Kerry Acker - Nina Simone: Jazz Singer

Simone at Carnegie Hall, 2001. At the time of this concert, Simone had been performing for almost half a century. She had progressed from a shy but gifted child to a music teacher, a lounge singer, a featured performer, an activist for civil rights, and an acknowledged queen of the American music industry. Her career had been influenced by the great anger she felt about the state of race relations in the United States, though, and she had developed a reputation as a "difficult" performer.

Source: Associated Press, AP/Mark Lennihan.

At the conclusion of Simone's brief but characteristically mesmerizing performance, a woman leaving the festival remarked, "Well, she certainly can still command an audience." (The New York Times, July 2, 2001) Indeed, the woman known as the High Priestess of Soul had long ago established her reputation as a compelling and powerful live performer who held her audience enthralled.

After opening with her beloved classic "My Baby Just Cares for Me," Simone dedicated her program to "my ancestors Marcus Garvey, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, Stokely Carmichael, and Paul Robeson." Throughout the show, her adoring public screamed, "We love you, Nina!" She responded, "I love you, too, sugar." When they yelled out their requests all at the same time, though, she reprimanded them: "I can't understand all of you at once. Say it again, but only one at a time."

And Simone couldn't help adding her thoughts about contemporary American politics when she performed "Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)" her own moving tribute to the assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. According to a July 5, 2001, review in the New York Amsterdam News, Simone added the following:

It's a goddamn shame Martin Luther King is dead.
We're heading for the break with Bush in the White House.
That man has got to go.

When she'd finished a stirring rendition of another of her own songs, the movingly funky "Four Women," Simone departed the stage to applause and foot stomping that raged on for about twelve minutes, after which the grande dame returned and sang a quick reprise of the opening number. She left the stage again, and the applause lasted another quarter of an hour. When she returned a second time, she proclaimed in signature Simone style, "I have no more to give you people; go the hell home." Her obedient congregation reluctantly but instantly obeyed.

Nina Simone: classically trained pianist, uncannily skilled improviser, elegant entertainer, gifted interpreter of others' songs, talented songwriter, outspoken militant, bitter expatriate, always a controversial figure. Like the woman herself, her music cannot be categorized easily: The Simone sound fused elements of classical, pop, jazz, gospel, folk, rhythm and blues, and soul. Vocally, she was incomparable. "Simone's moody-yet-elegant vocals are like no one else's, presenting a fiercely independent soul who harbors enormous (if somewhat hard-bitten) tenderness," writes music critic Richie Unterberger. (Erlewine, 1020) Her live performances were legendary for their passion and immediacy. John S. Wilson of The New York Times wrote of her live version of the song "Everything Must Change" that "[i]t grew in the classic Simone manner from a mumble and a quaver through an intense, breathy declaration, swelling to a shout that burst into gospel excitement that swept the audience into the performance." (Brennan, 228)

Her intense commitment to her music was matched only by a fierce dedication to social justice. In the mid-1960s, Simone, then a young African-American woman from North Carolina, was among the first popular performers to sing about racism. She regularly appeared at civil rights fundraising events and marches, and she openly supported the Freedom Fighters and other activists on the front lines. One of her original songs, "Mississippi Goddam," became an anthem for the civil rights movement. But as she grew more militant in the late 1960s and the 1970s and became involved with radical groups such as the Black Panthers, her controversial politics threatened to overshadow her gifts as a musician and entertainer. The songs she wrote became angry and impassioned, and she spoke bluntly about her uncompromising views on racial equality. Nina Simone did not hesitate to voice her opinions, regardless of the effect they might have on her career. Analyst Brian Ward remembers the influence she had on the movement: "There was a self-possessed assurancecritics would call it arrogance and bloody-mindednessabout Simone; an independence of mind, spirit and action which seemed both refreshing and inspirational. It was this combination of message, music and manner which made her such a potent figure for the movement." (Ward, 301)

In the 1970s, as her disillusionment with American racial attitudes intensified, so did her disgust with the entertainment industry. She abandoned the music business (temporarily) and went into self-imposed exile from her country of birth, living in Barbados, Liberia, Switzerland, and Holland before finally settling in the south of France. But her recordings continued to attract legions of fans, people who were captivated by her singular approach to music and her amazing ability to transform a song into an almost religious experience.