I put a Spell on You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in small-town North Carolina, Nina Simone was entrusted with the trouble of others from an early age -nursing her father back from the brink of death at the age of four and supporting her family by her late teens. After a one-year stint at Juilliard she applied to a prestigious Philadephia music school but was rejected, many say for racially motivated reasons. Simone taught piano students to pay her rent but soon discovered what her mother called "working in the fires of hell" -singing in bars. Her first professional gig was in Atlantic City before an unappreciative, drunken audience, but eventually college students discovered her and made her a local celebrity. Simone took up with an agent who moved her to New York and asked her to record a version of "I Loves You, Porgy." It played on a Philadelphia radio station to enormous acclaim, and her star was on the rise.

Nina Simone embraced the protest movement of the ´60s and ´70s with the song "Young, Gifted, and Black," which became an anthem for the American Civil Rights Movement. Songs like "I Put a Spell on You", "Put a Little Sugar in My Bowl", and "Mississippi Goddam," helped changed the face of race relations and music in America and around the world.

Here, then, are the many lives and loves of Nina Simone, reccounted in her unmistakable voice.