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Nina Simone · S1 E4
Bach in the Jim Crow South
Classical music is a white world. Eunice practices six hours a day, learning fugues and sonatas while growing up under segregation. Mrs. Miller and a group of local women create a fund to send her north. The town of Tryon invests in a girl who will never come back the same way
A house on Waymon Lane, Tryon. For six hours every day, the same sounds drift through the thin walls: Bach inventions, Beethoven sonatas, the same passage repeated forty times until the fingers can play it without the mind having to think.
Nina Simone performs Ne Me Quitte Pas. Forget the French, forget the heartbreak. Listen to the piano. Every note placed with the precision of a classical musician who spent her childhood practicing Bach six hours a day.
Ne Me Quitte Pas (1965)
Jacques Brel wrote it in 1959 as a raw plea to a departing lover. Nina Simone strips it down further than Brel ever dared: just her voice and her piano, alone in the room. The left hand keeps a steady, almost hymn-like pulse while the right hand moves in classical intervals that Bach would recognize. She sings in French with an American accent and it does not matter one bit. The emotion transcends the language because the piano is doing the real talking.
Six Hours
While other children play outside, Eunice practices. Mrs. Mazzanovich has built a schedule that would break most conservatory students: scales in the morning, Bach before lunch, Beethoven and Chopin after. Eunice loves the discipline the way athletes love pain, because it is the only path to something extraordinary.
TAP TO REVEAL: What genre did Nina Simone insist her music actually belonged to?
“I'll tell you what freedom is to me. No fear. I mean really, no fear.”
— Nina Simone
Love Me or Leave Me
From her debut album Little Girl Blue (1958). A Ruth Etting standard from the 1920s that Nina attacks with the hands of a concert pianist. The left hand drives a relentless pattern while the right hand decorates with runs that belong in a recital hall. This is what happens when all those hours of Bach meet a three-chord pop song.
In the 1940s, how many Black soloists were performing regularly with major American orchestras?
A private boarding school for Black girls in Asheville, North Carolina offers Eunice a spot. Allen High School will push her academics as hard as Mrs. Mazzanovich pushed her piano, and she will graduate as the best student they have ever seen.
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