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“When I used to get blue years ago, James Baldwin would say the same thing to me each time: ‘This is the world you have made for yourself, Nina, now you have to live in it,’” the trailblazing musician and civil rights activist Nina Simone muses in the opening lines of her 1992 autobiography, I Put a Spell on You.

Throughout this slight, remarkably placid autobiography (co-written with Stephen Cleary), one sometimes wonders—almost with relief—whether these words are actually the voice of Nina Simone. Could this possibly be the same tortured musical prodigy whose mental illness and irrational actions are brutally and heartbreakingly documented in Alan Light’s 2016 biography What Happened, Miss Simone?—a book inspired by the harrowing 2015 documentary of the same name?

But then, like flashes of lightning, Simone reveals her aching loneliness—her insecurities, her rage, her passion, and her inability to explain her oftentimes hurtful actions. A classically trained pianist who begrudgingly became “the high priestess of soul,” Simone knew people thought she was strange. Still, she

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Nina Simone’s Life in Music and Activism

Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images

By 1963, jazz musician Nina Simone already had an established music career. But two events that year permanently altered her direction. The first was the murder of NAACP activist Medgar Evers on June 12. Simone said that “while Medgar Evers’ murder was not the final straw for me, it was the match that lit the fuse.”

That fuse burned until it reached a powder keg: the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15. When she heard the news of four dead Black girls, she grabbed tools and scrap from her garage and tried “to make a zip gun, a home-made pistol.” After calming down, she instead sat at her piano, and in an hour, produced her first civil rights song, “Mississippi Goddam.”

The song exploded in popularity and launched Simone’s activism. It captured the tumultuous obstacles civil rights activists faced at the time, but also vented her fury at American racism. Organizations such as the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) reached out, and Stokely Car

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Although she was not openly bisexual, Simone was rumored to have relationships with women, and wrote of her attraction to both genders in her diary. She married New York police detective Andrew Stroud, who later became her manager, in 1961. The following year, they welcomed their daughter Lisa.

The assassination of Medgar Evers and the bombing the 16^th Street Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four little girls, led Simone to create music to express the pain of the period. She produced and created such protest songs as “Mississippi Goddam,” “Old Jim Crow,” “Why (The King of Love is Dead),” and “Young, Gifted and Black.” The latter two songs were dedicated to her friends, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Lorraine Hansberry, whose lives were tragically cut short.

After lackluster sales of subsequent albums and cold reception from her record company, Simone believed she was being punished for her activism. Simone left Stroud and the U.S. in 1970, and sought refuge in various locations around the world including in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. S