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Nina Simone’s North Carolina childhood home is protected.
The childhood home of the late singer and activist Nina Simone, near Asheville, North Carolina, had fallen into disrepair and would likely have been demolished had it not been for four New York City-based creatives who saw the value of preserving the jazz great’s home.
Recently named a National Treasure, the 660-square-foot, clapboard house in Tryon, North Carolina, will live on as, in the words of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a “symbol of Simone’s early life and legacy … for generations to come.”
Simone, born Eunice Waymon in Tryon in 1933, was as known for her civil rights activism as she was for the sultry voice that produced haunting songs like “I Put a Spell on You.” A childhood piano prodigy, Simone was denied entrance to the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia—a fact that she attributed to the racial discrimination she faced until she moved to France. She died there in 2003.
Simone’s childhood friends in Tryon remember “the High Priestess of Soul” as distant and not eager to reacquaint herself with her past, despite her subsequent visits to town. But now her family’s tin-roofed house has been preserved, as has this small corner of the western North Carolina mountains’ place in jazz history.
The story above appears in our Sept./Oct. 2018 issue.
