Nina Simone

Eunice Kathleen Waymon, the sixth of eight children in North Carolina, trained for the concert stage and aimed for Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, but was denied admission - she believed because of her race. To earn a living, she took a job playing piano at an Atlantic City nightclub in the late 1950s, adopting the name Nina Simone to hide the work from her family. When the club required her to sing, a jazz vocalist was born. Her 1958 debut Little Girl Blue launched a catalog that stretched past 40 albums by 1974, including a 1959 hit with "I Loves You, Porgy." Through the civil rights era she became a fierce voice for the movement, her contralto and baroque-trained piano bending across classical, gospel, blues, and R&B. After Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968, she left the U.S. and spent three decades performing across Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. Curtis finally awarded her an honorary degree in 2003, a day or two before she died.