LIFE MAGAZINE 10/1970
	RETURN OF THE QUEEN OF SHEBANG by Albert Goldman
			The High Priestess of Soul, Nina Simone, lingers in the wings until her dashiki-clad band has tuned the house vibes to a special frequency of jungle jazz. Then the Queen of Shebang sweeps onstage in an exotic white gown, hair held high in an Afro topknot, a regal circlet of pearls girdling her forehead. Barely acknowledging that tinny rain of applause, she sits down at the piano, fingers a few delicately Debussyan chords and quietly intones, “Black is the color of my true love’s hair.”      As her soft, hazy voice covers the mind like morning mist, you think back to her first hit, I Loves You Porgy, with its gently caressing phrases, its air of still longing and erotic reverie. That performance summed up vocally the yearning of the late ‘50s for something cool and beautiful and distant – like the silver-frosted notes of Miles Davis’ trumpet. Nina had been then the youngest and most promising of jazz singers, a tyro from Tryon, NC, the sixth of eight children born to a handyman and a housekeeper who was also a Methodist minister. Some local music teacher had recognized the child’s talent and gotten up a public fund to send the young Eunice Waymon to high school in Asheville and then way up north to Juilliard School of Music in New York.      Nina had been a piano student and had never thought about singing. Not till a hard-boiled nightclub owner in Atlantic City insisted that she sing as well as play or her supper did she begin to pay any attention to her voice. She discovered then – like many other classically trained black artist – that she had been better educated at home, down on the farm or in the ghetto, than at the conservatory. The moment she opened her mouth, she revealed herself as the bluesy disciple of Hazel Scott, Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday.      Unlike those ladies, however, she found the market for her talents drying up as jazz, nightclubs and the cool world crumbled in the hot festive sunlight of the Woodstock Generation. She might have been defeated by this changed of guard, the avant for the ariere, but instead she was inspired. During the past few years, she has built her reputation so high as the toughest, funkiest, most hand-clappin’ n’ finger-poppin’ of soul sisters that all she has to do is walk out on the stage of the Fillmore and the kids start taking the place apart.      The story of her turn-around comeback, the symbol of her invincible spirit and enormous youth appeal, is in her unforgettable interpretation of  Ain’t Got No/I Got Life from Hair. As she begins to recite the endless catalog of things she (and the kids) ain’t got – “no job, no money, no home, no father, no mother, not pot, no wine, no tokens for the subway” – her hard, dark voice rises and falls with the imploring intonations of the blues. Building to the great turn in the tune, suddenly she swings around and proudly proclaims all the things she has got – health, smile, soul, sex, arms, hands, breasts and hair – her voice rising triumphantly on a hard-rocking, uh-huh! beat that carries her off in glory above the kids’ clapping, crowing, stomping, whistling ovation.      Nina Simone’s recent success hasn’t inspired her to correct any of the personality faults that have always made her hard to take off the record. She still pollutes the atmosphere with a hostility that owes less to her color than to the rasping edge on her pride. She still can’t make up her mind whether she’s a lofty lady like Miriam Makeba or a Gem-blade mama like Dinah Washington. She has still to learn that the humility of the true performer is based on the drastically simple fact that he owes his life to the public.