In this 250th anniversary year of the United States, pianist Lara Downes is traveling the country collecting conversations with scholars, searching for our history through songs. Her latest is in Tryon, N.C. to talk with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Salamishah Tillet about the revered artist who is the subject of her upcoming book.
This series of conversations began in a 200-year-old barn in Brattleboro, Vt. and has taken me from Montgomery, Ala. to Philadelphia and New York City — encounters all meaningfully rooted in place and time. But this visit with Salamishah Tillet to Nina Simone's childhood home in North Carolina brought history viscerally and profoundly alive.
The 650-square-foot, three-room clapboard house where Simone was born in 1933 stands as a testament to the relationship of art and history. The home has been preserved by its owners, visual artists Adam Pendleton, Ellen Gallagher, Julie Mehretu and Rashid Johnson. They lovingly led the restoration in partnership with the National Trust for Historic Preservation's African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.
As Tillet and I sat within the sunlit quiet of its pale blue walls, with birds singing in the magnolia tree outside its windows, I felt suspended between Nina Simone's time and our own — the world she was born into and the world she changed.
My conversation with Tillet wound its way to a particular song by Simone: "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free," an anthem of the fearless fight for freedom that has been the essence of the American experiment for 250 years. Simone sought liberation from personal experiences of bigotry, misogyny and violence, from global injustice and intolerance, and from artistic constraints and conventions. Her courage was true and tested, ignited by ancestral memory, by rage and a conviction that it was her right and responsibility to stand up and speak out. "An artist's duty," she said, "is to reflect the times."
Tillet's book, Nina Simone and the World She Made, the result of two decades of devoted research and reflection, will be published next year. It tells the story of Simone's personal and political awakening and celebrates her place in the lineage of American music as a voice of freedom. Almost a century after Nina Simone's birth, her legacy resonates with urgency and reminds all of us who are artists that our work — if we do it without fear and fueled by the energy of hope — has the power to reflect its time, to imagine the future and maybe even to change our world.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Lara Downes: We're here in a tiny three-room house where a baby named Eunice Kathleen Waymon was born on Feb. 21, 1933. She would later be known as Nina Simone, and she would grow up in Jim Crow America, into the fight for civil rights. As an artist she would fulfill her own words: "I'll tell you what freedom is to me: no fear." I think that total absence of fear was something she really equated with her childhood. And so it's very meaningful to me that we're having this conversation in the physical space where that childhood started.
Salamishah Tillet: And across from the church that she grew up in and played in for a good part of her childhood. I've visited this house several times over the last decade, and I've been able to witness its transformation, its restoration. So it feels honorific to be here today with you.
This was, I think, a very close-knit community for her as a child. And there are stories about the community coming together to raise funds for her early musical endeavors.
It's a close-knit community for several reasons, partly because of segregation. Tryon, though, didn't necessarily have a dividing color line; we can think of Trade Street as a place Black people knew they could go to — certain stores with certain entrances. The East Side ends up being a place of Black businesses, a pretty self-affirming community, as well as one that's a direct result of being subjected to second class citizenship. So it's both a place that identified her genius rather early, but also it had to be a place of protection against the larger racial injustice that defined the community at the time.
I'm thinking especially of artists; I think there was this support system that you might not have had out in the bigger, whiter world, for all the reasons you just stated.
And Tryon's proximity to Asheville also lends itself to being a more bohemian, artsy place, a lot of artists moved here from New York, but it's also segregated. And that enabled people to see her talents, including her mother's employer, who offered to pay for [Nina's] piano lessons at a young age. That was a white employer, so you have this kind of unusual mix of people investing in her artistic talent, because the town itself is more artsy than maybe other places in Polk County.
That's my entry point into Nina's story — the childhood piano lessons, the early aspirations. And of course, her great dream was to be a classical pianist. And for me, the magic of her life is what happened because she couldn't fulfill that dream. It brought her so much pain throughout her life, but at the same time gave her the space to carve out this sound, and this approach to making music, that was really her own and not subject to anyone else's rules. And to me that looks like freedom.
