The Pain and the Glory: Nina Simone

Some time in the late 1980s, I went to see Nina Simone at Ronnie Scott’s. It wasn’t without a certain amount of trepidation. Her residencies at the club had yielded numerous tales of erratic behaviour, including pugilistic audience interactions and random walk-offs, which served only to burnish her legend. She’d been a piano prodigy, the High Priestess of Soul, a righteous testifier at the blazing heart of America’s civil rights movement, and, latterly, a wandering exile from her homeland and seemingly, taking into account her well-documented struggles with her mental health, from herself. Which Nina would we get tonight? 

I felt as if I had been flayed. But the skin grew back a little tougher, a little less innocent, and a little more black.

The entrance of ‘Miss Simone’ — as everyone addressed her, like an honorific — was dramatic enough: led on in a white fur coat and feathered plumes, she gripped the grand piano like a life raft, dropped into an elaborate curtsy as
the applause built, and, on rising, gave the audience a gladiatorial glower, which continued long after the nervous titters subsided and was broken only by her barked exhortations at a latecomer to “sit down, girl!” If this was a test, we must have passed it, because when she herself sat down, she proceeded to dazzle, beguile, rouse and break the hearts of the crowd with her excoriations of poverty and racism (Baltimore, Four Women), her tender evocations of love and longing for better times (I Loves You, Porgy, Little Girl Blue) and her galvanising exhortations of pride and joy (Young, Gifted and Black, My Baby Just Cares for Me). Her long, elegant fingers attacked and caressed the keys; her voice, declamatory and confessional, bespoke a lifetime of hard-won wisdom. But it was her version of Janis Ian’s Stars that seemed to give her the biggest pause, as she declaimed the lines: 

Some of us are downed
Some of us are crowned
And some are lost
And never found 

But most have seen it all
They live their lives in
Sad cafés and music halls
They always have a story 

What was Nina Simone’s story? “I’ll tell you what freedom is to me — no fear,” she once told an interviewer, and that elusive search for freedom — not only from fear but from the frustration, terror and rage brought on by mid-century America’s societal expectations and depredations — came to define her life and art. 

She was born Eunice Waymon in 1933, the sixth of eight children of John and Kate Waymon, a barber and Methodist preacher respectively, descendants of slaves and pillars of the small black community of Tryon, North Carolina. The air of the family home was thick with hymns and spirituals, and little Eunice, suitably transported, climbed up to the church organ bench at the age of two and a half to play God Be with You Till We Meet Again straight through, no flubs. She was soon accompanying the church choir, soundtracking the rapturous cadences of visiting revivalists, and taking piano lessons with a local teacher, Muriel Mazzanovich (‘Miz Mazzy’, as Eunice called her), which inspired her abiding love of Bach and her ambition to become a foremost classical pianist. Giving a recital in the local library at 11, Eunice saw her parents being removed from their front-row seats to make room for a white couple; her anger fighting with her sense of decorum (Miz Mazzy had been schooling her in deportment alongside the classical canon), she stood up and announced that if people wanted to hear her play, her parents had better be returned to their rightful places. This was effected — accompanied by the same nervous titters from the audience that would become a signature of Simone performances — but the next day she recalled, “I felt as if I had been flayed, and every slight, real or imagined, cut me raw. But the skin grew back a little tougher, a little less innocent, and a little more black.” 

That rawness was not assuaged when, a few years later, after a patron-funded private high school education (she graduated valedictorian) and a summer programme at Juilliard, she was rejected by the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia (Simone always believed it was because of her race, which Curtis always denied; they awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2003, just two days before her death). Adrift and broke, Eunice took a job playing cocktail piano in an Atlantic City dive — with the owner demanding that she also sing, something she hadn’t contemplated up to that point — and, in an effort to prevent her mother from learning that she’d turned to ‘the Devil’s music’, she changed her name to Nina Simone, from the Spanish niña, or ‘little girl’ (a nickname bestowed on her by an early boyfriend), and in honour of the French actress Simone Signoret, whom she’d admired in the 1952 movie Casque d’Or.

