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Nina Simone · S1 E5
Allen High School
A private boarding school for Black girls in Asheville, North Carolina. Eunice graduates as valedictorian. Her classical training intensifies. She is being groomed for something nobody in Tryon has ever done: a concert career
Asheville, North Carolina, late 1940s. Eunice Waymon walks through the gates of Allen High School carrying a suitcase and a plan that nobody from Tryon has ever attempted: become the first great Black classical concert pianist in America.
Nina Simone performs Here Comes the Sun. George Harrison wrote it about hope after a long winter. Nina sings it like someone who has waited her entire life for the world to let her in.
Here Comes the Sun (1971)
George Harrison wrote this on a spring morning in Eric Clapton's garden, relieved to be out of a Beatles business meeting. Nina takes that simple optimism and deepens it into something heavier, more earned. Her version moves at its own pace, slower than Harrison's, with piano chords that ring like church bells and a vocal that sounds less like relief and more like survival. She doesn't just cover the song. She makes it about surviving something Harrison never had to.
The School
Allen High School is a private boarding school for Black girls, serious, disciplined, and built for young women who are going somewhere. Eunice thrives in every subject, not just music, and her teachers recognize her as the kind of student who appears once in a generation.
TAP TO REVEAL: How did a tiny segregated town pay for Eunice's next step after Allen High School?
Allen High School, Asheville
A private boarding school for Black girls in the mountains of western North Carolina. For Eunice, this is the first step out of Tryon and toward the concert stage she has been promised since she was three years old.
Little Girl Blue
The Rodgers and Hart standard that became the title track of her 1958 debut album. A song about a girl sitting alone, counting on her fingers, waiting for her life to begin. Eunice Waymon at Allen High School, practicing and studying and dreaming of a concert hall, is exactly the girl this song is about.
Before leaving for New York, what was the furthest north Eunice had ever traveled?
Eunice Waymon boards a bus to New York City, seventeen years old, funded by a small town's faith in her future. She has never seen a building taller than three stories, and she is about to study with a man who learned piano from Clara Schumann herself.
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