
Nina Simone was an American singer, composer, pianist, and civil rights activist who was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon on February 21, 1933. Classical, folk, gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, and pop music impacted her work.
Her father, John Divine Waymon, owned a barbershop, a dry cleaner, and a nightclub, and her mother, Mary Kate Irvin, served as a Methodist minister. The sixth of eight children in an impoverished home, she began playing piano at the age of three or four; the first song she learned was “God Be With You, Till We Meet Again”.
She showed off her piano skills at the local church. She gave her first classical performance at the age of twelve. Simone later stated that her parents, who were in the first row, were forced to shift to the back of the hall during the performance to make a place for white people.
Who is Nina Simone husband Donald Ross?
Nina met Don Ross, a Beatnik poet working as a fairground barker in Atlantic City, in 1956. Ross led the life of a vagabond, but Nina found him irresistible: ‘he was in the bar every night, and I was lonely and drinking milk,’ she recounted.
The Waymon family despised him and considered him as a leech, but Nina and Ross married in 1958.
However, her family may have been correct all along, as Nina quickly regretted the marriage and they divorced after less than a year, legally divorcing in 1960.
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