During the twentieth century, Nina Simone was a prominent voice in jazz and activism. Her success as a black woman is a profound example of resilience, overcoming struggle and pushback for the content of her songs and the colour of her skin. She was a revolutionary musician, blending her skills as a classical pianist, with blues, folk, and jazz, presenting music in a deep baritone with sultry and refined skill. In the 1960s her music became the voice of the black generation fighting for their rights in America. After the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Mississippi in June 1963, and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed 4 black girls, Nina Simone said,
When I heard about the bombing of the church in which the four little black girls were killed in Alabama, I shut myself up in a room and that song happened. Medgar Evers had been recently slain in Mississippi. At first I tried to make myself a gun. I gathered some materials. I was going to take one of them out, and I didn’t care who it was. Then Andy, my husband at the time, said to me, ‘Nina, you can’t kill anyone. You are a musician. Do what you do.’ When I sat down the whole song happened. I never stopped writing until the thing was finished.
The song, ‘Mississippi Goddam,’ was one of passion and experience that accurately described the feelings of black Americans at the time, and it continues to today. It quickly became a civil rights anthem and changed the course of her life, turning her towards a life of activism. Before this time, Simone had a primarily white audience, but the inspiration for the tune manifested through her experience. Her desired career as a classical pianist was constantly dismantled due to her dark complexion. These unjust ‘failures’ would ultimately, lead to her career as a jazz singer and activist.
She was a revolutionary. Famously, her voice rang throughout New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1964, when she sang ‘Mississippi Goddam’ to a white audience. Simone opens with the line,
…and I mean every word of it.
Part way through the piece, she explains,
This is a show tune, but the show hasn’t been written for it, yet.
Eventually, Simone says,
I made you thought I was kiddin’.
In her necessary act of describing her experience as a black woman, Simone recognized the audience, spoke to them, and made them acutely aware of the realities of America in her condemnation. Simone sings,
Hound dogs on my trail
School children sitting in jail
Black cat cross my path
I think every day’s gonna be my last
Simone’s lyrical genius forced America into her shoes, and in her career as an activist, she consistently used her music to inspire empathy and real change. The performance will forever be one of the most prominent acts of resilience and strength, achieved by a woman who embodied those words profoundly.
Nina Simone was born Eunice Waymon on February 21, 1933 in Tryon, North Carolina. Simone was a pianist first and a singer second, blending the American sounds of jazz and blues, European art, and soulful, emotional story telling. In her autobiography, ‘You Put a Spell on Me,’ she wrote that,
Everything that happened to me as a child involved music. Everybody played music. There was never any formal training; we learned to play the same way we learned to walk, it was that natural.
Simone became the pianist for her church, but it was apparent she had a greater gift. Her mother cleaned the home of a white, British piano teacher in exchange for lessons in her segregated community. From a young age, Nina Simone hoped to be the first black concert pianist. She was awarded a one-year scholarship at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, but she ran out of money and had to halt her studies. Even though she was good enough, she was not accepted into her dream school, the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
I knew I was good enough. It didn’t occur to me until later that it was because I’m black.
The underlying, racial tones of her education as a musician , inspired her work as an activist in the 1960s. Simone dropped her plans in classical piano and began playing in clubs, forced to sing by her employer, which is when her singing abilities were discovered. She changed her name to Simone, in honour of her favourite actress Simone Signoret, to hide her nightclub singing from her religious mother. In 1954, she sang and played piano at the Midtown, an Irish pub in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
When Simone began playing in clubs, she assumed she was hired to simply play the piano, but her manager required that she had to sing to keep her job. At first, she began singing in the style of Billie Holiday and various other artists she admired. Most were indifferent to her music, but Simone was able to play what she wanted to hear, playing classical piano in juxtaposition to the folk, gospel, or jazz singing, creating her unique signature. In her 1991 autobiography, ‘I Put A Spell On You,’ Simone explained,
Critics started to talk about what sort of music I was playing, and tried to find a neat slot to file it away in. It was difficult for them because I was playing popular songs in a classical style with a classical piano technique influenced by cocktail jazz. On top of that I included spirituals and children’s song in my performances, and those sorts of songs were automatically identified with the folk movement. So, saying what sort of music I played gave the critics problems because there was something from everything in there, but it also meant I was appreciated across the board – by jazz, folk, pop and blues fans as well as admirers of classical music.
