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Nina Simone · S1 E6
New York Bound
Eunice leaves the South for New York City, seventeen years old, with a scholarship to Juilliard and a dream of becoming the first great Black classical concert pianist in America. She has never lived outside North Carolina
Pennsylvania Station, New York City, 1950. A seventeen-year-old girl from a town of two thousand people steps off the train and looks up at a ceiling higher than any building she has ever entered.
Nina Simone performs See-Line Woman. Listen to the rhythm: relentless, hypnotic, urban. This is the pulse of New York City, the thing that grabs a seventeen-year-old girl from the mountains and tells her the introduction is over.
See-Line Woman (1964)
A traditional folk song about a seductive, dangerous woman who takes what she wants and leaves when she is done. Nina turns it into a percussion-driven incantation, her piano hammering the same figure over and over while her voice rides on top with total authority. The hand claps, the bass line, the repetition: it sounds like a spell being cast. This is the furthest thing from Bach in a living room in Tryon. This is the sound of someone discovering a new kind of power.
Harlem
Eunice moves into a small room in Harlem. She teaches piano lessons to neighborhood children to cover rent and food, sends whatever is left back to her mother in Tryon. The city is loud, fast, and overwhelming, but it is also the first place she has ever lived where being Black and brilliant is not a contradiction.
TAP TO REVEAL: Who was Eunice Waymon's piano teacher in New York?
Juilliard School, New York City
The most prestigious music school in America. Eunice studied privately with Juilliard professor Carl Friedberg, preparing for the audition that she believed would open every door.
He Needs Me
From her debut album Little Girl Blue (1958). A tender, vulnerable ballad about devotion and need. This is the sound of seventeen-year-old Eunice in Harlem: alone, far from everything she knows, pouring everything she has into the one thing that has never let her down.
Carl Friedberg, Eunice's New York piano teacher, had studied under which legendary pianist?
There is one audition that matters more than any other. The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia is the most selective conservatory in America, and Eunice Waymon has spent her entire life preparing for it. The letter that comes back will change the course of American music.
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To be continued
Season 2: Curtis
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