What Happened, Miss Simone?

by Alan Light

  Copyright © 2016 by RadicalMedia LLC and the Estate of Nina Simone

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Crown Archetype and colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Light, Alan, author.

  Title: What happened, Miss Simone? : a biography / Alan Light.

  Description: New York : Crown Archetype, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015041145 | ISBN 9781101904879 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Simone, Nina, 1933-2003. | Women singers—United States—Biography. | Singers—United States—Biography. | What happened, Miss Simone? (Motion picture) | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Composers & Musicians. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Cultural Heritage.

  Classification: LCC ML420.S5635 L54 2016 | DDC 782.42164092—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041145

  ISBN 9781101904879

  eBook ISBN 9781101904886

  Title page illustration courtesy of Bernard Gotfryd/Courtesy of Lisa Simone Kelly

  Cover design: What Happened, Miss Simone? Program Artwork © 2014 @radical media LLC and Netflix, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

  Cover photographs: (light pattern) © Photodisc/Getty Images; (Simone in concert) © Hulton Archive/Archive Photos/Getty Images

  v4.1

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Photo Insert

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Discography

  Notes

  Bibliographical Sources

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  But what happened, Miss Simone? Specifically, what happened to your big eyes that quickly veil to hide the loneliness? To your voice that has so little tenderness, yet flows with your commitment to the battle of Life? What happened to you?

  —MAYA ANGELOU, 1970

  INTRODUCTION

  “Are you ready, black people?”

  In the summer of 1969—before, during, and after the “three days of peace and music” being held at Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, New York—another all-star outdoor music festival was taking place in Mount Morris Park, northeast of Manhattan’s Central Park. The Harlem Cultural Festival, also sometimes called the “Black Woodstock,” happened over the course of six Sunday afternoons from June 29 to August 24, with legends like B.B. King, the Staple Singers, and Sly & the Family Stone playing to an estimated one hundred thousand concertgoers.

  Tony Lawrence, a New York nightclub singer and sometime movie actor, was the producer, promoter, and host of the events. On campuses and in black neighborhoods throughout the country, unrest and upheaval were at a fever pitch, so while the city’s mayor John Lindsay spoke at the event (and was introduced as a “blue-eyed soul brother”), the New York Police Department refused to provide security for the concerts. In their stead, a delegation of Black Panthers managed the crowds.

  At one of the July shows, Jesse Jackson addressed the throngs of people. “As I look out at us rejoice today,” he said, “I was hoping it would be in preparation for the major fight we as a people have on our hands here in this nation. Some of you are laughing because you don’t know any better, and others laughing because you are too mean to cry. But you need to know that some mean stuff is going down. A lot of you can’t read newspapers. A lot of you can’t read books, because our schools have been mean and left us illiterate or semiliterate. But you have the mental capacity to read the signs of the times.”

  It was a time of joy and danger, of liberation and fear, testing the opportunities and the limits of empowerment. And no performance over those six summer Sundays would capture the moment, in all its contrasts, more than the appearance of Nina Simone.

  Are you ready to smash white things? Burn buildings? Are you ready?

  Are you ready to build black things?

  Simone’s concert came near the end of the series, on August 17. Just a few weeks earlier, she had recorded “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” inspired by the memory of her friend and mentor Lorraine Hansberry, an anthem of hope for the future of a civil rights movement that had already been battered and ripped apart by murders, philosophical and tactical divisions, and government interference; still, the song would be named the “Black National Anthem” by the Congress of Racial Equality and covered by Aretha Franklin and Donny Hathaway.

  When she took the stage at Mount Morris Park—in a long yellow-and-black-print dress, her hair teased into a sort of Afrobouffant, massive silver earrings dangling to her neck—she made explicit the tensions and the possibilities of an event celebrating black culture and black pride in the aftermath of the riots that had erupted in urban areas during the previous summers.

  Backed by a loose but propulsive and earnest-looking group of musicians wearing dashikis, she dug into a set focused on protest material of various moods: the brand-new “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”; “Four Women,” her controversial examination of the black female experience, and the insidious power held by varying black skin tones, in America; a fiery new song titled “Revolution,” with the refrain “Don’t you know it’s going to be all right,” borrowed from the Beatles’ hit of the same name; the joyous “Ain’t Got No—I Got Life” medley, from the “American Tribal Love-Rock Musical” Hair, which had opened on Broadway the previous year and was still running, about seventy blocks south of the Harlem stage.

  But it was the final number of her performance, a recitation of “Are You Ready, Black People?,” the battle cry written by David Nelson of the proto-rap group the Last Poets, that would define Simone’s performance for history. “I did not memorize enough, so I have to read it,” she told the crowd. “It’s for you.” And as her band banged out a rhythm on the congas and chanted, “Yes, I’m ready,” in response to the poem’s questions, she bit down on Nelson’s words.

  Are you ready to change yourself?—You know what I’m talking about.

  Are you ready to go inside yourself and change yourself?

  The Harlem audience yelled its approval. They shouted affirmations at the challenge to “smash white things,” to “go inside yourself and change yourself.” Simone built the poem to a climax, then said quietly, “See you later.” She left the stage as the band kept the groove going.

