Nina Simone: Virtuoso Warrior for Justice
“Nina Simone was born as Eunice Waymon in North Carolina in 1933. She began playing the piano at age 3, began formal piano lessons at age 5 with Muriel Massanovich, and by age 6 was performing in her local church during services. Nina gave her first public recital when she was eight and made her debut at 12 playing an all-classical program. When she made her entrance onto the stage and sat down to play, she noticed that her parents, who were seated in the front row, were forced to move to the back of the venue to make way for some white people. Nina announced that she would not begin to play until her parents were allowed to return to the front, and they were! Mazzanovich was very enthusiastic about Nina’s talent and progress and encouraged her that she would become the first black woman classical pianist, which Nina believed to be her destiny. “Once I understood Bach’s music I never wanted to be anything other than a concert pianist. Bach made me dedicate my life to music.” Her teacher organized a local fundraising campaign to pay for her music lessons and to eventually send her to the Juilliard School of Music in New York. When it was time for high school, Nina was sent to a boarding school, where she practiced five hours a day all through high school. She was valedictorian of her high school class, and was awarded a 1 year scholarship to the Juilliard School. Her dream was to attend the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. In fact her family moved to Philadelphia because they had the expectation that Nina would be a student at the Curtis Institute. After her time at Juilliard she auditioned for Curtis in 1951. However, she was rejected, and for the rest of her life, was convinced that it was because of the color of her skin, and never got over it. She began taking lessons from Vladimir Sokoloff, a piano teacher at Curtis, but then discovered that it was too late to reapply because Curtis didn’t accept students over the age of 21. To support herself she worked as an accompanist in a voice teacher’s studio, taught private piano lessons and worked as a photographer’s assistant developing photos. Nina continued taking lessons from Sokoloff in Philadelphia. To pay for them and her other living expenses she got a job in a bar and grill in Atlantic City, where she played jazz, blues, and classical music. However, the owner told her that she needed to sing while she played in order to keep the job. It was around this time that she changed her name to Nina Simone because she didn’t want her mother to know that she was playing in a bar. Her mother, who was a Methodist minister, considered music outside of church to be “the devils music”. In 1959 she made a very successful Town Hall debut in New York City. That year she released her first and biggest hit single in the United States: I Loves You Porgy from Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess. Simone wrote: “Critics started to talk about what sort of music I was playing and trying 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 songs in my performances, and those sorts of songs were automatically identified with the folk movement. 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. “Some days I found myself sitting down and thinking; ‘I am working hard, I am earning good money, I am successful, people respect me, I am doing well, so why aren’t I happy?’” Al Shackman was Nina’s friend, guitarist, and music director for 43 years. For 10 years beginning in 1961 Nina was married to Andrew Stroud, a New York City cop, from whom she suffered violent domestic abuse. He quit the police department to manage Nina’s career. Their daughter, Lisa, was born in 1962. She did play some classical music at that concert including an extraordinary performance of Delilah’s aria from St. Saens’s opera, Samson and Delilah. “As I acquired fame and money those early goals I had chased so hard slowly slipped away. Classical music became a part of my past almost without my realizing it. There just wasn’t the time to practice anymore, or the motivation.” In June of 1963 civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in Mississippi, followed in September by the death of 4 young black girls who were killed in the bombing of the 16th St. Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama during a Bible study class. In the rioting which followed, Birmingham police shot another black child, and a white mob beat a young black man to death. These terror attacks deeply pained Simone. That same day, full of agony she turned to her art to convey her rage. The result was her song Mississippi Goddam, her 1st protest song against racial injustice. In 1965 she also performed Mississippi Goddam at the conclusion of the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama for voting rights. She said the song came to her “in a rush of fury, hatred and determination”. This is what she created from the pain. She wrote: “News came through every day of friends getting arrested, beaten and intimidated. My music was dedicated to a purpose more important than classical music’s pursuit of excellence. It was dedicated to the fight for freedom and the historical destiny of my people. I felt a fierce pride when I thought about what we were all doing together.” In 1967 she created the protest song, Backlash Blues, with lyrics by the poet, Langston Hughes. Nina was particularly attentive to the acoustics of every venue she performed in. “I learned to prepare myself thoroughly. I’d go to the empty hall