Simone’s consummate facility soon saw her gravitate towards the clubs in Harlem and Greenwich Village. With her eclectic repertoire, incorporating jazz, folk and show tunes — and often folding in some Bach or Mozart curlicues to emphasise her classical bona fides — alongside her swooping, scatting contralto (“Sometimes I sound like gravel, sometimes like coffee and cream — you use all that you’ve got inside,” she once said), she quickly became a musician’s musician. “She has introduced fugue and counterpoint into the freewheeling spontaneity of the jazz world,” marvelled one British critic, while Miles Davis, no slouch at whipping up a Bitches’ Brew himself, marvelled at her ability to sing one song while playing an entirely different one. Her 1959 debut album, Little Girl Blue, spawned her only top 20 U.S. hit, the delicate, yearning I Loves You, Porgy. In 1961 she married Andrew Stroud, a tough New York vice cop on the Harlem beat — they had met backstage at one of her gigs, where she noted, approvingly, that he was “very sure of himself ” — and he left his job to steer her career. By 1963 they had a daughter, Lisa Celeste, and a large house in the leafy Westchester city of Mount Vernon, replete with Paisley wallpaper, a cold store (for Simone’s fur coats), a gardener and a maid. That same year, Simone finally achieved her long-held ambition to play Carnegie Hall, but the experience was bittersweet: “I wrote a letter to my parents, saying, ‘This is where you wanted me to play, but I should have been playing Bach’.” 

However, Simone’s career was about to take a different turn. The day of her Carnegie Hall concert — April 12 — was the day Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested and thrown in jail in Birmingham, Alabama, and while Simone was hardly unapprised of the urgency of the black struggle — Malcolm X and his family were her neighbours in Mount Vernon — she now applied her intelligence and restive force to it, sharing halls and platforms with African-American culture’s finest minds, including the playwright Lorraine Hansberry (Simone’s To Be Young, Gifted and Black would be inspired by her), the writer James Baldwin, the poet Langston Hughes, and the activist Stokely Carmichael. Her repertoire — from the brooding Four Women to her tub-thumping take on I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to Be Free — became overtly political, but it was the September 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, which killed four young African-American girls fresh out of Bible class, that really jolted her. Her first reaction was to try to make a zip gun with tools from her garage. Her second was to write the propulsive lament-cum-call to arms that is Mississippi Goddam: 

Alabama’s gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

Sometimes I sound like gravel, sometimes like coffee and cream — you use all that you’ve got inside. 

Simone didn’t care that radio stations were sending boxes of the record back, not only unplayed but with each disc neatly cracked in two. “My voice broke with the way I would sing that song — I lost an octave I was so angry,” she said. “I wanted to shake people up so badly. I wanted them to be in pieces.” 

Whether she meant that literally was a moot point; when Simone met Martin Luther King Jr. she declared, “I’m not non-violent” (“Not to worry, sister,” was Dr. King’s equivocal response), and she now favoured bright African-style robes and towering braids while she inquired of her audiences whether they were prepared to take up munitions and burn down cities in order to achieve their own freedom from fear. As the sixties progressed, she seemed emotionally disturbed to some and a beacon of hope to others; she was the most laceratingly truthful black woman in America. 

But eventually the result was estrangement: from her audiences, increasingly alienated; from her husband, who, Simone later revealed, regularly beat her, a violence she internalised; and from America itself, particularly after King’s shooting in 1968. Simone took to calling her birthplace the ‘United Snakes of America’, and eventually, in 1974, she followed Baldwin, Carmichael and other leading lights in decamping abroad. “Andy was gone and the movement had walked out on me, too,” she wrote, “leaving me like a seduced schoolgirl, lost.” 

“I don’t belong here, I don’t belong there,” Simone had sung in Mississippi Goddam, and her last 25 peripatetic years — she lived in Liberia, Switzerland, France and the Netherlands — seemed to prove her point. There were lows — she set her house in France on fire, and was institutionalised — and even the highs were double-edged: yes, she enjoyed a revival when Chanel used her finger-snapping 1959 recording of My Baby Just Cares for Me in an ad campaign for No.5, but she didn’t see any royalties from the gold and platinum discs, having signed away her rights for $3,000 at the time. However, a much-overdue diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and the appropriate medication, at least enabled her to take to stages like the one on which I saw her, and on which she left an indelible mark, freedom reigning, the fear — temporarily at least — at bay. She finished that night with Four Women, leaning into its archetypal tale of burdens borne: 

My skin is black
My arms are long
My hair is woolly
My back is strong
Strong enough to take the pain
Inflicted again and again 

The ovation was long and heartfelt. There was one last glower, undercut with a wistful smile. And then Miss Simone was gone. 

I lost an octave I was so angry. I wanted to shake people up so badly. I wanted them to be in pieces. 

Read the full story in Issue 98, available now.

Photo Credits: Getty Images