I begin her story before classical music, partly because she learns how to play piano through gospel music. Because of the segregation that she experienced in the town, and the deep disappointment she experiences as a result of not going to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, that becomes the defining moment of her life.
I am interested in how they recognized her genius because she was playing gospel songs. Her mother, Mary Kate Waymon, known as Reverend Waymon, was a Black woman preacher who traveled throughout North Carolina, taking Nina to tent revivals. So, without necessarily being able to read music, Nina is learning all of these deep musical techniques through gospel. Also, she says this is where she learns how to improvise. She's learning both how to respond to an audience, adapt to their moods, and to rev them up, matching her mother's tempo. She's learning all of that before she becomes a classical pianist. To your point, though, she's merging all of these musical traditions to become Nina Simone. And for me, it's important to start with gospel and then go to classical and then go to jazz and everything else, because you lose this part of the story in Tryon if you don't recognize the gospel birth of Nina Simone.
Right. And when I talk about the finding of freedom in the music, yes, it's civil rights and it's social justice, but it's also the finding of self. And those things that can so easily be erased, by, for example, a classical training. That's the first thing that they want to erase, is a gospel background. So she's allowing all of those things to merge, plus pioneering new sounds because now it's the '60s and the '70s. Her music, to me, is like the entire transformation of the 20th century.
With classical music, it allowed her to literally travel to another part of Tryon. It gives her a kind of physical mobility, and then also an imagination of what's possible. There's a freedom that she's beginning to experience as a child. And then when she's able to merge the musical traditions she's inherited with her singing, that's when she's able to say, "This is who I am in this social justice movement. I'm playing on all these things and I'm going to use them in order to embody a certain freedom, but also to share that with the world and particularly with Black people in America."
You came to Nina's music through a very different pathway, from music you were listening to in the '90s when they were starting to sample her and reference her, and look backwards to that legacy.
She's one of those artists that you're proud to find on your own, right? A lot of people discover her in college. I grew up listening to Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald. Those were the singers. But Nina Simone didn't fit into that canon. And she doesn't want to be in that category, so it's all good. But in 1995, I was at the University of Pennsylvania, my senior year, and the Fugees came out with their second album. And [Lauryn Hill] claims Nina Simone at the expense of all these other people who are out there trying to be gangsters. And I was like, "Whoa, who's that?" And I go downtown and buy The Best of Nina Simone. And I've been chasing her ever since.
For me, she was just in my parents' record collection. I don't think I thought too much about what it was. But the presence of that piano playing just put it in its own space for me. It's quite extraordinary that she managed to hold on to that, especially as music was getting more and more commercialized and there was pressure from labels to decide what you were, and then you had to keep playing that thing.
I think you can hear this with the albums that she puts out in the '60s. Everyone was trying to figure out how to market Nina Simone and eventually they land on live performances as a way to channel that kind of energy, exuberance and rigor that she has on stage. Not only are they trying to figure out how to market her, they're also trying to train her fans how to listen to her on an album. Nina Simone is one of those artists that, while it's important for us to have her music shared through albums, seeing her live — which I never did — is extraordinary. You can see clips of her on YouTube.
I had this experience just a few weeks ago with kids at a middle school in Brooklyn, where the theme that they had been exploring was: Can music change the world? And their answer was, "No, that's dumb." So I played for them the video of Nina singing "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free." It's from the Montreux Jazz Festival, 1976 and it's a crazy, electric performance. She's full of rage and she's full of pain, but she's also got this fire in her belly. And there is no way to experience this and not have your mind changed.
And these kids are living in a time now when the world is what it is, and there's so much division. And we were talking about the '60s and '70s, how much polarization there was and how an artist like Nina, with a song like this, could accomplish so much more than thousands of arguments or politicians or anything else. And actually, she changed their minds. To watch the kids come to that conclusion was also to watch them step into the possibility that they could do whatever they want to do, with that kind of conviction.
