THE REJECTION THAT CHANGED AMERICAN MUSIC
In 1950, a seventeen year old girl from Tryon, North Carolina applied to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Curtis was and still is one of the most prestigious conservatories in the world. Admission was nearly impossible. She had been preparing for it her entire life.
They said no.
Eunice Waymon — who the world would later know as Nina Simone — believed until she died that she was rejected because of the color of her skin. Curtis disputed this. But Nina never wavered in what she believed happened that day, and she carried it with her through everything that came after.
She needed money. A friend connected her to a club owner in Atlantic City who was looking for a piano player. She took the job. When she showed up, the owner told her there was one condition: she had to sing.
She had never thought of herself as a singer. She was a pianist. A classically trained pianist who had studied under a student of Rachmaninoff and whose entire identity was built around the keyboard. Singing felt like a consolation prize.
She sang anyway.
What came out of her that night in Atlantic City was something nobody had heard before. Not quite jazz. Not quite blues. Not quite classical. A voice that sounded like it had lived three lifetimes and was not particularly interested in making you comfortable about it.
Mississippi Goddam. Feeling Good. I Put a Spell on You. Four Women. Strange Fruit. Ain’t Got No.
All of it came from a woman who only started singing because a conservatory told her she was not good enough to be taken seriously as a pianist.
The cruelty of that rejection is hard to sit with. But so is the other side of it: that sometimes the path you are forced onto turns out to be the only one that could have led you to what you were actually meant to do.
Nina herself never made peace with it. She wanted to be a concert pianist and she was denied that, and no amount of success as a singer made her forget it.
But the rest of us got something from that closed door that we never would have gotten otherwise.
There is nothing uplifting about that. It is just true.
WHAT TO LISTEN TO
Nina Simone at Town Hall (1959). Recorded live in New York. It is the record that put everything together for the first time — the classical training, the jazz phrasing, the voice that sounds like it came from somewhere much older than twenty six years old.
THE MUSIC
If the history is what brings you here, the music is what keeps you here.
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Until next time.
Sid