in the afternoon and walk around to see where the people were sitting, how close they’d be to me at the front and how far away at the back, whether the seats got closer together or further apart, how big the stage was, how the lights were positioned, where the microphones were going to hit, everything. I was especially careful of microphones, taking the trouble to find one that worked for me and throwing away those that didn’t. So by the time I got on stage I knew exactly what I was doing. “Before important concerts I would practice alone for hours at a time, so long sometimes that my arms would seize up completely. There was one period when I was so dissatisfied with drummers that I decided not to use them anymore. So I sat down for days and trained my left hand like a drum. Just as I mastered it my arm went paralyzed from all the work it had done. Other times I’d fall asleep at the piano. I did my preparation as carefully as possible. I made sure the musicians in my bands understood in every detail the way we were to play, and we rehearsed regularly.” Some of the activists in her personal network included Malcom X, James Baldwin, Stokie Carmichael, and Langston Hughes. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, Nina’s bass player, Gene Taylor wrote the song: Why? (The King of Love is Dead). She debuted it 3 days later at New York’s Westbury Music Fair. She wrote: “I think my performance that night was one of my very best, focused by the love and quiet despair we all felt at our loss.” Simone was very close to her father. However, in 1971 she overheard him telling her brother that he had consistently supported their family, when it was Nina who had been helping the family financially for years. She was so hurt and betrayed by his lie that she disowned her father and a year later suffered the loss of both her father and her sister Lucille within weeks of each other, which she took very badly. The concert producer Ron Delsner said: “As she became embittered by what was going on in this country, it came out in her performance. She started to turn off the white audiences who were now afraid to go to a show, afraid of getting beat up or mugged, or afraid of hearing some message they were sick and tired of hearing.” She wrote: “The protest years were over not just for me but for a whole generation and in music, just like in politics, many of the greatest talents were dead or in exile. I became bitter and disillusioned. I was lost and I struck out at the people around me, which destroyed my recording career in America.” Her career had already been damaged because of her intense concentration on performing and recording mainly songs of angry protest for several years. In 1969 she composed the song To Be Young, Gifted and Black with lyrics by Weldon Irvine, based on her friend Lorraine Hansberry’s unfinished play by the same name. “All my friends had either left the movement or were exiled or were killed. And so I was lost and I was bitter, very bitter. I became paranoid and imagined that somebody was out to get me and out to kill me every minute of my life. Indeed the FBI did have a file on me. “When the civil rights movement died there was no reason to stay. And the racial prejudice was so much I couldn’t bear it and I had to get out of there. I didn’t think it was my home anymore.” In 1970 she left her husband and the United States and lived the rest of her life in Liberia, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Barbados, where she had a lengthy affair with its prime minister, Errol Barrow. She especially loved living in Liberia, but had stopped performing and recording. Another civil rights song she sang was I wish I Knew How it Would Feel to be Free by Billy Taylor composed in 1953. Simone performed several Hebrew songs, including Vaynikehu, an Israeli song in 5/4 time. Od Yishama, (It will yet be heard), and a popular Jewish wedding song, Shabbat Shalom. In the early 50s Eliyahu Gamliel composed Eretz Zavat Chalav U’Dash A land flowing with milk and honey. Taken from a biblical passage, it speaks of a people yearning for a better life. Shlomo Carlebach was born in Berlin in 1925. His father was an Orthodox rabbi and in 1933, the family fled from the Nazis. “I realized that most people don’t go to synagogues anymore.” To reach people he started singing. “I take words of the prophets, and words from prayers which are about a better world, more peace in the world, more love in the world, more oneness. My songs are not against anything, they are only ‘for’…. They give strength, like a Jewish vitamin pill.” One of Carlebach’s most famous songs, “Am Yisrael Chai The People of Israel Live,” became an anthem for Jewish people especially those living in the former Soviet Union. At age 69, Shlomo Carlebach died of heart failure in 1994. His body was flown to Israel for burial. Carlebach and Nina Simone met in 1957 when she was working as a pianist and lounge singer in Atlantic City. Simone was drawn to the unconventional rabbi. They both wanted to change the world, believing that one can’t be an artist just to entertain people. They both wanted very much to change the destiny of their peoples. Simone stated: “I don’t know any genius who had a happy life,” Carlebach commented “Her manic depression and bipolar disorder didn’t help. But she loved me the best way she knew how.” A musical and a movie based on this unlikely alliance is called Soul Doctor. 