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Random House, Inc.
February 2010
On Sale: February 2, 2010
454 pages
ISBN: 0375424016
EAN: 9780375424014
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
From the author of the acclaimed Dinah Washington biography
Queen comes this complete account of the triumphs and
difficulties of the brilliant and high-tempered Nina Simone.
Her distinctive voice and music occupy a singular place in
the canon of American song. Tapping into newly unearthed
material—including stories of family and career—Nadine
Cohodas gives us a luminous portrait of the singer who was
born Eunice Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, in 1933, one of
eight children in a proud black family. We see her as a
prodigiously talented child who is trained in classical
piano through the charitable auspices of a local white
woman. We witness her devastating disappointment when she is
rejected by the Curtis Institute of Music—a dream deferred
that would forever shape her self-image as well as her
music. Yet by 1959—now calling herself Nina Simone—she had
sung New York City’s venerable Town Hall and was on her way.
As we watch Simone’s exciting rise to stardom, Cohodas
expertly weaves in the central factors of her life and
career: her unique and provocative relationship with her
audiences (she would “shush” them angrily; as a classically
trained musician, she didn’t believe in cabaret chat); her
involvement in and contributions to the civil rights
movement; her two marriages, including one of brief family
contentment with police detective Andy Stroud, with whom she
had her daughter, Lisa; the alienation from the United
States that drove her to live abroad. Alongside these
threads runs a darker one: Nina’s increasing and sometimes
baffling outbursts of rage and pain and her lifelong
struggle to overcome a deep sense of personal injustice,
which persisted even as she won international renown.
Princess Noire is a fascinating story, well told and
thoroughly documented with intimate photos—a treatment that
captures the passions of Nina’s life.
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