“I wish I could break all the chains holding me”: “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” by Nina Simone

School integration, Barnard School, Washington, D.C., 1955. Thomas J. O'Halloran

I learned of Nina Simone’s song through an NPR story Songs of the Civil Rights Movement.

I looked up “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” on Freegal, and there it was.

 Born Eunice Waymon in 1933, Simone recounts, “Everything that happened to me as a child involved music…we learned to play the same way we learned to walk. It was that natural.”

Her mother’s employer thought she had a special talent and paid for her music lessons. By her senior year of high school, Simone had her sights set on being a concert pianist, and had won a one-year scholarship to the prestigious Julliard School of Music.

She intended to go on to the Curtis Institute, but they rejected her saying that her playing wasn’t good enough. She resolved to work harder and take the examination a second time, but then she began to suspect that they had refused her because she was African-American.

She settled in Philadelphia and started giving piano lessons. One day, she learned that one of her students (who wasn’t very good at piano) was earning more than she was playing at local bars.

She wanted to get more income, but knew that her staunchly religious mother would object to her even going into a bar, much less working at one.

So she took a stage name. She had liked a term of endearment, nina, (Spanish for little girl) which her boyfriend had used. And she like Simone Signoret, a French actress.

And so, Nina Simone was born. Her first album was called Little Girl Blue.