walking upstream…
Nina Simone
sourcesSound Salon — J.S. Bach's Influence on Nina Simone (autobiography quote on Bach as "a mathematician") · PBS American Masters (Curtis Institute rejection quote from What Happened, Miss Simone?) · Wikipedia — Little Girl Blue (1957 Bethlehem session details, "I Loves You, Porgy" chart performance) · Billie Holiday Songs — 1948 sessions (confirms Decca recording date for "I Loves You, Porgy")
In 1950, seventeen-year-old Eunice Waymon auditioned for the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, certain her classical training had earned a place. She was rejected. "It took me about six months to realize it was because I was Black," she said years later; "I never really got over that jolt of racism." Broke, she took a job playing piano at an Atlantic City bar in 1954; the owner demanded she sing too, and to hide the work from her Methodist-minister mother she renamed herself Nina Simone. The redirected classical ambition never left, it just found new instruments: her 1958 recording of "I Loves You, Porgy" made her a star, and by 1964 that same trained precision powered "Mississippi Goddam," a rage disguised as a show tune. She died in France in 2003, having turned a denied classical career into a weapon.
the sound in question
1964
Mississippi GoddamNina Simone
walk the tributaries ↓
Johann Sebastian Bach1720s · Baroque / Classical
In her autobiography, I Put a Spell on You, Simone described what studying Bach did to her as a child in Tryon: "he's a mathematician and all the notes you play add up to something," she wrote, building "like ocean waves getting bigger and bigger" toward a climax. Once she grasped that logic, she "never wanted to be anything other than a concert pianist" — training the Curtis Institute later refused to certify. Denied the concert stage, she carried Bach's counterpoint into nightclub sets instead, working fugue-like lines into jazz standards until the two languages fused.
listen: upstream & here
1722
The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I: Prelude No. 1 in C Major, BWV 846Johann Sebastian Bach
1958
Love Me or Leave MeNina Simone
listen forBach's Prelude in C Major unspools from a single arpeggiated pattern, reharmonized bar by bar, never quite resolving until its final chord. A minute into Simone's 1958 "Love Me or Leave Me," the vocal drops out and her hands take over: the same interlocking, self-answering lines emerge inside the jazz changes, several voices moving at once, a fugue smuggled into a Bethlehem Records session. It's the clearest surviving proof that the training Curtis Institute refused to certify kept working long after the rejection.
Billie Holiday1930s–40s · Jazz / Vocal jazz
Simone's own estate biography names Billie Holiday as "one of Nina's stated musical influences," pointing specifically to Holiday's reading of "Porgy" from Porgy and Bess. A decade after Holiday cut the song for Decca, Simone recorded her own version during a marathon single-day session for Bethlehem Records — fourteen songs cut in one sitting. Released as a single, "I Loves You, Porgy" became her breakthrough hit in 1958, carrying a song she credited to Holiday into the recording that turned a bar pianist into a national artist.
listen: upstream & heresource: Official Nina Simone Biography — estate site (classical training, Curtis Institute rejection, Billie Holiday influence, Bethlehem breakthrough) ↗
1948
I Loves You, PorgyBillie Holiday
1958
I Loves You, PorgyNina Simone
listen forHoliday's 1948 "I Loves You, Porgy" sits behind the beat, her voice arriving late and unhurried, so the plea reads more like resignation than romance. Simone's 1958 version keeps that same patience — she lets phrases hang before resolving them — but strips the arrangement down further, playing sparse piano chords under her own voice instead of a full band. The debt shows up as restraint: both versions trust silence to do the work other recordings of the song fill with orchestration.