Her Midtown performances gained the attention of jazz fans and record executives. In 1958, she was offered a recording contract with Bethlehem Records, a year later, she released a rendition of George Gershwin’s ‘I Loves You, Porgy,’ gaining attention from the masses. Before leaving Bethlehem Records, she recorded ‘I Put a Spell on You,’ ‘My Baby Just Cares for Me,’ and ‘Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,’ among others. She began a thriving career recording for Colpix, Philips, and RCA labels. Nina Simone had a huge career as a jazz singer, but the civil rights movement and the death and violence against black Americans inspired her work in the movement as a singer.
By the early 1960s, Simone became active in the civil rights movement, participating in the Selma to Montgomery marches and layering the reach of the movement by recording songs that became anthems of the movements. recording several songs that soon became civil rights anthems. Her most influential song pertaining to the events of the 1960s was ‘Mississippi Goddam,’ but her frank discussion of racism led to radio bans throughout the South. She covered Billie Holliday’s ‘Strange Fruit,’ and wrote the gospel-influenced, ‘To Be Young, Gifted and Black,’ in memory of the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who was friends with Simone and wrote the 1957 play ‘A Raisin in the Sun,’ making her the first black author on broadway. In her autobiography, Simone described the hesitancy and necessity for politically charged music,
Nightclubs were dirty, making records was dirty, popular music was dirty and to mix all that with politics seemed senseless and demeaning. And until songs like ‘Mississippi Goddam’ just burst out of me, I had musical problems as well. How can you take the memory of a man like [Civil Rights activist] Medgar Evers and reduce all that he was to three and a half minutes and a simple tune? … But the Alabama church bombing and the murder of Medgar Evers stopped that argument and with ‘Mississippi Goddam,’ I realized there was no turning back.
Truly, it was ‘Mississippi Goddam’ that would change her career and America forever. In the 1960’s, the nation was set ablaze with the strength of the civil rights movement and the equally audacious white backlash in the South. Sitting at her piano in Carnegie Hall in 1964, Simone jumps into the sweeping lyrics of her new song,
Alabama’s gotten me so upset.
Tennessee made me lose my rest.
Everybody knows about Mississippi, Goddam!”
These lyrics came as a shock not only because of her white audiences familiarity to lighter songs like ‘My Baby Just Cares for Me,’ but also the stereotypes related to how a woman, especially a black women should act. Swearing in Carnegie Hall was not on that list of stereotypes. However, it was the bluntness and shock that gained the support and attention from the civil rights movement. Nina Simone’s voice and skilled hands rose to prominence in such a way that it was difficult for white radio stations to deny her success. Yet, her fame existed in a backdrop of racial discrimination. In a way, the civil rights movement was an opportunity to break away from her commanding and being commanded by a white audience. Equally, Simone controlled her white audience, but racism in the nation silenced her experience, until she broke away with ‘Mississippi Goddam.’ As a black, female, classical pianist, she was an anomaly to the entire nation, both black and white people. Having experienced ostracization in her career due to the colour of her skin, she embraced the civil rights movement with righteous anger.
On a surface level, it can be hard to recognize the impact and significance of ‘Mississippi Goddam;’ historical context provides an answer. To begin, language considered inappropriate was nonexistent in music. As well, ideas perceived as anti-American propaganda were blacklisted, which included analysis of systematic racism within the United States. The severe censorship of language and ideas, coupled with the fact that Nina Simone was a proud, black women, with dark skin, African features, and inspired boldness, led to severe pushback. Radio stations would return recordings on 45s cracked in half. ‘Mississippi Goddamn’ holds similar to the story of David and Goliath, with Simone facing and challenging the darkest example of colonialism and racism. As her outspokenness continued, venues hesitated to book her. The same audience that supported her now refused to understand her. It was the civil rights movement that became Simone’s new audience. In the documentary, ‘What Happened Miss Simone,’ Dick Gregor explains,
…to have someone of her stature talking about your problem. You know how happy they had to be? We all wanted to say it. She said it.
Nina was friends with the greats, Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Lorraine Hansberry, but she herself was a great. Nina Simone brought the music emoting the complexity of black identity through anthems and sobering melodies. Simone’s gift was profound, but the context of her sound, and her desire for violent revolution hindered her career. She was the living, breathing possession of her songs, but her passion didn’t allow her to reach the heights of her contemporaries. The authenticity she exemplified propelled a movement forward, but it created additional stress, triggering mental instability later in life. She was a martyr to the cause.
