A new book offers an incomplete map of a complex and tortured artist.
by Rashod D. Ollison
She had been the toast of New York City’s pop scene for all of two years, but Nina Simone was already cementing her legend as a no-nonsense diva.
There she was onstage at the Apollo Theater in February 1961, barely two weeks before her 28th birthday. She was a slip of a woman, haughty and remote, her dusky voice commanding and blues-suffused. Halfway through her spoken introduction to Nat Adderley’s “Work Song,” Nina thought she heard giggles and chatter, which wasn’t unusual for the notoriously rowdy crowd at the famed Harlem venue.
But the former Eunice Waymon of Tryon, N.C., was having none of it. She snapped: “For the very first time in your lives, act like ladies and gentlemen at the Apollo.”
The crowd shut up immediately, and Nina turned back to the piano and performed. The artist, whose only smash at the time was a tear-stained rendition of “I Love You, Porgy,” was hard to pin down even then. Nina’s approach was steeped in classical music. In fact, she was trained as a classical pianist and had hopes of breaking into that lily-white field. But her music rippled with the blues, jazz and gospel. European styles and African roots music were also braided into her work.
But her repertoire turned bitingly political, starting with 1963’s self-penned “Mississippi Goddam.” She traded elegant gowns for vibrant Afrocentric garb, and as she spiraled into the depths of mental illness, Nina’s behavior on and off the stage became more erratic. When she wasn’t rambling through her set, she would cuss out ticket holders—or not show up at all. She would pull knives on musicians and shoot at noisy neighbors.
But fans all over the world kept coming back. Although she never matched the commercial success of contemporaries like Ray Charles, Sam Cooke or Aretha Franklin, Nina still became an international icon. Her commitment to using her music as a weapon, as a way to raise consciousness about the sociopolitical storms gathering around us, was unwavering throughout her 40-year career.
So it’s fitting for Women’s History Month that we remember Nina Simone, an oft-misunderstood artist who refused to compromise in an industry and a country that didn’t know (and still don’t know) what to make of self-assured, dark-skinned women with soul, brains and talent to spare. Her artistic triumphs and public struggles helped karate-kick down doors for the likes of Erykah Badu, India.Arie and, of course, Lauryn Hill, who name-checked Nina in the Fugees’ hit “Ready or Not.”
The legend’s strange and sometimes-volatile life is explored in the new book, Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone by Nadine Cohodas, whose last book, Queen, was a biography of another troubled soul sister, Dinah Washington. Like that book, Princess Noire is painstakingly researched. It also clears up factual deficiencies found in Nina’s 1991 autobiography, I Put a Spell On You.
Read the Full Essay @ The Root
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