What Happened, Miss Simone?: A Biography - Hardcover

Light, Alan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1101904879 ISBN 13: 9781101904879

Publisher: Crown Archetype, 2016

Synopsis

Inspired by the Academy Award-nominated Netflix documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?, an intimate and vivid look at the legendary life of Nina Simone, the classically trained pianist who evolved into a chart-topping chanteuse and committed civil rights activist. 
 
From music journalist and former Spin and Vibe editor-in-chief Alan Light comes a biography of incandescent soul singer and Black Power icon Nina Simone, one of the most influential, provocative, and least understood artists of our time. Drawn from a trove of rare archival footage, audio recordings and interviews (including Simone's remarkable private diaries), this nuanced examination of Nina Simone’s life highlights her musical inventiveness and unwavering quest for equality, while laying bare the personal demons that plagued her from the time of her Jim Crow childhood in North Carolina to her self-imposed exile in Liberia and Paris later in life.
 
Harnessing the singular voice of Miss Simone herself and incorporating candid reflections from those who knew her best, including her only daughter, Light brings us face to face with a legend, examining the very public persona and very private struggles of one of our greatest artists.

About this title

About the Author

A veteran music journalist, ALAN LIGHT is the author of The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley and the Unlikely Ascent of "Hallelujah" and Let's Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain. Light was previously the editor-in-chief of Vibe and Spin and a senior writer for Rolling Stone. He is also a frequent contributor to the New York Times.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER 10
 
People seem to think that when she went out onstage, that was when she became  Nina Simone. My mother was Nina Simone 24/7. . . . She couldn’t be herself, and she wasn’t loved for who she was when she was not at the piano and not singing.
 
— LISA SIMONE KELLY
 
 
The summer of 1969 saw perhaps the most rigorous tour schedule Nina Simone ever faced. With plans put in place by Andy and spurred by her recent chart success, she played a full slate
of shows in the United States (including  the Harlem Cultural Festival appearance) and also made a quick trip that took her to France  for a festival in Antibes and then to Algeria for the first Pan-African Festival.
As the “folk-rock”  boom  had given way to psychedelia  and then the first  stirrings  of  the singer-songwriter  movement, pop songs had an increasing  sense of gravity and ambition that seemed  to appeal  to Simone.  She followed  her  hit from  Hair with  another single  from  a current pop  source,  covering  the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody” and reaching  number 5 on the UK  charts. The  song also became  the title track for Simone’s next album,  which had the most contemporary song selection she ever attempted: three songs written by Bob Dylan (she was one of the few truly great Dylan interpreters), Leonard  Cohen’s “Suzanne,” the folk song “Turn! Turn! Turn!” (with lyrics taken from  the Bible  and  credited to Pete Seeger,  the song  had  of course been a huge hit for the Byrds a few years earlier).
She also cut two more  Bee Gees compositions and a modi- fied version  of the Beatles’ “Revolution,” later praised  by John Lennon  himself.  Such a track list broadened her audience  and inevitably interested young, white rock  fans, which  led to her first  booking  into Bill Graham’s  famous  venue,  the Fillmore East.
A review in the Village Voice indicates that Simone was at the peak of her power in the East Village rock mecca. “She now pos- sesses an absolute mastery of her material,” wrote Don  Heck- man. “Like all great singers, she has passed  the point of sheer technique and takes for granted nuances  of performance that other singers would have to make  strenuous and conscious  ef- forts to achieve.”
In August, she also recorded the song that would be her final contribution to the protest repertoire—though it was one  of inspiration  and  uplift  rather than fury. Lorraine  Hansberry’s ex-husband and estate executor, Robert Nemiroff, had adapted some of her writings into a new off-Broadway  play titled To Be Young, Gifted and Black. One  Sunday morning,  Simone  opened the New York Times and saw a story about the production, with a photo of her old friend Hansberry.
“This picture caught hold of me,” she said. “In her eyes, she kept trying to tell me something, and the memory of being with her many times kept flooding back. I sat down at the piano at that moment and made up a tune. I knew what I wanted it to say, but I couldn’t get the words together. So I called up my mu- sical director, Weldon Irving, Junior, and I said, ‘Hey, Weldon, I got a song, and I want you to finish writing it.’ I hummed it over the phone,  told him what was on my mind, explained  to him a little bit about Lorraine  Hansberry. And he captured the mood, and it was finished on Tuesday, forty-eight hours later.”
Like all great anthems, the lyrics to “To Be Young,  Gifted and Black” are simple and clear, the melody forceful and memo- rable but not cloying.

