The legendary singer was not only recognized with a life-size bronze statue in her hometown, but part of her actually came home. An 8-foot statue of Simone sitting at a piano was unveiled in Tryon Sunday afternoon on what would have been her 77th birthday.  The statue also houses some of her ashes.

"It's not something very often done, but I thought it was part of the idea of bringing her home,"
said Zenos Frudakis, a sculptor living near Philadelphia who spent two years working on the statue.

After Simone died in 2003, her daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, gave some of her mother's ashes to Frudakis for the statue. The sculptor encased the ashes inside the statue's chest in a bronze heart.


Tryon was Simone's hometown, and biographers and documentary crews have visited the small town over
the years to report on her life, but there has been nothing in the town to commemorate the woman known as "The High Priestess of Soul" who left her impact on jazz, gospel, pop and
folk music.

Tryon "is the only place in the world that can claim (being her hometown)," said Crys Armbrust,
president of Tryon's Downtown Development Association and founder and executive director of the Nina
Simone Project.


"In some sense, she has returned home. A portion of her resides here and is embodied in that sculpture."


Simone was considered the civil rights movement's official singer for her protest songs, including
"Mississippi Goddam," which was written after the death of activist Medgar Evers and a church bombing
at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young girls.

Her outspokenness during the movement and her time spent living in Europe and Africa is thought to have
made some people in Tryon hesitant to recognize Simone in the past.