Nina Simone: A Troubled Genius?
Nina Simone, the High Priestess of Soul, was many things; accomplished pianist of everything from classical to jazz and soul; baritone singer; songwriter; civil rights activist… but, she had another side to her; a woman with a huge temper; often prone to violent and aggressive outbursts; and ultimately, as a result, a convicted criminal - all ultimately, and belatedly, diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
So, a complicated lady, with a complicated life… but also one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, summarised so well by author and radio host Rickey Vincent, who felt she was a pioneer, prone to “fits of outrage and improvisational genius”.
Blue Ridge Baby
Nina Simone was actually born Eunice Waymon, born in Polk County, North Carolina in 1933, the sixth of eight children, to John (a barber and dry-cleaner) and Mary (a Methodist preacher and housekeeper). She was already learning piano by age four (by ear, initially), going on to play regularly at the church services her mother took. One story says that she climbed onto the church organ bench one Sunday, at the age of two and a half and played God Be With You Till We Meet Again right through. Mary was happy for Eunice to pursue music, as long as it wasn’t non-religious stuff; she did not approve of genres like jazz and the blues.
Her talent was recognised by the wealthy white family her mother worked for, and it was they who paid for more formal piano lessons, and it was soon clear to even more people. This experience gave her a love of classical music, especially Johan Sebastian Bach, and the desire to become a concert pianist. She gave a classical recital when she was twelve, which also gave her the first opportunity to flex her activist wings. Her parents were in the front row of the audience, before being asked to move to the back to make way for a white couple. Seeing this, the young Waymon refused to perform until her parents were back in their original seats.
Local people rallied around her to raise money to continue her education at Allen High School for Girls (about 30 miles northwest of them). She graduated as valedictorian and spent a summer at the prestigious Julliard School in NYC, working with the noted German pianist, Carl Friedburg. Her aim was to get into the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia to train as a concert pianist, but her application was denied. Her accusations of racism were perhaps a little unfounded, as they had previously had other African American students, like Blanch Burton-Lyles, studying there.
With her musical aspirations seemingly on hold, she took a job as a photographer’s assistant, whilst getting private lessons from Curtis professor Vladimir Sokoloff. She also gave private lessons to others from her home.
New name needed
To fund these lessons with Friedburg, she needed more money, so she got a gig at the Midtown Bar & Grill, down the road in Atlantic City, New Jersey. There was a hitch though, the bar owner wanted her to sing as well as play, something she had never really done. But the $90 a week for regular performances was not to be sniffed at. The next issue was not wanting her family to find out that she had strayed from classical into the more dangerous jazz (a.k.a. The Devil’s Music), so decided she needed a stage name. Niña had been a nickname given her by a boyfriend (meaning ‘girl’), while Simone came from the French actress Simone Signoret. Nina Simone was born.
These gigs allowed her to develop a range of jazz and blues, with some classical elements thrown in, and build a small fan base. In 1958, she married beatnik Don Ross, but quickly regretted that - she left him and Philly, and headed up to New York City. There, she settled into the clubs of Greenwich Village rather than those in Harlem, and with that air of the classical added into her already eclectic mix of jazz and folk, she was hard to categorise.
Little Girl Blue
Spotted by Lee Kraft, she signed with independent jazz label Bethlehem Records, but her debut record, recorded in 1957, never ended up being released until 1959 - and the label put out no singles to go with it either. Upset with them, she had moved onto Colpix Records, just as the debut finally arrived.
Here we have that first single - a delicate and sentimental ballad that doesn't reflect her later work all that much
I Loves You Porgy (live on the Ed Sullivan Show, 1960)
Bethlehem eventually released a single, I Loves You Porgy, and she had a hit. It made the Top 20, which in turn helped the album, Little Girl Blue (which also includes the future hit, My Baby Just Cares For Me). It seems that the tracks for the album had all been laid down in one thirteen hour session, with bassist Jimmy Bond and drummer Tootie Heath.
Given that her heart was still really set on being a classical musician (the jazz gigs were just to pay the bills), she sold the album rights back to Bethlehem for $3,000, a decision that would unwittingly cost her a lot of money later in life. She also didn’t like being billed as a jazz vocalist, feeling it was more of a race label than a reflection of what her training and style had given her.
Now with Colpix, album number two was quick to follow. The Amazing Nina Simone and single Chilly Winds Don’t Blow came just two months after the first record. Her contract with Colpix allowed her full creative control and the choice over what to record. She was still basically playing along with this record contract stuff, with the underlying ambition remaining to be a top classical performer.
This one takes a jazz structure and gives it almost a Bond theme makeover - it is full of drama - and that sustained note at the end....
