What was Nina Simone’s highest ever chart position?
Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon, the unwillingly monikered ‘high priestess of soul’, Nina Simone has gone down in history for her distinctive contralto voice, but her music didn’t dominate the charts quite the same.
Having first encountered music at an early age, Simone started her musical career by learning hymns such as ‘God Be With You, Till We Meet Again’ at the age of just three or four, foreshadowing her string of church performances as an adolescent. Later in life, she would even admit that she was a musical genius aged just six months old, something she claimed was a “gift from God”. Still, that genius was considered insufficient for Simone to study at the Curtis Institute of Music, Philadelphia.
Instead, the late artist began to perform at bars as smoky as her voice in Atlantic City, New Jersey, as a means to afford private piano lessons. Given her mother’s aversion to “Devil’s music”, Simone adopted her stage pseudonym, combining her nickname “Niña” and “Simone” from the French actress Simone Signoret. Gradually, the musician’s theatrical blend of jazz, blues and classical music gained her a small following, and Simone recorded what would later become one of her most infamous tracks, ‘I Loves You, Porgy’, taken from the opera Porgy and Bess.
In 1959, she released her debut album, Little Girl Blue, via Bethlehem Records, which caused the artist to lose more than $1million in royalties, given she had sold her rights. Following the success of her debut, Simone began to record a mix of studio and live albums with Colpix Records, the first recording company for Columbia Pictures, such as Nina Simone at Town Hall, which landed her a spot among the soon-to-be-thriving Greenwich Village music scene.
But it was only in the following decade, when the Civil Rights Movement grew in strength, that Simone began to draw on her African-American heritage. With her song ‘Mississippi Goddam’, she addressed racial inequality for the first time, which led to the track being boycotted in some Southern states.
In 1967, Simone changed her label once again, moving to RCA Victor before releasing Nina Simone Sings the Blues and Silk & Soul in the same year. Spanning recording companies over her storied career, her later albums include 1970’s Black Gold and 1974’s aptly titled It Is Finished, which marked her final LP with RCA. It was 1993’s A Single Woman that was her final album before she succumbed to the ravages of her long-standing breast cancer diagnosis.
So, what was Nina Simone’s highest charting position?
Despite her impressive discography, Simone never topped the charts the way she might top your jazz and blues playlist. In fact, her highest topping album, Feeling Good: Her Greatest Hits and Remixes, was released posthumously in 2022, reaching number four in the US jazz charts, meaning she never saw any of her albums reach higher than eighth position in the US R&B charts; her others remained well past 100th place in the Billboard 200.
Her singles, however, were a different story. ‘I Loves You, Porgy’ reached number 18 in the US, while ‘I Put a Spell on You’ reached number 23 in the R&B charts. In many ways, Simone’s chart success took place in Europe, with ‘To Love Somebody’ and the 1987 re-release of ‘My Baby Cares Just For Me’ reaching number five in the UK charts, while ‘Ain’t Got No, I Got Life’ secured second place in 1968.
