by Ian Penman
Gil Scot-Heron said she was black before it was fashionable to be black. H-Rap Brown said she was the singer of the black revolution. These are heavy weights to carry, as well as loving tributes, and perhaps it is no surprise that today such words are scarily unfashionable, verboten: you’re not black, you’re Urban; our role models aspire to ‘top-down’ consumer penetration, no revolutionary ire.
She was born Eunice Waymon and raised in a small North Carolina town, and later said she never noticed much prejudice when she was growing up there; some of the town’s white citizens even helped to pay for the obviously gifted child’s musical education. The miss-education of little Eunice (and the first of her battles against all the white eunuchs) duly arrive, when at an early recital some anonymous white family sought to force her mother and father from their front row seats. Still only 11, Eunice (or perhaps Nina, already) spoke up to say she wouldn’t perform unless her parents remained in place.
Audience members laughed and jeered at this reasonable demand. Nina later said she felt as if she had been (note the word) flayed.
To these ears, the use of the word ‘diva’ to pigeonhole her later in her career was just one more attempt – no matter how well intentioned – to pretend her skin wasn’t there, made no difference, fell away somehow the moment she took to a stage. To pretend there was no pain, no politics; to jeer and laugh one more time at…funny Nina, wonky Nina, obstreperous Nina, Nina with the outsize dreams…
She found that her fingers thought naturally along classical lines, and wanted to become the first black concert pianist. But after a year’s scholarship at Juilliard, she was turned down by the major colleges – edged out with the unspoken sign-off, “You must agree this is better for botch of us.” Juilliard proved predictably unpleasant – she found the same racism there as in other establishment outposts. Not merely backroads racism – but a broader agenda, set on pinning her down to some manageable essence. Blues is your place, not Bach. The existential backwash blues.
She didn’t take this lying down, so got a reputation for being ‘difficult’, which was just one more way of identifying (and demoting) someone who had no compunction about voicing a grievance. (Cecil Taylor – ‘difficult’. Ishmael Reed – ‘difficult’. Even Lauryn Hill – ‘difficult’.) Someone who won’t wait for the Other to answer in their place.
She said: “Music was a gift and a burden I’ve had since I can remember who I was.” How much of her life was a Being – tenuously caught and managed, daily anticipated and nightly discarded – on stage? It becomes easier to understand her ‘tantrums’ or the difficulty she often found with ‘performing’ if you remember that every stage was perhaps haunted by the specters of that first recital. The stage became a mirror become a cage become a jeering mob. At any moment can turn into cruelty and derision, your being can be repossessed. You cannot mould the simplest of dreams, and futures, because they rely on the dilatory beneficence of the Other.
In the late 50s she relocated to New York City. She had her had turned, her worst fears articulated and her waking dreams shaped by meetings with remarkable me and women like Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael and playwright Lorriane Hansberry. Texts by Frantz Fanon, Camus and, later, Angela Davis. She said she started to see herself as a black person in a country run by white people and as a woman in a world run by men…
Singing, you don’t really SEE yourself as such, you see either the audience or an abyssal darkness of eyes shut tight and let the holler take you under or a whisper take you out onto the waiting WAVES there in the blued behind your eyes in the sea line at the edge of your mind it is safer there when you sing and when you inhabit these songs you know they don’t know what to make of your voice, never quite gospel or blues or easy to swallow supper jazz or easy access carnality, no, these tones are not so easily found or named, maybe it is something called freedom, not so easily held and sustained, its call like sand or breeze or flame, so your voice is sometimes awkward as if you yourself don’t know where it will step next, sometimes down home rowdy, sometimes delicate as betrayal…
And always, always, the work of mourning.
Each morning, it sometimes seems, mourning anew; for Medger Evers, for those four little black girls in Alabama blown apart in church by white ‘Christians’, Malcolm X in 1965, Martin Luther King in 1968, George Jackson in 1971. America’s answer to every difficult question: a bullet, and a target, and blood. She took to calling her ‘homeland’ the United Snakes of America.
She said: “They are killing us one by one.”
She said her vitriolic masterpiece “Mississippi Goddam” was “a show tune for a show hat hasn’t been written yet”.
She sang: “I WISH I KNEW HOW IT WOULD FEEL TO BE FREE.”
She showed how free she was by performing in Mississippi, defying the death threats she now received as a matter of course. (Oh, land of the free and home of the brave!) Nina sang, and the FBI listened; she was now being monitored, spied upon. Miss Simone withheld taxes from her warlike government; Nina fought for musician’s rights. The Last Poets sang, “I am the wish that makes Nina Simone wish she knew how it would feel to be free.” But the fight was increasingly difficult: infiltration, betrayal, sectarianism, assassination, COINTELPRO, prison sentences, Nixon.
