For decades record stores shoved Nina Simone into the jazz bin, as if one word could contain a woman who played Bach, belted protest songs and reimagined pop hits in the same breath. The label suited marketing departments, but Simone herself heard something more sinister in it: a racial code that flattened black creativity into a single category.
She called her art “black classical music,” insisted she was a folk singer at heart, and built a career that made genre boundaries look small. Understanding why she fought that fight does more than tidy up record-store bins; it exposes how race and commerce decide what American music is allowed to be.
The Problem With Calling Nina Simone A “Jazz Singer”
Simone was brutally clear about why she distrusted the word jazz. “Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music,” she said, collapsing the distance between barrooms and Beethoven in one sentence. For her, the word did not signal sophistication so much as a racial fence built around black creativity.
To many white listeners in the 1950s and 60s, jazz still meant nightclub entertainment or what Simone acidly described elsewhere as “dirt,” not the disciplined art she had devoted her childhood to. Once record labels saw a black woman who could improvise at the piano and sing standards, they leaned on the easy tag, even when she laced those standards with counterpoint and protest.
Classical Roots: A Concert Pianist In A Nightclub World
Born Eunice Waymon in a segregated North Carolina town, Simone was groomed not for cabarets but for the recital hall. By three she was playing complete songs; as a teenager she devoured Bach and Chopin, studied in New York at Juilliard, and auditioned for Philadelphia’s elite Curtis Institute of Music, later recalling that its rejection of her was a shattering, racially charged end to her concert-piano dream.
Forced onto the nightclub circuit in Atlantic City to survive, she took the conservatory with her instead of leaving it at the door. In performances like her famous version of “Love Me or Leave Me,” she suddenly launches into a Bach-style fugue mid-solo, turning a swing tune into a counterpoint masterclass and reminding the audience that the woman in the smoky club was still a serious classical musician.
Why Nina Simone Called Herself A Folk Singer
Given that background, it is striking that Simone preferred to describe herself not as a jazz musician but as a folk singer. In her autobiography she wrote that if she had to be called anything, it should have been a folk singer, because there was more folk and blues than jazz in her playing, as one essay on her life and autobiography points out.
In practice her sets could jump from an Appalachian ballad to an African American spiritual, from Israeli folk song to Brecht and Weill, from Bob Dylan to children’s chants. “Folk” for Simone meant music ordinary people used to tell the truth about their lives, which made it the perfect umbrella for her own protest anthems like “Mississippi Goddam” and “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.”
Genre-Bending In Practice
One reason critics and fans keep arguing about Simone’s genre is that each phase of her career points in a different direction without ever dropping the others. A quick look at a few records shows how impossible it is to pin her down.
| Era | Key records | What she is doing musically |
|---|---|---|
| Late 1950s | Little Girl Blue, early club recordings | Jazz and pop standards played with strict classical voicings and rubato phrasing, like an art song recital that also swings. |
| Early 1960s | Nina Simone at Carnegie Hall, Folksy Nina | Folk ballads, spirituals and blues in a grand hall, treating Carnegie as a Greenwich Village coffeehouse. |
| Mid 1960s | Pastel Blues, Wild Is the Wind | Blues expanded into long narratives such as “Sinnerman” and character pieces like “Four Women,” with piano parts closer to Baroque invention than barroom riffs. |
| Late 1960s – early 1970s | Nina Simone in Concert, Black Gold | Show tunes and originals turned into weapons, from “Mississippi Goddam” to “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” mixing folk anthem, gospel call-and-response and biting cabaret. |
If most artists made even one of those stylistic leaps, we would call it a radical reinvention. For Simone, that kind of shape-shifting was simply how she worked.
Why Critics And Institutions Struggled To Place Her
That range came with professional costs. A 1960s critic once dismissed her as a “supper club songstress,” even as scholars now underline that her repertoire in that decade blended jazz with blues, gospel and classical techniques and became inseparable from the era’s black activism. When your sound keeps shifting under the listener’s feet, lazy pigeonholes start to crumble.
The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s own research guide admits that Simone’s “astonishing, unclassifiable range” has made it especially difficult to assess her legacy, noting that she was marketed as a jazz singer, trained as a classical pianist, nicknamed the High Priestess of Soul, and, in her own words, a folk singer whose songbook stretched from Israeli tunes to the Bee Gees. Small wonder that for years she slipped through the cracks of neat academic and industry histories.
From Marginalized To Canonized
As late as the 2000s you could still feel that hesitation in how institutions honored her. When Rolling Stone finally put Simone into its 2008 list of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time, she sat high among rock and soul legends but arrived decades after many of the peers she had influenced. Only in 2018 did the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induct her, praising the classically trained virtuoso who fused jazz, soul, gospel and folk into a single, uncompromising voice.
Musicians, meanwhile, had never been confused. Aretha Franklin named her 1972 album Young, Gifted and Black after Simone’s anthem and cut a definitive cover of the song, effectively carrying Simone’s message of black pride into the center of mainstream soul. It is tribute and transmission at once.
Artists Who Claim Her As A Touchstone
Across the Atlantic and across generations, other singers have claimed her just as fiercely. Rufus Wainwright has called Simone the artist who gave him the most inspiration and direction as a singer-pianist, his ultimate model for how to inhabit a song. Roberta Flack, another conservatory-schooled keyboardist turned crossover star, has cited Simone as one of her key role models, a template for blending classical discipline with emotionally fearless popular music.
Why Nina Simone’s Genre Revolt Still Matters
Simone’s war with genre labels was not mere ego. She was pointing at how race and commerce decide what counts as “serious” art and what gets quarantined as entertainment, even when the same harmonic language runs through both. If we take her seriously and hear her as black classical music or radical folk, we are forced to admit how much black genius has been misfiled.
For listeners who discovered her as background music in a cafe or on a film soundtrack, there is still joy in listening with fresh ears. The next time you put her on, try three experiments:
- Imagine you are at a piano recital, and focus on her left-hand voicings, inner lines and rhythm; hear how much architecture sits under the surface.
- Then listen as if she were a folk singer, paying attention to which community or struggle each lyric is really addressing, not just the love story on the surface.
- Finally, hear her as a blues shouter and gospel preacher, noticing how often she sacrifices prettiness for raw truth when a song turns political.
Once you do, the old argument over whether Nina Simone was jazz, folk, soul or something else starts to feel small. What is left is what she insisted on all along: a black woman forged in classical rigor and political fire, using every tool she had to tell the truth about her time.
