VOICE ONE:
I’m Faith Lapidus.
VOICE TWO:
And I’m Steve Ember with the VOA Special English program PEOPLE IN AMERICA. Today we tell about singer Nina Simone and play some of her music. She was also active in the civil rights movement of the nineteen sixties.
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VOICE ONE:
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| Nina Simone Silk and Soul Album |
Nina Simone wrote and performed the song you just heard. It is called “Young, Gifted and Black. “In the nineteen sixties, a major black civil rights group declared it the national song of black people in America.
Nina Simone was very young when her musical ability first appeared. She could play songs on the piano when she was three years old. She learned by listening to music and then searching for the correct piano keys.
In a book about her life, Nina Simone wrote that everything that happened to her as a child involved music. She said her first memory was of her mother singing. She said her mother always sang Christian songs around the house. That influence shows up years later in the recording of “If You Pray Right” on Miss Simone’s album “Baltimore.”
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VOICE TWO:
Nina Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in nineteen thirty-three in the southern town of Tryon, North Carolina. Her parents owned several businesses there. Her mother was also a Methodist minister. The family of ten lived in a big house and made good earnings. However, difficult economic times in the United States hurt the family’s businesses. The family had to move to smaller homes as their finances continued to shrink.
VOICE ONE:
In time, Eunice’s mother went to work cleaning house for a white woman in the town. The woman knew about Nina’s piano playing. She suggested that Missus Waymon send her daughter to a piano teacher for lessons. When Missus Waymon said the family did not have the money, her employer said she would pay for the girl’s first year of lessons.
Nina Simone wrote that she grew to love her first piano teacher, a white woman from England. In fact, the teacher helped set up financial assistance for Nina’s lessons. Nina Simone also wrote about how much she liked her mother’s employer. She wrote that, as a child, she expected all white people to be as kind as they were.
VOICE TWO:
Eunice Waymon had her first public performance when she was eleven. Many people in the town had given money to help pay for lessons for the young pianist. Miss Simone wrote that it was expected she would perform to show them what their money had produced.
The performance was at the town hall. Eunice was at the piano. She looked at her parents just before she was to play. She saw them being forced from their seats in the front. A white family wanted to sit in their place. Her parents did not resist.
The young girl stood up and spoke. She said no one would hear her play if her parents were not returned to their seats.They were and the concert began.
VOICE ONE: