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Nina Simone: Singer Dubbed The High Priestess of Soul

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Nina Simone genuinely earned the epithet unique. Although she was once dubbed The High Priestess of Soul, she fitted no precise musical pigeon-holes, and her genius was tempered by an unpredictability which made every concert an adventure for her audience.

She could be a wildly inconsistent performer, given to ludicrously overdramatic delivery, abbreviated sets, and berating her paying customers for being insufficiently attentive. At the other extreme, she was a powerful, emotive singer who successfully bridged the gap between blues, soul, pop and jazz, and appealed to a broad and adoring audience.

Although she recorded many jazz tunes with many jazz musicians, her vocal delivery and unorthodox interpretations seemed most effective in the blues and soul field, underpinned as they were by a strong and very overt gospel influence.

Her outspoken support for civil rights in the ferment of the 1960s was typical of her politicised stance against racism and inequality in society at large (especially American society), and the inequitable nature of the music business in which she found herself enmeshed.

The unpredictable and at times unstable traits in her character led her into several brushes with the law, ranging from arrest for unpaid taxes in America to a court appearance in France after discharging a scattergun in the general direction of two noisy teenagers next door (she was given a suspended jail sentence after a psychological evaluation found that she had been incapable of evaluating the consequences of her act due to depression).

She was born Eunice Waymon, and grew up singing in a church choir. She studied piano avidly as a child, and later wrote in her autobiography I Put a Spell On You (1991) that she

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