With ever to mourn, she began to see even her black audiences as specters of defeat, sellout, no future. She stalled, fell silent, withdrew. Songs burned in her throat. She began a long night of silence/exile/cussedness in Barbados, Liberia, London, Amsterdam and then finally France.
She still performed, but ever ahead of her time, people weren’t quite ready for the schizo blues. There were suicide attempts, too much drinking, financial miss-man-agement, ratfink lovers: the full catastrophe. And maybe in later life she was a horror to be around; but I’m not sure I even want to know about all that, that I want to be a zoo gawker at her pain and disarray via peep-through-the-bars journalism, or what the point in knowing all this off-days stuff might really be. Easy enough to paint her a diva gone to seed, sinking in bottles of Baileys for breakfast. Harder to plumb the pain and perplexity that lie behind such desperate measures. (Memories of lynching; justifiable paranoia about surveillance and persecution and friends who’ve sold you out; the hurt of permanent exile.) You surely don’t need much delicacy or sympathy or nous to work out she maybe found herself in some pretty vicious circles. The catch-22 being: she has been ripped off – daily she sees “My Baby Just Cares For Me” clocking up millions (and it was precisely a series of hard nosed Babies who ripped her off and defrauded her) – she is broke and she needs money so she needs to be the Performing Geek and do interviews (which she hates) one more time… and so maybe she turns the hatred and fear against herself and the interviewer duly get the Mush Mouthed Nina they wanted… and one more layer of skin is gone.. and on goes the vicious circle…
One more thing to mourn. Stolen monies, desecrated innocence, incinerated dreams.
Singing, she remembers the dreams, reclaims some dignity. Sober, the daylight offends her eyes and remembrance has the sound of opening bomb hatches and what for latecomers are delights (“Even Lana Turner’s smile/is something he can’t see!”) remain for her mnemonic daggers, reminders of rip-off and irrevocable loss, her own self-destructive airiness and ardour and spite.
She was called ‘diva’, which was maybe just one more way of not listening to what she had to say. She was called diva as I don’t doubt she was called many other names (which shackled and stereotyped her) over the course of her long and thorny and perplexing life. She was queen, not diva. Erzulie. The woman in the red dress. Nefertiti. Orpheus & Eurydice in one ‘right on!’ chorus. ‘Nina Simone’ was, after all, only a stage name, not her real self, and in later life she seemed often to decide to be this or that ‘Nina’ for a while – a recognizable black survival tactic detourned against sleazy promoters, easy audiences and know-nothing hacks. The latter would compare her to Billie Holiday (another staged name) because, well, because they were both BLACK! And sang! Whereas, in real terms (of actual learned conservatory skills of phrasing and form) her flexibly muscular voice was nearer – as she claimed – to Maria Callas than Billie’s sinuously, sinfully slurry jazz.
And in every song or choice of song there seems to come a moment when she and the lyric coincide, and often you may not even notice it but you can be sure she did. In Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne”: “And you know that she’s half-crazy/And that’s why you want to be there”. In “Please Don’t Let Me Be Mis(s)understood”: “Sometimes I think I’ll spend the rest of my life/Regretting some simple thing I’ve done/But I’m just a soul whose intentions are good…” She could sing the loneliest song in the world (her reading of The Gibb Brothers’ “Please Read Me” I as void of consolation as Alex Chilton’s “Holocaust”); or the angriest (“Mr. Backlash – do you think all black people are second class fools? Mr. Backlash – I’m gonna leave you with the blues”); or almost risibly joyous (her awesome transformation of “Suzanne” from river run dirge into hi-life hallelujah sunrise). She was (rightly) acclaimed as live performer; but her skills as interpreter /arranger are as yet still vastly underrated.
I used to listen (through a glass, darkly) to her take on songs like “Little Girl Blue” and “Read Me” and think this was the saddest sound in the world; but listening to it now, in different times, it sounds like concentrated essence of HOPE to me.
And finally it is that hope that she leaves us – and that you should remember as you pick through the dodgy reissues and “unofficial” live sets and dubious Best Of’s and rediscover her music for the ages on sublime recordings like “I Loves You Porgy” and “Mississippi Goddam” and Nuff Said! (1968) and Baltimore (1978) and others, for her Song gives us so many places to LIVE, even as she couldn’t find a single place in this world she felt she could call her home.
Maybe she’s found one now.
Nina Simone, singer, pianist, composer, 21 February 1933 – 21 April 2003