A listener note, this episode contains references to domestic and sexual violence and scenes of a distressing nature.

Hello and welcome to a new series of legacy.

And this is a special series of legacy because Afwa, you're not sitting next to me

in the studio like normal. Tell us where you are and why. I'm in L.A. And it's a bit of a shame

not to be with you in person, Peter, but it feels kind of appropriate that I'm in the US because

the person we're talking about in this season is such an American icon and a

global icon, but she's very much a product of the United States. So I came here especially for that.

You've been waiting for this one after, because you lit up when we agreed that this is who we were

going to talk about. I don't know if it's fair to show favouritism to our characters,

but I can't hide the fact that this is a big one for me.

Nina Simone, I was thinking about this.

Is it an exaggeration to say she changed my life?

Hearing her music for the first time, which I did quite late in life,

I was a first year at

university. It totally flawed me and I spent the whole of the rest of my 20s listening to

Nina Simone all the time. I probably heard her on ads, but I'd never sat down and really listened to her

and engaged with her message and her energy until I was an undergraduate. And I had a boyfriend

who was black American and introduced me to Nina Simone properly. And he insisted that I

listened to her music chronologically so that I could understand the evolution of her sound.

And I was a pianist as well. I played the piano growing up. I got to quite an advanced level at the piano. And I could also relate to one of her struggles, which we'll

talk about, which was wanting to master the craft of classical piano, but feeling such a

connection to jazz, the blues, protest music, and struggling to reconcile that respect for the classical canon,

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