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Nina Simone · S1 E2
Mrs. Miller
Muriel Mazzanovich, a white Englishwoman trained at the Royal Academy of Music, hears the three-year-old Eunice play hymns by ear. She offers free classical piano lessons. For the next six years, Bach, Beethoven, and Chopin pour into a small house on a dirt road in the American South
A white woman in a small Southern town knocks on the door of a Black family's house and offers to teach their three-year-old daughter piano for free. It is 1936, and Jim Crow governs every interaction across the color line in Tryon.
Nina Simone performs I Put a Spell on You. The title says everything about what happened in that living room in Tryon. A classically trained Englishwoman opened a book of Bach inventions, placed a child's hands on the keyboard, and cast a spell that lasted a lifetime.
I Put a Spell on You (1965)
Originally a Screamin' Jay Hawkins howl from 1956, Nina rebuilds it from the ground up. Where Hawkins screams, she smolders. The arrangement is pure orchestral drama: strings, horns, and a vocal that climbs from a whisper to something almost frightening. Listen for the piano underneath, steady and disciplined while everything else catches fire. That control, holding perfect technique inside emotional chaos, is Mrs. Mazzanovich's fingerprint on every note Nina Simone ever played.
Miz Mazzy
Muriel Mazzanovich is English-born, classically trained, and living in rural North Carolina. The locals call her "Miz Mazzy." She hears the Waymon child play at church and recognizes instantly what she has: a prodigy who, in any other body in any other place, would already be on a path to the concert stage.
The Classical Education
“Bach made me dedicate my life to music.”
— Nina Simone
TAP TO REVEAL: What did Nina Simone practice every single day from age three until her death?
Plain Gold Ring
From her debut album Little Girl Blue (1958). The most dramatic three minutes on the record: her left hand pounds a relentless pattern that could come straight from a Bach prelude while her voice rides on top like a storm warning. This is what happens when you give a classically trained prodigy a microphone and tell her to play whatever she wants.
Eunice is eleven years old and about to give a recital at Tryon's town hall. Her parents sit in the front row. A white audience member asks them to move to the back. What happens next will shape every defiant performance Nina Simone ever gives.
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