Feeling Good (official music video)
Activism
New York life exposed her to many different activists. She got to know civil rights leaders and activists like James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. But, it was dramatist Lorraine Hansberry, who she forged the closest bond with. Hansberry was already an award winner for her play A Raisin In The Sun. Simone would recall that the pair “never talked about men or clothes. It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution - real girl’s talk.”
She attended the American Society of African Culture conference in Lagos, in 1961, and would frequently perform at benefits for the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She was also involved in gay rights too, having affairs with a number of women, although never officially coming out as bisexual.
She remarried in 1961, this time with a NYPD detective named Andrew Stroud, having a daughter (Lisa) with him the following year. They lived out in the suburb of Mount Vernon in Westchester, even comfortable enough to have their own gardener and maid. He would become her manager, but he would also abuse her psychologically and physically, in her own later words, treating her “like a work horse”.
Switching from Colpix to Philips Records in 1964, she jumped more directly into confronting racial discrimination head on. Her debut for the label, Nina Simone in Concert included Mississippi Goddam, her response to the murder of Medgar Evers and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young black girls. The song, which she wrote in under an hour, was her way to throw “ten bullets back at them” and became her first protest song. It made it very clear that she didn’t believe in gradual change with race relations, “me and my people are just about due”.
This one rollicks along like a steam train, belying the lyrical tone. It then plays out like a chase scene - "I think every day's gonna be my last... I don't belong here, I don't belong there". The call and response with her band adds another layer, building up the frustration - "Too Slow!" It ends with a call to arms, "You don't have to live next to me, just give me my equal-i-ty".
Mississippi Goddam (live in the Netherlands)
She would recount to David Upshal on the BBC Late Show in 1991, that, “I must say that Martin Luther King didn’t win too much with his non-violence”, reflecting her frustration at the slowness of progress from peaceful protests. For her, it wasn’t a sufficient reaction to the violence and oppression being meted out on black Americans on a seemingly daily basis. She felt that militancy was essential for achieving equality. Her friend, James Baldwin, had once stated that in all of American history “the only time that nonviolence has been admired is when the Negroes practice it.”
She began to routinely perform and speak at civil rights meetings, including the Selma to Montgomery march (where she would play Mississippi Goddam). Her thoughts on civil rights aligned her more with Malcolm X (a near neighbour in New York) and revolution, than the pacifism of Martin Luther King Jr.
Nonetheless, playing the Westbury Music Fair in New York state, three days after King’s assassination, she dedicated her performance to him and sang Why? (The King of Love is Dead), written by her bassist Gene Taylor.
Simone continued her association with the more political elements of the civil rights movement saw her engage with both the Black Nationalism and Black Power movements, and she would often speak very forcefully on the subject. Her music continued to mix things up; To Be Young Gifted, And Black was a positive song for young African American children, while Four Women was about the suffering and resilience of African American women; then there were covers of other popular artists like Leonard Cohen and George Harrison. Nadine Cohodos once said of Four Women, that “the song compressed two centuries of Black history into four compact verses.” There was also some concern, especially from husband / manager Stroud, that the song would set her career back - a few radio stations had considered it insulting to black women and refused to play it. But Simone had been clear and vocal on civil rights since the early 60s, so was not unaware of the pressures that taking such a stand could have on a black artist's commercial success.
Apparently when she played this live it changed every time - giving different emphasis to the different women's stories. It is a mellow song that rises to one heck of a dramatic crescendo.
Four Women (audio only)
But her music wasn’t all civil rights themed - Stroud ensured that she dialled back a bit, so that it didn’t impact her income too much. While Mississippi Goddam was used a little more sparingly, she also incorporated songs by the likes of Bob Dylan and Leonard Bernstein. But she maintained that the civil rights ones were “the important ones”. It was seemingly what gave her strength.
Simone's cover of this Screamin' Jay Hawkins classic starts with an orchestral swell, with the tinkling of her piano in the background. For a jazz tune, the brass is used relatively sparingly to accent.
I Put A Spell On You (official music video)
The decade had taken a toll on her, with the constant challenges she faced from both her race and her gender. “By the time the sixties ended, I’d look in the mirror and see two faces, knowing that on the one hand I loved being black and being a woman, and that on the other it was my color and my sex which had f***ed me up in the first place.”
She would later reflect that Mississippi Goddam had perhaps harmed her career, with parts of the music industry, she felt, boycotting her. She left for Barbados in 1970, her husband / manager Stroud assuming she wanted a divorce (she also left her ring behind). She did return though, to find there was a warrant for her arrest for unpaid taxes, allegedly part of a protest against the Vietnam War. So, back to Barbados she went.
West African turmoil
Her next stint out there included an affair with the island's Prime Minister, Errol Barrow. And from there, her friend, the South African singing legend Miriam Makeba, persuaded her to move to Liberia. She initially left her daughter Lisa back in New York, but she did eventually come out and join her mother. Initially things seemed good, with Simone feeling like moving there had released her from the prison of America. However, things did not ultimately go well, especially with young Lisa. Simone was both physically and mentally abusive towards her daughter, driving her to the verge of suicide, leading to her return to her father in New York.
