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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Now on a rare tour of the U.S., she's been the "High Priestess of Soul" for decades, making music that's an eloquent blend of joy, sorrow and anger.
Jun 20, 2000 | It was less than a decade ago that I first heard Nina Simone sing. It was Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released," and though I'd heard countless vocalists cover Dylan's songs, never before had I experienced such a complex rendition as hers. There was something about the heaviness in the timbre of Simone's voice and the lightness of her fingers on the piano keys that produced a sound of tremendous joy and tremendous sorrow -- simultaneously. Since that day, I haven't gone a week without listening to her.
Simone's admirers have found their way to her from a range of places, and that diversity is reflected in her music. She plays blues, jazz, protest songs, gospel, pop, hymns and folk tunes. She covers the songs of the Beatles, Jacques Brel, Leonard Cohen, George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Duke Ellington and the Bee Gees, and yet every song she sings is her own.
She was trained as a classical pianist, and her playing is infused with the Bach of her childhood; her youth spent in church tinges her sound with traces of gospel. Though she didn't begin to sing until after she'd developed her skills as a pianist, her voice demonstrates these influences as well, mirroring her playing. When Simone sings the Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun," its dreadful sadness and enormous ecstasy make it seem like it could never have been anyone else's song. Beneath the complex layers of her voice and her playing are longing, loss and happiness laid bare. As Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins has said, "I mostly listen to Nina Simone when I am feeling raw. The more I feel raw, the more I relate to her."
Simone was born in 1933 as Eunice Waymon, the sixth of eight children in the segregated town of Tryon, N.C. Her mother was a minister who also worked as a maid and her father was a handyman. Eunice was involved with music from the time she was old enough to crawl onto the piano bench. Her parents couldn't afford piano lessons, so her mother's employer paid for the child's training, and soon the entire town rallied together to create a fund for her instruction.
She was the pride of Tyron, and in 1950 she won a scholarship to Juilliard. After her first year in New York, she applied for a fellowship to the prestigious Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and was denied. She then became an accompanist for a singer and started teaching music to make enough money for her own weekly lessons. When one of her students got an engagement playing Atlantic City, N.J., making more money in a summer than she made in a year, Eunice went to the Midtown Bar and Grill on Pacific Avenue and, in 1954, got a gig of her own.
Already her mother disdained any music that was not in praise of God, and Eunice knew she wouldn't be pleased that her daughter was playing in a bar, so she changed her first name to Nina -- a nickname from a Hispanic boyfriend meaning "little one" -- and her last name to Simone for the French actress Simone Signoret. When she was told that she would not be paid if she didn't sing, the pianist used her voice for the first time. And Eunice Waymon transformed herself into Nina Simone.
In three summers performing at the Midtown she played a combination of classical and popular music, developing her complex amalgamation of voice and piano, and began a relationship with her audience that has endured: Talk during a performance, and Simone will stop playing. She might even leave the stage. Claiming that it broke her concentration, at the bar she'd wait until the loud drunks were thrown into the street to resume her playing.
At the Midtown, Simone met her first husband, a white beatnik whom she would leave a year after they were married. She also met her first agent, who promised her more money by playing New York and Philly clubs. He kept his agreement, signing her with the Bethlehem label and, in 1958, when Simone was 25 years old, she recorded her first album, "Little Girl Blue."
As was the case with nearly every album that followed, "Little Girl Blue" had an array of pieces ranging from her own "Central Park Blues" to the traditional "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands" to the title song written by T.B. Harms. But it was Gershwin's "I Loves You, Porgy," from "Porgy and Bess," that became a hit, selling over a million copies. That the first single was also a song made famous by the jazz vocalist Billie Holiday made critics group the two together, a comparison Simone found insulting from the start. "She was a drug addict," says Simone in a January 1997 Details magazine interview. "I'm more of a diva, like Maria Callas."
It wasn't fame but money for piano lessons that drove Simone. Even with a hit record, living in New York a year after it was released she had to work as a maid for a white family to maintain her piano instruction. When it seemed Bethlehem had no interest in promoting Simone and was making her little money, she switched to Colpix -- Columbia Pictures Records -- in her first of many record company shifts. She would record 10 albums with Colpix, the first being "The Amazing Nina Simone." Before it was even released, though, Bethlehem put out a rival record without Simone's knowledge, called "Nina Simone and Her Friends," which contained three songs recorded in the studio and not used on "Little Girl Blue." Everyone but Simone seemed to be making money off of her.
Though she had developed a staunch following, it wasn't until she played New York's Town Hall on Sept. 12, 1959, that Simone became a star. Released as "Nina Simone at Town Hall," the concert placed her alongside the many writers and musicians hanging out in Greenwich Village such as Bob Dylan, James Baldwin, Odetta, Lorraine Hansberry and Joan Baez. In the liner notes to the album, Roger Caras writes, "No song that Nina sings has ever been sung before, at least as the same work. Nina brings to each number a special quality that comes from brilliant musicianship with an almost philosophical understanding of the words. When Nina sings the word 'love,' it isn't a word combined from four letters out of the alphabet but an emotional experience you can feel."
