Nina Simone

Welcome back to the blog. This class seems to have bad luck with meeting with meeting it usual twice a week like normal. The snow is really wrecking this class from meeting during the week.

            This one class on Tuesday we watched a document on Nina Samone in class on Tuesday and it was very interesting learning about her. She had such an interesting history to her name. I love the fact that from a young age she wanted to challenge the world around her. Her dream from day one was to defy the world, her dream was to become the world’s first black woman pianist. At a young age, her name wasn’t even Nina Simone she grew up as Eunice Waymon.  When she was Eunice, she was trained by an old White woman who is a retired music teacher. 

            This was big during this time since it was during the civil rights movement and back then no one really mixed but through all this the community came together and raised her a fund to go to college to farther her education. She went to Julliard for a year and then applied to go to another school in Pennsylvania, they denied her because of her race. 

            Because she already moved to Pennsylvania, she had to find a job to make money, so she started playing piano at a bar.  That is where she got her jazz and blue sound to her playing and also how she got her name Nina Simone. She chooses to change her name she her mother wouldn’t figure out she was playing the “devils” music. The rest is history.

            She is such a roll model for young kids because she made up her mind to do something and even though people kept trying to knock her down she found a way to do what she wanted to do and be famous and be happy while doing it.