I choose to reflect the times and situations in which I find myself. That to me is my duty.
Having grown tired of the injustice and division in America, Simone escaped. Her career suffered, and she spent most of the 1970s in a musically fallow period, struggling financially, and with her mental health. She lived as an expatriate in many countries, including Liberia, Barbados, Egypt, Turkey, the Netherlands, and Switzerland; in 1994, she settled in the south of France. Near the end of her life, Simone’s struggle with mental health controlled all aspects of her music and performance. Although she experienced a career resurgence in the 1980s when a Chanel perfume commercial featured her version of ‘My Baby Just Cares for Me,’ leading to the song reaching number 5 on the UK charts, her performances held an eeriness only understood when looking at the frustrations of her career and brilliance in music. She continued to tour until the late 1990s, filling concert halls until the end of her career. Her performance at Montreux in 1976 gives an idea of the frustration Nina Simone was feeling. Her unwillingness to play before the audience is completely calm shows her desires to be respected, but gives insight into her trauma, laying a ghostly veil over the room, while still giving an intelligent, gripping, and talented performance. Simone sang every word with heartfelt possession, relating to every second, and forcing the audience to feel her intense sadness and pain for a fleeting moment.
In 2000, Simone returned to the United States for a rare appearance at the Wiltern Theatre. She performed with her daughter, Lisa, who used the stage name Simone. Nina Simone’s struggles caused ripples in her family, and the performance was one of perseverance and resilience. Jazz critic Don Heckman wrote that the concert was,
an experience that has as much to do with a soul–stirring, spirit–raising, shamanistic ritual as it does with a mere program of music.… But she could have come on to a stage with nothing more than her piano and a companion and the crowd would have been just as pleased, the music no less assertive and challenging.
Simone died in her sleep of natural causes on April 21, 2003, at her home in southern France; she was 70. She is survived by three brothers, a sister, and her daughter. The Curtis Institute of Music, which denied her application early in her music career, awarded her an honorary degree. In recent years, she has been the subject of two documentaries, ‘Nina’ and ‘What Happened, Miss Simone?’ In 2018, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
In her autobiography, Nina Simone writes that her function as an artist is,
…to make people feel on a deep level. It’s difficult to describe because it’s not something you can analyze; to get near what it’s about you have to play it. And when you’ve caught it, when you’ve got the audience hooked, you always know because it’s like electricity hanging in the air.
It was her electricity that made her such an important artist to so many. Simone’s electricity lit up the world her whole life, and continues to be a profound light today and it will be for years to come. Up until the end of her life, the context of her race remained an important wire in the beautiful, brilliant, and black circuit that spread across the world.
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Nina Simone Performing In 1976
A Note From The Author:
I was familiar with Nina Simone because she originally recorded the song, ‘Feeling Good,’ in 1965. I gained a much greater appreciation for her abilities when I watched, ‘What Happened, Miss Simone?’ The documentary accurately described her life, brilliance, and struggle, diving into her work in the civil rights movement and the abuse she faced in her family and the greater world. Unfortunately, she is a great example of the sacrifices made when one is passionate and opinionated. Simone’s involvement in the civil rights movement deeply impacted her life in negative ways, but it was something she couldn’t avoid. From the beginning of her life, racism was an integral part of her life. Simone had to decide to go against the grain or play with the system, and her authenticity made her a revolutionary. My favourite album by Nina Simone is the compilation album, ‘Forever Young, Gifted & Black: Songs of Freedom and Spirit.’ It is an intelligent summary of the sound of the civil rights movement. The album contains songs of analysis like ‘I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free’ and ‘Mississippi Goddam (Live),’ sobering songs of loss like ‘Why? (The King of Love is Dead) [Live],’ and triumphant anthems like ‘To Be Young, Gifted and Black’ and ‘Ain’t Got No / I Got Life.’ The music is skillful, the voice is honest, and the lyrics are gripping, inspiring, and brilliant. Although ‘Forever Young, Gifted & Black: Songs of Freedom and Spirit,’ which was released three years after her death, never gained the popularity of some of her earlier pieces, the songs primarily recorded in the 1960s displays the electric, fundamental, and ethereal virtuosity of the works of Nina Simone.
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