I'm just thinking about their immediate frame of reference, like an album like Cowboy Carter or artists like Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny. For me, listening to these artists — in very different genres than the many that Nina Simone inhabited — you can see that they're kind of figuring out a way to use their political sensibilities and their musical message. To experience just the last two Super Bowl performances alone, they are like descendants of Nina Simone.
And another aspect of this moment is that we are pushed to the brink. Now you have to make a choice: Are you going to step up and speak out, or not? There's no more waffling. I look back to the '60s and to artists like Nina and others who were at the heart of the movement. I think I have this rose-colored glasses nostalgia about it. How amazing to have been present in these moments, like the March on Washington, to be there and sing a song. The more I learn about the climate of that time, it was a terrifying thing to do and not good for your career. It was really putting yourself on the line, and I wonder about how Nina felt in that environment.
I think there's something about her constitution. There's something about growing up with a mother who's literally going around the state, converting people to a cause. And I think Nina has this unrelenting desire to use music to make a difference in the world. Once she lost the dream of being a classical pianist, [the movement] fills her up in ways that gave her a reason to be in the world. And she couldn't go back. There are deep consequences for her performing these radical songs, most famously "Mississippi Goddam," that she composed.
I keep going back to this song, "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" because for me it's like a personal statement of liberation. I've had very few role models in my artistic life, who encouraged me to keep going, to do my thing. So for me, it's been very important to look at her legacy.
This song comes in that sweet middle space of her already being identified as a protest musician and still constantly experimenting with sound and form. It's also a way of marking the Civil Rights Movement. Because Billy Taylor writes the song in 1963 as an instrumental for his daughter. That's a really beautiful gift for your child, who represents the possibilities of this battle. She's not entrenched in it the way he was. This is the generation that you're actually fighting for, to have freedoms that you didn't experience in your own childhood. The lyrics were added later.
What I love about this song is that it's really up-tempo, but in many ways it's a song about lament. The wish fulfillment is freedom, but you haven't experienced it yourself. And so you're hoping, wishing. And I was thinking about this in contrast to the other songs like "We Shall Overcome," or Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come." Those are almost like it's predetermined that freedom is going to happen. But this song is so upbeat and rollicking that you actually feel like you're experiencing some sense of it as you're listening to it.
That's what I'm talking about. All of those emotions that coexist. I think that's what those kids in Brooklyn were responding to. It is not just, "I wish I knew how it would feel to be free," it's about, "I wish I could give all the love that's in my heart." It's like "I am not allowed to be fully myself." But when you see her live, there is determination that contradicts the words.
Nina is doing so much in one song, or one album, that you not only have to pay attention, but you have to retrain your ear to experience all the different moods and modes that she is encompassing.
I'm having this feeling right now.
Yeah?
We're sitting in this house, which was purchased in 2017 by a collective of visual artists who wanted to reclaim it, working with the National Trust for Historic Preservation to get it designated as a national treasure.
And the house is so beautiful. The walls are pale blue and the floors are the old original floors. And I'm thinking about our nostalgia for the '60s — nostalgia for some world that our parents had experienced where they had this incredible, collective hope. And then we grew up in the '80s and we saw that it hadn't happened. So this is a nostalgia for a time when people could be so hopeful.
Yeah. Or so radical.
We're here and it's so peaceful and it's pretty much exactly as it was in 1933, which was a terrible time, in so many ways. And I'm thinking about history and the preservation of it, and how much gets lost, especially when you're talking about Black stories. So I'm feeling gratitude that Nina Simone completely captured her world in her music. And then she gives it to us, and I can give it to these kids in a middle school classroom.
To think that you're recognizing America's 250 through the life of a Black girl from the segregated South is pretty amazing. We're sitting in the home of Eunice Waymon and it's the story of America.
Tom Huizenga and Vincent Acovino produced the audio version of this story. Tom Huizenga produced the digital version.
(Playlist image courtesy of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History)
Copyright 2026 NPR