Critical Renaissance
1978’s Baltimore, her first album in four years, broke no commercial records but was critically well received. It included everything from spirituals to a cover of Hall & Oates Rich Girl. She started making regular performances at legendary Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London, which resulted in Live at Ronnie Scott’s in 1984.
In 1985, her notoriously volatile reputation came to the forefront again, when she fired a gun at a record company executive, who had, she said, been stealing her royalties. She claimed she was trying to kill him, but missed. There was also a time when she was discovered wandering naked down a hotel corridor, brandishing a knife.
This song, made famous by The Animals, has been slowed way down here, with Simone's voice sounding fantastic - quavering and lifting the tune up.
Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood (official music video)
She was becoming something of a nomad, moving around between Liberia, Barbados and Switzerland, and then ending up in Paris where she routinely appeared at Aux Trois Mailletz. She didn’t get much financial reward for these gigs, and they ranged from the brilliant to her giving up in under fifteen minutes, too drunk to play properly, often scolding the audience.
There was retro success for that 1958 tune, My Baby Just Cares For Me, when it appeared in a commercial for Chanel No. 5 (directed by Ridley Scott of all people) on European TV in 1987. It even made it to number four in the UK charts. She continued to dislike the jazz tag, calling her style, ‘black classical music’. She told BBC Breakfast that, “For years it was known as jazz, but it isn’t that. It’s a combination of gospel, pop, love songs, political songs, so it is black-oriented classical music, that’s what it is.”
Next came a move to Nijmegen in the Netherlands, in early 1988, purchasing an apartment with views across the Waal river and Ooijpolder nature reserve. It was here that she eventually received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and started taking the antipsychotic drug, Trilafon. This perhaps explained her reputation for her temper and often violently aggressive outbursts. Later on, it would emerge from some of her friends that she had been taking some kind of medication (possibly also Trilafon) since back in the 1960s. Some sense of calm arrived and she was enjoying being somewhat anonymous in the Netherlands.
In 1991, she swapped Nijmegen for Amsterdam for the next two years, before moving on again - this time in the south of France, close to Aix-en-Provence. This was also the time that what would be her final album, A Single Woman, was released.
A few years later, she was playing a rare gig back in the US (in Newark), where she told the crowd, “If you’re going to come see me again, you’ve got to come to France, because I am not coming back.”
She endured several years with breast cancer before dying in her sleep at home on 21 April 2003, aged just seventy. Even though she knew how ill she was and could no longer play live, she refused to return to “the United Snakes of America”. Her funeral was attended by Miriam Makeba and Patti LaBelle, the actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee.
I told you Simone covered many bases across her career, and this one was a Bee Gees song! What she created is Motown adjacent, with plenty of swing and augmented by great backing vocals. I also love the rolling drum patterns through it - it is such an uplifting and joyous version.
To Love Somebody (audio only)
Remembering Nina
Rolling Stone noted that “her honey-coated, slightly adenoidal cry was one of the most affecting voices of the civil rights movement”, and her ability to shift between a range of genres, often on the same record. Jim Fusilli of the Wall Street Journal is certain that she remains relevant, writing in 2015 that her work “didn’t adhere to ephemeral trends, it isn’t a relic of a bygone era; her vocal delivery and technical skills as a pianist still dazzle; and her emotional performances have a visceral impact.”
Canadian jazz singer Kellylee Evans wrote an essay on Simone for the Jazz Times in 2024; Simone, she said, was “Sharp as ice. Gentle as falling snowflakes. Sometimes frightening. Always nourishing.” As she discussed the process of falling in love with Simone’s songs, not being an instant love affair, but one that ultimately gave her “a good dose of strength and bravery mixed with a desire for joy”.
Claudia Roth Pierpont reflected on Simone in an essay for the New Yorker in 2014, around the time that a biopic of Simone’s life was about to come out (Nina). The issue for many was her very African features and dark skin, and what it meant for her to be played by someone with a lighter tone (Zoe Saldana), who was of Dominican descent. She was in agreement with the film’s director, Cynthia Mort, who argued that all the characters in Four Women have different skin tones, and all suffer damage through the song because of their race.
Pierpont also discussed Simone's explosive temper. While her performances were designed to be intimate, to get the connection with the audience, she would quickly call out, or glare at, anyone daring to talk while she played - or occasionally, leave the stage altogether.
That Aretha Franklin cited her as a major influence, should tell you all you need to know - and perhaps we shall leave it there.
We finish with that song, recorded way back at the start of her career, that would come back around 30 years later to bring back in the public eye. The piano kind of prances, while there is that lovely smooth drum shuffle going on.
My Baby Just Cares For Me (audio only)
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