4 years after his death an article alleged that Carebach had sexually assaulted dozens of women. Daniel Wise, the creator of Soul Doctor stated “After over 100 interviews with credible individuals, and researching dozens of documents and published articles, there was nothing I could find to support such allegations.” While still living in the United States Simone had begun experiencing hallucinations, which continued during her years abroad. Her daughter spoke of Simone’s schizophrenia and a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. She was prescribed anti-psychotic drugs, and when she refused to take them, her intimates mixed them into her food. In 1976 in London Nina ingested 35 sleeping pills in a failed suicide attempt. During the 1980s she performed regularly at a jazz clubs for very little money. Often she was too drunk to sing or play the piano properly. At other times she scolded the audience. Three of her intimate friends then intervened. In 1993 she settled in the south of France, and passed away in her sleep from breast cancer in 2003 at age 70. In 1957 Simone recorded You’ll Never Walk Alone from the 1945 musical Carousel by Richard Rodgers. She continued playing it including a phenomenal performance of it in Hamburg in 1989. The song My baby just cares for me was composed by Walter Donaldson. It’s from the 1930 musical Whoopee! made famous by Eddie Cantor. She recorded it for her very first album in 1957. In 1987 it became a major hit in Europe after it had been used in a commercial for Chanel No. 5 perfume there, resulting in a brief surge in popularity. She once said that the song is about her piano. My baby was the piano. That was her first and lifelong love. In her performance of it at the 1987 Montreux Jazz Festival, she barely sang the words. When I hear it I am absolutely mesmerized at the inventiveness, the rock solid rhythm, and her ability to sustain the perpetual motion as she played it on a 10 foot Bösendorfer piano. Nina Simone recorded 47 albums, over 400 songs, and gave over 2,000 performances during a career that spanned almost half a century. She was nominated for 15 Grammy Awards and inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Some of her songs have been performed by other artists, and are heard in various movies, TV series, and video games. Her song Mississippi was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry. She was inducted into the National Rhythm and Blues Hall of Fame, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame, received a lifetime achievement award by the Irish Music Hall of Fame, was the recipient of a Grammy Hall of Fame Award for her interpretation of Gershwin’s I Loves You, Porgy, and was the recipient of honorary degrees from Amherst College, Malcolm X College, and just 2 days before her death from the Curtis Institute of Music, the same school that had refused admission to her 52 years before. In addition to her autobiography, 7 biographies have been written in English, and some in French. 4 documentaries, 1 bio pic, and 2 plays have been created about Simone. Streets have been named after her in the Netherlands and in Mount Vernon, New York, and a statue of her was erected in Nina Simone Plaza in her hometown of Tryon, North Carolina. These are the lyrics to the song, Why? The King of Love is Dead, which Gene Taylor wrote when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. Once upon this planet Earth Lived a man of humble birth Preaching love and freedom for his fellow man He was dreaming of the day Peace would come to earth to stay And he spread his message all across the land Turn the other cheek he’d plead Love thy neighbor was his creed. Pain, humiliation, death he did not dread With his bible at his side From his foes, he did not hide It’s hard to think That this great man is dead Will the murders never cease? Are they men or are they beasts? What do they ever hope, ever hope to gain? Will my country fall, stand or fall? Is it too late for us all? And did Martin Luther King just die in vain? ’Cause he’d seen the mountaintop And he knew he could not stop Always living with the threat of death ahead Folks you’d better stop and think ‘Cause we’re headed for the brink What will happen now, that he is dead? He was for equality For all people, you and me Full of love and goodwill Hate was not his way He was not a violent man Bigotry had sealed his fate We can all shed tears But it won’t change a thing Teach your people Will they ever learn? ‘Cause you always kill with burn, and burn with guns And kill with guns and burn Don’t you know how we got to react? Don’t you know what it will bring? But he had seen the mountaintop And he knew he could not stop Always living with the threat of death ahead Folks you’d better stop and think Everybody knows we’re on the brink What will happen, now that the King is dead? I’m gonna say he had seen the mountaintop And he knew he could not stop Always living with the threat of death ahead Folks you’d better stop and think and feel again For we’re headed for the brink What’s gonna happen, now in all of our cities My people are rising They’re living in lies Even if they have to die Even if they have to die At the moment that they know what life is Even at that one moment that you know what life is If you have to die, it’s alright ‘Cause you know what life is You know what freedom is for one moment of your life What’s gonna happen Now that the king of love is dead? He has seen the mountain top And he knew he could not stop Always living with the threat of death ahead Folks you’d better stop and think ‘Cause we’re almost to the brink What will happen, now that the King of love is dead?