Nina Simone's grave — Carry-le-Rouet, France

Nina Simone died on April 21, 2003, at her home in Carry-le-Rouet, a small coastal town on the Côte Bleue west of Marseille, and was buried in the cemetery there. She had lived in France since the 1990s — having spent the preceding decades in Liberia, Barbados, Switzerland, and various other places as she worked through the consequences of her increasingly turbulent relationship with the United States, its race politics, and its treatment of her. France, and the Mediterranean south particularly, offered her the distance she needed: she was famous there, respected, not required to perform the specific kind of American authenticity that the American music industry had always expected of her.

Her life after the civil rights movement — which she had been deeply involved in, writing and recording "Mississippi Goddam" in response to the 1963 Birmingham church bombing and the murder of Medgar Evers, and performing at the 1964 and 1965 civil rights marches — was one of increasing estrangement from America and increasing difficulty managing her mental health. She was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which had been undiagnosed for most of her adult life. The exile years produced uneven work and produced also, occasionally, performances of extraordinary intensity that reminded audiences why she had been called, in the 1960s, the High Priestess of Soul.

Carry-le-Rouet is a modest, pretty seaside town with no particular prior association with American music. Her grave there is visited by fans who travel specifically to pay their respects. She asked, in her later years, for her ashes to be scattered across several African countries; her family's final arrangements differed from this wish. The Mediterranean light in Carry-le-Rouet is everything she described wanting when she talked about leaving America.