Saving Nina Simone’s Childhood Home: From Singer’s Home To Artist Retreat

The legendary singer Nina Simone is remembered for her impassioned fusion of classical music, gospel, soul and jazz and for her deeply involved civil rights activism.
In 2017, four well known Black New York artists, Julie Mehretu, Adam Pendleton, Ellen Gallagher, and Rashid Johnson came together to buy her childhood home and save it from demolition. We take a look at this important cultural heritage site, the artists who rescued it, and what the future holds for the place where Nina Simone started her life in music.

The Incomparable Nina Simone

Nina Simone was born as Eunice Kathleen Waymon in 1933 on 30 East Livingston Street in Tryon, North Carolina, where she grew up in a music-loving family and started playing the piano at the age of 4. Her father, John Devan Waymon, played the harmonica, banjo guitar, and mouth harp. Her mother Mary Kate was a Methodist preacher, and sang hymns every day. From an early age, Simone would play piano in the local church, and her mother’s white employer was so impressed with her musical skills that she offered to pay for her piano lessons. At the age of 12, Simone had her first official concert, a classical recital where, due to segregation, her parents were made to sit at the back of the hall while the white people sat at the front. Simone refused to play unless her parents could sit in the front row, and so they were moved to the front. This was the young Simone’s first moment of activism, with many more to follow throughout her life.

After graduating high school, Simone moved to New York City in 1950, where she studied for a period at the acclaimed Julliard School, wanting to pursue a career as a classical pianist. However, she was devastated when she was not accepted at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, most likely due to racial prejudices. In order to survive and fund her private piano lessons, Simone started performing at the Midtown Bar & Grill in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The owner insisted that she sing as well as play the piano, so she started combining her classical piano skills with all kinds of different styles and songs that she loved, playing a unique mixture of jazz, blues and classical music. During this period, Simone took on the stage name “Nina Simone,” derived from “niña”, a nickname given to her by her boyfriend at the time, and the French actress Simone Signoret. Simone soon rose to fame with her iconic performances and unique sound and style.

She became an important voice in the Civil Rights Movement, daring to speak out and say what others were afraid to say through her music, with fiery songs like “Mississippi Goddamn”, a response to the June 12, 1963 murder of Medgar Evers and the September 15, 1963 bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Alabama that killed four young black girls. Even though her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement was in some ways damaging for her commercial musical career, Simone kept doing what she believed in the most. Her turbulent life eventually led her to distance herself from the United States and the music scene in the 1970s, when she moved to Liberia. Eventually, she picked up her musical career again in Europe, where she had to work extremely hard to start everything up again, while suffering a great deal due to her bipolar disorder. She performed widely again in the last decades of her life, still captivating and enrapturing her audiences with her incredible presence and energy, and passed away in her home in Southern France in 2003.

Nina Simone’s Childhood Home

Two years after Simone’s death, in 2005, her childhood home in Tryon had been vacant for more than a decade and faced demolishment when a local economic planner and his wife, Kevin and Julie McIntyre, bought the house and started major renovations. They hoped to turn it into a permanent monument to Nina Simone’s life and legacy. The McIntyres turned to Simone’s older brother Carrol Waymon for guidance in the project, and invested $100,000 of their own money in the house, installing a new porch and front stairs, fixing the foundation, and replacing bricks and beams. They attached weatherboard siding to the exterior, which came from a local church also built in the 1920s.

The inside of the house was furnished with Depression-era furniture. They installed a metal bed and coal stove, as well as a pedal organ decorated with sheet music including Simone’s “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black” and Bach. Sadly, the project became too expensive and overwhelming and the McIntyres were forced to put the house up for sale. It was bought by another owner, but was back on the market by 2017, when the house again faced demolition.