  To be young, gifted and black,
Oh, what a lovely precious dream
To be young, gifted and black,
Open your heart to what I mean
 
 
In the whole world you know
There are a billion boys and girls
Who are young, gifted and black,
And that’s a fact!
 
 
Young, gifted and black
We must begin to tell our young
There’s a world waiting for you
This is a quest that’s just begun
 
 
When you feel really low
Yeah, there’s a great truth you should know
When you’re young, gifted and black
Your soul’s intact!
 
 
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!
 
Speaking  about the song at the time of its release,  Simone revealed  a true sense of purpose,  a look beyond  the historical outrage of “Mississippi  Goddam” and “Four Women” to a mis- sion for the future. “To me, we are the most beautiful creatures in the whole world, black people,” she said. “I mean that in every sense, outside and inside. We have a culture that’s surpassed  by no other civilization, but don’t know anything about it. So my job is to somehow make them curious enough, or persuade them by hook  or crook,  to get more  aware of themselves, and where they came from, and to bring it out. This is what compels me to compel them, and I will do it by whatever means necessary.
“As far as I’m concerned, my music is addressed to my people, especially to make them more  curious  about where they came from and their own identity and pride in that identity. We don’t know anything about ourselves. We  don’t even have the pride and  the dignity  of African  people.  We  can’t  even  talk about where  we came  from,  we don’t know.  It’s like a lost race, and my songs are deliberately to provoke  this feeling of ‘Who am I? Where did I come from? Do I really like me, and why do I like me? And if I am black and beautiful, I really am and I know it, and I don’t care who says what.’ That’s what my songs are about, and it is addressed to black people. Though I hope that in their musical concept, and in their musical form and power, that they will also live on after I die, as much as they are universal songs, too.”
“To Be Young, Gifted and Black” was a Top 10 R&B hit and, peaking  at number 76 on the pop charts, also Simone’s biggest crossover  success since “I Loves You,  Porgy.” The  song would be covered  by Aretha Franklin  (who made it the title of a 1972 album) and the masterful soul singer Donny  Hathaway; a few years later, Simone even performed the song sitting on a stoop on Sesame Street. The Congress  of Racial Equality named  it the “Black National Anthem,”  and  the themes articulated by the song would be explored by such artists as Stevie Wonder and the
Staple Singers.
“I’m born  of the young, gifted, and black affirmation,” said Attallah Shabazz. “It wasn’t that we didn’t know it. It was daring to proclaim it, and then share it joyously. It’s stated in a way that you know your African-ness without apology, without explana- tion, and it’s put into a contemporary, hip song, which  means you get to hum it in public. And you didn’t have to be black to sing it, because it was just a truth.”
The studio version of “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” was released only as a single; Simone’s next album would be another live set, titled Black Gold and recorded at an October show at New York’s Philharmonic Hall. The closing number was a nine- and-a-half-minute version of the new hit, which she introduced by saying, “It is not addressed to white people primarily. Though it doesn’t put you down in any way . . . it simply ignores you. For my people need all the inspiration and love that they can get.”
As  the focus  of  her  work  increasingly  shifted to singing about and for her black audience,  Simone’s political thrust had moved from the drive for civil rights and racial equality to the priorities  of  independence  and  self-sufficiency   that defined the Black Power  agenda. “She made the transition from move- ments demanding the acknowledgment of our rights as citizens to insurgent  movements  calling for  the economic and  politi- cal restructuring of our  society,”  wrote  Angela  Davis.  “With her, I moved from an assimilationist project to a revolutionary project.”
Black Gold would be Simone’s only gold-selling album  with RCA  Victor. It was nominated for a Grammy  for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance (although she would once again lose to Aretha Franklin).  A separate LP containing an interview with Simone was mailed to radio DJs for promotion; in this conversa- tion, she expressed her satisfaction with the record.
“There  is a great deal of electricity in this album,” she said. “There  is a great  deal  of rapport between  the audience  and myself, which has been missing in so many of the previous  al- bums.”
Simone  was finely attuned to her  audiences,  and  to which nights she was truly on her game. If this meant that her perfor- mances could be uneven, it also resulted in her ability to maxi- mize her powers  when she felt in command. “If I’m in a good mood,  in very high  spirits,  I can tell  how I’m  going to move them,” she said. “But, on the other hand,  if they are in a very different mood, they may be able to sway me their way. Usually I know as time goes on how it’s going. Sometimes I may know the minute I get onstage.”
