prejudice . Its individual details , as with so many others in her life , gradually faded into insignificance . The legend got printed .
Atlantic City and not Philadelphia was to be her immediate future . Fate throws down unlikely encounters , and it was Nina ’ s fate to fall in with an elegant prostitute called Faith Jackson ( who seems to have used a male name , too ), whose particular beat took in all the hot spots and likely marks of the Eastern seaboard . Faith had business in New Jersey , where gambling was legal and men temporarily separated from their wives were both devil-may-care and hungry for pleasure . Nina was introduced to Harry Steward , the white owner of a narrow dive on Pacific Avenue called the Midtown Bar & Grill . This was the summer of 1954 . On July 19 of that year , Sun Records released “ That ’ s All Right ”, the first single by a young mixedblood boy called Elvis Presley , who had taken black vernacular music and given it a new voice and the beginnings of a new image . In future years , Nina Simone was to be one of the few stars who managed to compete successfully with the new rock music , though she remained contemptuous of what she perceived as its crudity : “ animal music ”, she called it on one occasion . Nevertheless , she was one of the few artists who managed to bridge a jazz and rock audience , while remaining distinct from either genre .
Her first appearance at the Midtown has acquired an almost cinematic vividness that further feeds the Simone legend . Was there really an umbrella suspended above her piano stool to divert the drips from a leaky ceiling ? Did she really turn up for her first paid engagement in a gown that would have been more suitable in Carnegie Hall ? There was to be nothing , then or ever , of the hoochie-coochie girl in Nina Simone and the
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