📍30 E Livingston Street, Tryon, NC 28782, USA
1933 – 1945“I was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in February 1933 in a small, three-room clapboard house at 30 East Livingston Street in Tryon, a little town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, the sixth of eight children. My father, John Divine Waymon, was a handyman, barber and preacher, and my mother, Mary Kate, was a Methodist minister. During the Depression my father's businesses failed, and we moved to smaller houses as money ran out. I could play the piano by ear by the time I was three, and I played at my mother's church. When I was six, two women heard me play at the Tryon Theater and persuaded my mother I needed lessons. Muriel Mazzanovich, an English piano teacher, taught me classical music at her house for four years; I loved Bach above all. The townspeople, Black and white, raised money through the Eunice Waymon Fund to pay for my education. At my first recital, at eleven, my parents were moved from their seats in the front row to make room for white people, and I refused to play until they were brought back to the front. I never forgot that. The fund sent me to high school in Asheville and then to the Juilliard School in New York. I hoped to be the first Black classical concert pianist in America, but when the Curtis Institute rejected me, I began singing in an Atlantic City bar as Nina Simone. I became the High Priestess of Soul and a voice of the civil rights movement. In 2017 artists bought my childhood home, and the National Trust is helping to preserve it as a place of inspiration.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today