Eunice Kathleen Waymon: a Black Panther with Angel voice
Known as Nina Simona is considered one of the most special female voices in popular music of the 20th century. It is very difficult to classify it: was singer of jazz, blues, protest, pop, Opera, pianist, arranger and composer. Sang meaning be women and be black. He sang on solitude, the love, anger, racism and injustice.
Never turned into a "great Star Jazz" according to the conventional parameters. Had few blockbuster hits, perhaps because the houses American labels found it somewhat uncomfortable his militancy in the Black Panther Party, the largest movement of struggle for civil rights of people of African descent estadunidenses over the years 60 '
Born February 21, 1933 in Tryon, North Carolina in the United States.
Daughter of a worker and a domestic worker, was the sixth of eight children. Child prodigy, already played piano at the age of four. Along with his brothers sang in the chorus of the Methodist Church led by his mother, and with the help is your teacher who created a foundation that Eunice could continue studying both formal and musical, was able to reach Academy Julliard in New York where he studied piano in concert, little thing common to a woman of color for that time. During this period, his family moved to Philadelphia, where his parents tried to get her a scholarship at the Curtis Institute, but it was denied on racial grounds.
However, this was not the first nor the last time that Eunice had to prove employer taste of what it means to be discriminated against by the "color" of their skin. In 1943 at the age of 10 on the occasion of his first concert piano at the library of his hometown, parents were displaced from the first row seating to a "significant" white.
To help the family economically began working as a pianist companion in several nightclubs, and in 1954 while he was playing in an Irish pub in Atlantic City, the owner asked to to play, sing. It was then when Eunice changed its name to the Nina Simone, by the French actress Simone Signoret who admired and released publicly as a singer.
In 1963 the Ku Kux Klan members perpetrated a terrorist attack with explosives in a Birmingham, Alabama, an organizing centre of the black civil rights movement Baptist Church. The explosion killed four black girls who were in the interior of the Church. Nina Simone in reaction to this horrible fact composed his first protest song "Mississippi Goddam!" a furious complaint about the situation in which people of African descent in his country were living.
In the 1966 wrote "Four women", a protest song, almost as a four black women lament that deals with racial discrimination, the song was banned in New York and Philadelphia radio stations so pretext being "insulting to the people of color", logically rather than insulting to the people of color was that the "decent society" breathed not heard this complaint so shameful for herself
In 1968 she sang at the funeral of Martin Luther King.
In 1969 fed up with racism and disappointed by the pettiness of the world of music and American labels, Nina decided to leave his country. He lived in Barbados, in Liberia, in Switzerland, in Paris, in the Netherlands and finally in southern France near Marseilles, where he lived until his death that occurred on 21 April 2003.
During a tour of art having come to New York in 1978 was arrested and quickly released, by not paying taxes during the years 1971, 72 and 73 in protest against the Vietnam war.
During the years lived in Europe recorded several albums. In Paris in 1982, he recorded "Fodder On My Wings" in English and French, disk based on auto-impuesto exile outside the USA. In 1990 he recorded with Maria Bethania, in 1991 with Miriam Makeba. In 1998 he was guest of honour at the South African President Nelson Mandela who turned this opportunity of 80 years birthday.
During the first years of his career, did not consider a politically aware artist. Rather he was fascinated by songs of love, but in the manner of the black people. Felt own racism and national oppression for life, but regarded as them a single issue that had to be individually. However, entered into a process of change when broke the blacks fight against oppression in South.
He began to realize that what he had suffered and struggled to overcome was linked to passing you all the black people. Playwright Lorraine Hansberry was very friend and was put in the wave of the privacy policy.
Hansberry was help to recognize that the struggle for civil rights for blacks was part of a wider against national struggle and class and locate their own experiences of this fight. Nina also sought to discuss with people from different positions, as the Black author Langston Hughes, Stokeley Carmichael (Kwame Guissé) and, later, the Black Panther Party
At the beginning of the sixties, publicly supported the struggle of the black people against police brutality and other racist attacks. But, says in his autobiography I Put a Spell on You still could not
To enter more movement, sought how to explore themes and educate politically. Bregó very seriously with the issue of the strategy needed to free the black people of truth. Although supported Martin Luther King, Jr. and the movement who led had more in common with the radical sectors of the movement, such as Malcolm X, Stokeley Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, SNCC (student non-violent Coordinating Committee) and the Black Panther Party. He fell particularly well the Panthers because gave inspiration to the young black men before only knew the pacifist resistance model. According to Nina: "These boys realized by the Black Panthers there black heroes willing to fight and die if necessary to achieve what they want." "This I love; whites fear also not given, and we definitely need that."
Once an interviewer asked how I wanted to remember, and replied: "I want I remember as a diva that from the beginning to the end never relented in what he felt on racism and what should be the world, and was consistently until the end of their days".
credits: ENcontrARTE