Following the run of “Ain’t Got No / I Got Life,” “To Love Somebody,”  and  especially  “To Be Young,  Gifted and  Black,” the mainstream media began paying attention to Nina  Simone in a way they hadn’t since the days of “I Loves You, Porgy.” In the fall of 1970 alone,  there were features about the singer in LIFE  magazine,  the brand-new black  women’s publication Es- sence, and Redbook, who had Maya Angelou—a cultural icon with the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings the previous year—pen an extensive, ambitious profile that was presented in an introduction as “the impressions of a poet.”
“Nina Simone is able to stand upon  a shadowed  stage, take in all light and then return that luminescence to her audience in opulent, pulsating rays,” Angelou wrote. “At other times and with  no  seeming  reluctance  she  rejects  the audience,  rejects their physical fact, rejects their loyalty, rejects their devotion.”
But despite her sudden  turn as a media darling, she was still plagued by the same issues. George  Wein said that he booked her for a successful show at the historically black Hampton In- stitute but that when he put her on the bill at the Playboy Jazz Festival  she  was acting  strangely.  “You  really could  not grab ahold of this woman.  You could not do it, much  as you tried,”
he said.
Trouble seemed  to follow her. Wein had a house  in France near James Baldwin’s house, and the two men had become friendly. Simone came to visit Baldwin and got into some alter- cation. Whatever transpired, it was ugly enough  that Simone was asked to leave. “I don’t know the details, but Jimmy could put up with anything,” said Wein. “Jimmy Baldwin was one of the most generous, sweetest, nicest people, but he couldn’t make it with Nina, and that was very bad.”
But Baldwin’s friendship ran deeper than one bad night, and he would return to save Nina during a dark moment at the Vil- lage Gate in New  York.  Tickets for the show were ten dollars (expensive  for  a nightclub),  and  the set started about ninety minutes late. “She had a certain kind of regality, mixed up with a kind of pretentious arrogance,” said Stanley Crouch, who was covering the show. “She was really a very frightened person; she wasn’t as arrogant as she seemed.  She was definitely afraid  of being rejected, but she was ready to go out and tell the audience, ‘I am here, I am Nina Simone, I don’t care.’ ”
Al Schackman remembered this particular set. “At the Vil- lage Gate, she wouldn’t have anybody play with her, just the two of us. We’re on, and somehow  she gets this thing going about Jews, ‘That Jew, he owns this club, all these Jews,’ and I’m going to myself, ‘Oh, shit, Nina, most of your audience is Jewish.’ ”
Song after song collapsed midway through, with Simone complaining about the microphones and the lights, until even- tually  Baldwin  came  out and  sat with  her  onstage.  He  said, “Nina, I think you should sing,” and she replied, “James, yes, of course—I like you, I know you like me, so if you think I should sing,  I will sing.” Schackman recalled,  “Jimmy  was an  angel come to earth, he really truly was.”
“He  was  a  little drunk,  and  you  couldn’t  tell  if  she  was drunk,”  said Crouch, of Baldwin and Simone  that night. “She stopped and said, ‘I bet you all think I’m drunk—well, I am not, and you better remember that, because if you act as though you think I’m drunk and you abuse me, I will just stop and leave and you still have to pay and I am still going to get paid.’
“She had that kind of thing in her, that if you actually outdid her  in a form  of obnoxiousness, she could  be more  obnoxious than you could. And at a certain point, you would just surren- der, because  you would realize that you were not going to win, because she was going to be more obnoxious than you could be.”
Still, when she turned it on, she could transport crowds  to incomparable heights. If she and an audience  could  feed each other’s energy, the results were something beyond a concert ex- perience. A breathless review in the San Francisco Chronicle  by John L. Wasserman offers an example of her still-incandescent potency.
“She is Priestess and she is Leader, mystic and political scien- tist, dancer,  actress, play wright and chemist,” he wrote. “I have never, ever seen a singer exercise the kind of control, the kind of benign manipulation that Miss Simone did on Saturday night.” Wasserman described the show as “one hour 35 minutes of spiri- tual sex . . . if one talks about sex in singing, Tina  Turner is a stripper, Nina is a woman.” She is, he concluded, “a person mak- ing the final merger of life and art.”
“If you’re striking at the heart of five thousand people, there’s more being plugged into you,” said Simone. “There’s more elec- tricity coming  from  you, becaus...

Edition details

• Publisher: Crown Archetype
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1101904879
• ISBN 13: 9781101904879
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320