Jazz great Nina Simone dies in France

NEW YORK -- Nina Simone, whose deep, raspy, forceful voice made her a unique figure in jazz and later helped define the civil rights movement, died Monday at her home in France, according to her personal manager. She was 70.\nClifton Henderson, who was at Simone's bedside at her death, said she died of "natural causes" in her sleep after a long illness. He refused to provide the name of the town where she lived.\n"She inspired other singers to do what they believed in," Henderson said, saying the musician would also be remembered for her activism. "She'll definitely be looked at as a civil rights movement leader."\nBorn Eunice Kathleen Waymon in 1933 in North Carolina, Simone was the sixth of seven children in a poor family. She began playing the piano at age 4.\nIn the late 1950s Simone recorded her first tracks, including "Plain Gold Ring" and "Don't Smoke In Bed." But she gained fame in 1959 with her recording of "I Loves You Porgy," from the opera "Porgy & Bess."\nBut she later wove the turbulent times of the 1960s into her music. In 1963, after the church bombing that killed four young black girls in Birmingham, Ala., and the slaying of Medgar Evers, she wrote "Mississippi Goddam," and after the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., she recorded "Why? The King of Love is Dead." One of her most famous songs was the black pride anthem, "To Be Young, Gifted and Black."\nSimone enjoyed perhaps her greatest success in the 1960s and 70s, with songs like "I Want A Little Sugar in My Bowl," and "Four Women" -- the song with the famous line "they call me PEACHES."\nShe recorded songs from artists as diverse as Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Bee Gees and made them her own. Perhaps one of her more popular covers was her version of "House of the Rising Sun."\nSimone spent much of her recent time in France, and in a 1998 interview blamed racism in the United States for her decision to live abroad, saying that as a black person she had "paid a heavy price for fighting the establishment."\nShe left the United States in 1973 and lived in the Caribbean and Africa before settling in Europe.\nShe was survived by a daughter, Lisa -- also a singer.