05/25/2026
A white couple wanted the good seats, so a ten-year-old's parents were moved to the back of the room. The child at the piano was Eunice Waymon, and she stood up and told that whole hall she would not play another note until her mother and father were returned to the front row.
She was about ten years old, and there were two chairs in the front row of the library in Tryon that belonged to her mother and father.
She would not touch the piano until they were sitting in them.
This was Eunice Waymon's recital.
The whole town had come, because everybody in Tryon, North Carolina already knew the Waymon girl could play. She had been playing the piano since she was three, and she was the church pianist by six, working the pedals before her feet could comfortably reach them.
A white couple arrived after the room had filled. Someone leaned over and asked her mother and father to give up their seats and move to the back so the couple could sit closer to the front.
Her parents stood up without a word and started for the back of the room.
And Eunice, sitting at the piano in front of everyone who had come, said there would be no music. She told that hall, full of people who had paid to hear a Black child play Bach, that if her parents could not sit in the front then she would not play at all.
She was ten.
The chairs were given back. Her mother and father sat down again in the front row, and only then did she begin.
She wrote later that the day after that recital, every small slight cut her raw. Prejudice had been made real to her, she said, like someone switching on a light.
After that, she started stopping in at the drugstore just to watch the mixture of indifference and disdain she stirred up in the white customers there.
Before that night, she had believed white people were all like Miz Mazzy.
Miz Mazzy was Muriel Mazzanovich, an Englishwoman who had settled in Tryon. Every Saturday, Eunice crossed the railroad tracks into the white part of town to take piano lessons from her.
Miz Mazzy gave her Bach, and Bach decided the rest of her life.
"Once I understood Bach's music," she wrote, "I never wanted to be anything other than a concert pianist."
That was the plan, and it was a specific one. Not a singer. Not a star in a nightclub.
A Black girl from a preacher's family in the Jim Crow South was going to walk onto a classical concert stage, and there had never been one who looked like her, and she meant to be the first.
As a child she had taken her example from Marian Anderson, the great contralto, another Black artist with a gift the country kept trying to lock out of its finest rooms.
The town of Tryon believed it with her.
Her father, John Divine Waymon, had once run his own businesses, but the Depression took them and illness took the rest, and the family had no money to train a prodigy. So Miz Mazzy and others set up a fund with Eunice's name on it, and the people of Tryon, Black and white, put their money in.
In return, the child played free recitals in the town hall.
She practiced five hours a day.
After high school, where she finished at the top of her class, the town's fund and a scholarship carried her to the Juilliard School in New York to study classical piano. Juilliard was only the preparation.
The real target, the place that would make the concert career real, was the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
Curtis was the most selective conservatory in the country, and it cost nothing to attend, and a place there meant the dream was no longer a dream.
Her whole family believed she would get in.
They believed it so completely that they packed up and left North Carolina, moving the family to Philadelphia to be near her while she studied there.
The Waymons bet everything they had on one audition.
She played it, and by the accounts that survive it was a strong audition, the kind a young pianist remembers as one of her finest.
Then the letter came, and Curtis said no.
She was eighteen years old.
She had crossed those railroad tracks every Saturday for years, practiced five hours a day since she was small, carried a whole town's fund and a whole town's pride on her hands. Her family had pulled up its roots and moved to a new city on the strength of those same hands.
And a conservatory in Philadelphia decided, in one afternoon, that it was finished.
They told her she was not good enough.
She did not believe that for a single second, and she never would.
She knew what she could do at a piano, because Juilliard had told her, and Bach had told her, and eighteen years of work had told her.
"I knew I was good enough, but they turned me down," she said years afterward. "It took me about six months to realize it was because I was Black."
She said she never really got over that jolt.
She would say later that an insider at Curtis told her the truth, that the reason had been the color of her skin.
For a while, she stopped.
The girl who practiced five hours a day thought hard about leaving music for good.
When she did go back to it, the work she could find was small. She took a job as a photographer's assistant for a time, and then as an accompanist for a singing teacher, the grand concert career shrunk down to other people's lessons and other people's afternoons.
What Curtis closed was not a job and not a contest. It was the concert stage itself, the only thing she had ever trained for, the reason behind every hour at that piano.
Everything her childhood had pointed at was on the other side of a door a school had shut, and there was no other door cut to that shape.
She had once said plainly what music was to her.
"Music is a gift and a burden I've had since I can remember who I was," she said. "I was born into music."
The gift now had nowhere to go.
She stayed in the North and taught piano to other people's children to pay her rent.
One of those students had a summer job playing piano in a bar in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and it paid ninety dollars a week.
Ninety dollars was double what Eunice was earning.
She figured, she wrote later, that if a student of hers could get hired as a pianist, then so could she.
So in the summer of 1954, she sat down at the piano in the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City.
After the first night, the owner told her the job came with a condition. She would have to sing, not just play.
She had never worked as a singer in her life. She started anyway, six nights a week, six hours a night.
Her mother was a Methodist minister who would not have wanted to know her daughter was playing in a bar. So Eunice Waymon did not use her own name in that room.
She borrowed "Nina" from a nickname and "Simone" from a French actress she admired, and she walked in as someone new.
The classically trained pianist Curtis had turned away became Nina Simone in an Atlantic City bar, so a preacher back home would not find out.
And the voice no conservatory had ever asked to hear turned out to be one of the great voices of the century.
She put the Bach in it anyway.
The training Curtis would not certify went straight into her playing, the counterpoint and the structure sitting under songs that sounded like nothing else on the radio.
She sang "I Loves You, Porgy," and the country heard her.
She sang "Mississippi Goddam" and "To Be Young, Gifted and Black," and the movement heard her, and she stood on civil rights platforms beside Martin Luther King.
She recorded dozens of albums and wrote hundreds of songs.
The child who was going to be the first Black classical concert pianist had become something the world held no category for.
In 1993, a reporter asked her about Curtis.
She said again that she had been rejected because she was Black. Then she said, with what the reporter called some relish, that her name had grown bigger than the whole Curtis Institute.
She was right, and the school seemed to know it.
In 2003, more than fifty years after that letter, the Curtis Institute of Music gave Nina Simone an honorary degree.
She was seventy years old and ill with cancer at her home in the south of France.
Two days after Curtis finally put her name on a diploma, she died.
It comes back to two chairs in a front row.
At ten years old, she had already decided that her mother and father would sit where they could be seen, or there would be no performance at all. Curtis, when she was eighteen, told her to take a seat at the back of the whole profession.
She did then what she had done in that library as a child.
She would not sit where they put her.
By the time Curtis came around with its diploma, Nina Simone had been sitting in the front row for fifty years, and the country had long since moved its chair to hear her.
I put a lot of effort into researching and sharing stories that matter. If you'd like to support the work, here's the link:
https://buymeacoffee.com/blackhistoryarchives
Every coffee helps me keep creating
