohodas
From the writer of the acclaimed Dinah Washington biography Queen comes this entire account of the triumphs and problems of the bright and high-tempered Nina Simone. Her detailed voice and song occupy a novel position within the canon of yankee tune.
Tapping into newly unearthed material—including tales of relations and career—Nadine Cohodas provides us a luminous portrait of the singer who used to be born Eunice Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, in 1933, considered one of 8 young ones in a proud black relatives. We see her as a prodigiously gifted baby who's knowledgeable in classical piano throughout the charitable auspices of an area white girl. We witness her devastating sadness while she is rejected by means of the Curtis Institute of Music—a dream deferred that might ceaselessly form her self-image in addition to her song. but by way of 1959—now calling herself Nina Simone—she had sung manhattan City’s venerable city corridor and used to be on her means.
As we watch Simone’s intriguing upward thrust to stardom, Cohodas expertly weaves within the important elements of her lifestyles and profession: her specific and provocative dating together with her audiences (she might “shush” them angrily; as a classically educated musician, she didn’t think in cabaret chat); her involvement in and contributions to the civil rights circulation; her marriages, together with one among short relatives contentment with police detective Andy Stroud, with whom she had her daughter, Lisa; the alienation from the USA that drove her to reside in a foreign country. along those threads runs a darker one: Nina’s expanding and infrequently baffling outbursts of rage and ache and her lifelong fight to beat a deep experience of private injustice, which endured while she received overseas renown.
Princess Noire is an interesting tale, good advised and carefully documented with intimate photos—a therapy that captures the passions of Nina’s lifestyles.
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Additional info for Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone
Example text
When the sun—assuming good weather—was going down but still shimmered through the skylight. Eunice and Miss Mazzy had selected an ambitious program. She started with her favorite composer, Bach— the French Suite in E-flat, which was made up of seven pieces. Next came Beethoven’s Sonata in F Minor. After an intermission she 46 · princess noire played three pieces by Chopin, Etude in A-flat Major, Nocturne in E Major, and Etude in C Minor, followed by Debussy’s Doll’s Serenade. She finished on a light note, with his Golliwogg’s Cakewalk.
Prelude to a Fugue ~ June 1950–May 1954 ~ unice’s first trip to New York City, when she was twelve, had scarcely prepared her for life as a Juilliard student. It was an eight-week summer vacation organized around family, with everyone—Kate, Eunice, Dorothy, and the babies, Frances and Sam—staying on 129th Street where Lucille, Eunice’s oldest sister, lived. Her husband was in the service, so she was glad to have the company even if things were crowded. Kate had used that summer of 1945 to earn some extra money at a factory job, but work took second place to her love of the church.
Carrol and Dorothy remembered that first year as a blur of two temporary stops before the family resettled on the east side. This last house was less than a mile from the Livingston Street place, but it felt much farther because the streets wound back and forth up the hills. By this time, Lucille had moved out—she had married Isaac Waddell, one of the family’s neighbors. Not long after, John left, too, prompted by an argument with his father that made him realize that at nineteen he was old enough to be on his own.