Nina Simone

The sixth of eight children, Nina Simone was three when she first started accompanying her mother, a Methodist minister, on piano at their local church. She went on to study classical piano and gave her first recital at 12 but subsequent rejections for further music study scholarships on what she believed to be racial grounds, hardened her political sensibility and laid the seeds of her involvement with civil rights issues. Playing Atlantic City bars, she adopted the name Nina Simone to avoid being chastised by her mother for playing the "devil's music", and went on to have a hit with I Loves You Porgy (1958), followed soon after by her first album Little Girl Blue. Mixing blues, jazz and soul with her own barbed songs tackling racial inequality, Simone developed into a uniquely individual performer with little tolerance for music industry conventions and, inspired by a play of the same name, recorded her 1970 classic Young, Gifted and Black. A volatile character suffering from bipolar disorder, she channelled her troubles into brilliant recordings like Ain't Got No, I Got Life and My Baby Just Cares For Me.