Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in small-town North Carolina in 1933, Nina Simone, who was to become the "high priestess of soul", was entrusted with the troubles 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 Philadelphia 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 1960s and 1970s 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 change the face of race relations and music in America and around the world.

STEPHEN CLEARY is a filmmaker who lives in London.

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