Lost in a (Mis)Gendered Appalachia

Empty and nondescript, Nina Simone’s childhood home stands—just barely—on a secluded corner in tiny Tryon, North Carolina. The house is a stalwart white cube, only three rooms, unplumbed and unwired. Its foundation is stacked bricks, and the tin roof rusts and peels in the sun. Clean windows and new locks suggest the place has recently received some care, and the front porch boasts a bright ceiling, freshly painted traditional “haint blue” to keep bad spirits from the door. The overgrown yard slopes downward toward a steep gulley, and in the distance rolls a line of hills, with more hills behind those, and beyond them still more.

Though most people associate Nina Simone with the jazz clubs of New York and Paris, she grew up here, in rural Appalachia. Her home is only a few miles from my mother’s house, in an area that is more genteel and diverse than the rest of the region. In western North Carolina, where Nina Simone was raised, and where I still live, we don’t mine coal. We grow apples. While Appalachia technically stretches across thirteen states, its core starts here in Tryon and ends somewhere in West Virginia. Coal country may get more attention, but Tryon is wholly Appalachian, too, and it was in these foothills south of Asheville where Simone learned classical piano from a local teacher, Muriel Mazzanovich. “Miss Mazzy” organized concerts to raise money for Simone’s tuition at a prestigious Black high school in Asheville. Eventually, her neighbors raised enough to send her to Juilliard for a summer. The rest of Simone’s life is much better known—her legendary musical career, her protracted battles with racism, mental illness, and a fickle public. But first, there was East Livingston Street in Tryon, and that rolling, crazy-magic landscape.

Nina Simone was a mountain girl, is what I’m saying. I am asking you to picture her that way, to set aside what you know of this iconic artist and think of her rural beginnings. Her entire experience, her whole world before jazz, before fame and legend and fight, was the Jim Crow South and the hills of the Blue Ridge. That little house in Tryon overlooks some of the oldest geological formations in North America. The railroad tracks she crossed every Saturday to attend her music lessons mark the boundary of the first Cherokee land seizures of 1767.

Her voice came from the sticks. What people now, reductively, call Trump country. Land of moonshine and Truck Nutz. A place many outsiders joke about, or pity, or deride—if they ever think about it, about us, at all.

It’s my home. My (white, working class) family has lived here since the early 1800s, and if you know this place like I do, female creativity will be at the center of your understanding of Appalachia. Women like Nina Simone epitomize our artistic traditions and folkways, our music, literature, and collective inner life.