Nina Simone: A Protest Singer’s Cause and Stunning Effect

“>Nina Simone, who died Monday at age 70 at her home in the South of France, never hid her intense rage, or her immense passion. Onstage, she was the embodiment of the combustible artist, ready to rail at inattentive audiences, inarticulate critics, deceitful promoters and thieving label owners. In performance, and on her many albums, Simone offered shimmering testimonials to the power of love as well as blistering social commentaries, most but not all of them rooted in America’s shameful legacy of racism.
Sometimes those two worlds were joined, as ”To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” the uplifting anthem Simone wrote with Weldon Irvine. Inspired by a posthumous collection of writings by the pioneering African American playwright Lorraine Hansberry, the song captured the empowerment of racial pride:
Young, gifted and black
How I long to know the truth
There are times when I look back
And I am haunted by my youth
Oh but my joy of today
Is that we can all be proud to say
To be young, gifted and black
Is where it’s at.
Powerful readings by Donny Hathaway and Aretha Franklin are better known, but Simone’s is the original.
Simone was a crucial voice in the civil rights era, when some of her most striking work addressed the horrors and injustices attending blacks in the South, incendiary tracts like ”Mississippi Goddam” (inspired by the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four black girls), ”Old Jim Crow” and ”Backlash Blues” (based on a poem written for Simone by Langston Hughes). Like jazz artists Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach and Charles Mingus, Simone used her populistplatform to shine a bright light into ugly corners of American society.
There was a time when Nina Simone was dubbed ”the high priestess of soul,” a term she hated, not only because it smacked of marketing hype but because it tried to put her in a box she’d never have fit in comfortably. While Simone certainly invested all her work with soul, she blurred boundaries and jumped genres, embracing jazz, pop, blues, spirituals, folk, French chansons, African song and the works of contemporary songwriters like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, the Bee Gees and the Beatles. Simone’s reading of ”Here Comes the Sun” remains a transcendent moment of elegance and joy. Simone was also one of the first African American artists to embrace traditional African garb, adding regal bearing to her already dramatic presence.
Ironically, Simone’s first and only American hit came early in her career, with a luminous reading of George Gershwin’s ”I Loves You Porgy” recorded in 1957; it went Top 20, the only Top 40 entry of a career that covered 45 years. Confirming the vagaries of pop culture, Simone did enjoy a top-five single in England in 1987, when a three-decade-old recording of ”My Baby Just Cares for Me”–from the same ”Little Girl Blue” album that included ”Porgy”–became a hitafter being used in a television commercial.
What was always evident was a powerful contralto that expressed Simone’s highly personal interpretations of varied materials, subtly shaded by her assured piano underscoring. Simone–born Eunice Waymon in Tryon, N.C.–had trained to be a classical pianist, but such opportunities for African Americans in the 1950s were limited. Initially, to support her education, she made a living accompanying classical singers. When an opportunity to work in an Atlantic City lounge cropped up in 1954, it was on the condition that she sang as well as played. That’s when Eunice Waymon became Nina Simone, out of fear of offending her handyman father and, perhaps more important, her Methodist minister mother. Up to that point, Simone had never sung in public.
Simone started off exploring the Great American Songbook, but also expanded her repertoire with stately spirituals like ”He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” and reconstituted folk standards like ”House of the Rising Sun” and ”Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.” Whatever the material, Simone offered it on her terms.
Her recording career started in the mid-’50s on the Bethlehem label, and even though she was never a particularly commercial presence, she was prolific: The online site All Music Guide lists almost 100 albums (including compilations). Many of the best are live albums that capture the artist’s charisma, tenderness and fervor–as well as the occasional firestorm of anger and frustration. Because Simone was so productive, particularly in the first two decades of her career, she could be annoyingly erratic and inconsistent on record: her best-ofs are often the best representation of less-than-stellar efforts, but there’s usually at least one gem on every album she recorded.
By the late ’60s, Nina Simone had grown weary of American racial politics and frustrated with the level of her commercial success. She relocated to Europe, where she felt more appreciated as both an artist and a black person. She lived at various times in Switzerland, France and England, as well as Liberia and Barbados.
In 1992, Simone published her autobiography, ”I Put a Spell on You.” The title is taken from one of Simone’s unparalleled covers, this one of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ wild voodoo declaration of lust and love. In Simone’s hands, it was seductive, bold and irresistible, a testament to a fiercely independent spirit who did things her way because that was the only way.