Black Quotidian: Everyday History in African-American Newspapers

August 29, 1953

On August 29, 1953, the Philadelphia Tribune carried a small notice regarding the engagement of Eunice Kathleen Waymon to Edward Irving Vinson. “Miss Waymon is a pianist studying with Mr. Vladimir Sokoloff of the Curtis School of Music,” the Tribune noted. “Mr. Vinson is a student at the Westminster Choir College, Princeton, N.J. The wedding will take place in the Spring.” The next year Eunice Waymon took the stage name Nina Simone. This relationship and engagement is not mentioned directly in Simone’s autobiography, but is mentioned in passing in Alan Light’s recent biography of Simone: “This period also saw her begin her first lengthy relationship since Edney Whiteside, with a man she met in church. ‘I was near my family. I was studying music. I had a boyfriend, and I had a storefront [for private piano lessons]. So that was a pretty normal existence.”110

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