  But once again, on that day and the days that followed, true revolutionary action failed to materialize; the chaos the crowd chanted about did not ensue. And whether or not she still literally believed in her music’s power to inspire social or political change, soon thereafter, Nina Simone—who often referred to herself as “the only singer in the civil rights movement”—would reach a breaking point in her frustration with America and with what she saw as the dwindling potential of true black progress.

  “We had no leaders,” she would say in 1989. “Lorraine Hansberry was dead, Langston Hughes was dead, Eldridge Cleaver was in jail. Paul Robeson was long since been dead, Stokely Carmichael was gone, Malcolm X was dead, and Martin Luther King was dead. We had nobody left.”

  On top of the scarcity of true visionaries, S
imone was also disappointed with the men in the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, who she had been hoping would take up arms and lead a real revolution. “I became very disillusioned about it all,” she recalled. “I felt that there was no more movement anymore, and that I wasn’t part of anything.” Earlier in her life, she had invested years into the dream of becoming America’s first great black classical pianist; after the disappointment of abandoning that aspiration, she was losing hope in her second grand ambition—the struggle for racial equality that had dominated her recent work.

  Only a few years after the Harlem Cultural Festival, Nina Simone would renounce her country, living out most of her final decades drifting in exile through the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. Although she had steadily produced albums between Little Girl Blue—the 1958 debut that made her a sensation—and (the presciently titled) It Is Finished in 1974, she released just three more studio albums before her death on April 21, 2003.

  After her reign as one of the culture’s most influential artists—as a singer and an activist—Simone’s later life began as a sad, disturbing saga. She spent years struggling against managers and record labels, trying to wrest control of her work from them. She frequently fought with those closest to her. She found and lost various loves, real and imagined, and her sometimes-obsessive quest for another husband dominated her thoughts until her last days. (“Most of my love affairs were too blind and too desperate,” she said. “That’s how I lost them.”) But her final act also had its triumphs. Following many inconsistent years, she would ultimately emerge—against all odds—as a financially solvent, beloved icon. She would appear on stages until the last year of her life, often entertaining lengthy standing ovations after a show.

  “What I hear about Nina is either ‘Her music is fantastic’ or ‘Oh, she was a difficult person,’ ” said Gerrit De Bruin, her close and trusted companion throughout the tumultuous 1980s and ’90s. “But she was a very lovely person as well, a very loving person. If she hadn’t been such a genius, nothing would have happened. She would have been in the gutter, a bag lady or whatever. But the world accepted a lot because it was the genius artist Nina.”

  Most of this troubled existence, of course, had to do with her specific circumstances: being a piano prodigy who grew up in the rural and segregated South, with complicated relationships to her family, her music, and her sexuality. Her mother was a traveling minister who, Simone always felt, cared more about her parishioners than her daughter, while her beloved father eventually (inevitably?) disappointed her late in his life, causing her to disown him before his death. Her letters and diaries reveal a woman who feared her own husband, questioned her sexual preference, battled depression.

  But it’s hard not to look at Nina Simone’s triumphant, tortured life as, in some ways, a reflection of her time, her race, her gender. If she was both brilliant and unstable, did she not live through a moment in history that was also brilliant and unstable?

  Attallah Shabazz, one of Malcolm X’s daughters—whose family lived next door to Simone’s family for several years in Mount Vernon, New York—put it another way. Simone “was not at odds with the times,” she said. “The times were at odds with her. When a person moves to their own kind of clock, spirit, flow, you’re always in congress with yourself. The challenge is, how does the congress around you accept you? How do we fit in in the world that we’re around, but be exactly who we are? Was Nina Simone allowed to be exactly who she was? No. So she had to seek places to be at one with her congress—to Africa, to Paris. But then she was away from other comforts, people, family, roots.

  “How does royalty stomp around in the mud and still walk with grace? Most people are afraid to be as honest as she lived.”

  —

  “She is loved or feared, adored or disliked, but few who have met her music or glimpsed her soul react with moderation. She is an extremist, extremely realized.” This was Maya Angelou’s description of Nina Simone in a 1970 profile for Redbook magazine. If it feels a bit overstated now, it seems to be an accurate representation of Simone’s standing at the height of her powers. Her commercial success may have been slight next to that of the pop giants who emerged during the same era (“I’ve only got four very famous songs,” she would later say), but her impact was profound.

  Simone’s music was singular, inimitable, uncategorizable. “In many ways,” wrote Princeton professor Daphne Brooks in an essay examining several different performances by Simone of “Four Women,” “Nina Simone would shape the bulk of her career in response to an aesthetic conundrum: what should a black female artist sound like?”

  Trained as a classical pianist, she was often called a jazz singer, but it was a label she deeply resented, seeing in it only a racial classification. She grudgingly accepted the popular nickname “the High Priestess of Soul” but gave it little significance. If anything, she claimed, she was a folk singer, and her dazzling, unpredictable repertoire—Israeli folk tunes, compositions by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, songs by the Bee Gees and Leonard Cohen and George Harrison, traditional ballads, jazz standards, spirituals, children’s songs—is perhaps unmatched in its range.

  Her piano playing, the blazing focus of her early life, was accomplished and sophisticated well beyond that of her peers. And her delivery, on her best days, was unparalleled in its intensity and force. Her voice, a husky contralto, was untrained and, for some, a bit of an acquired taste but was incomparably equipped to express certain emotions, and Rolling Stone ranked her number 29 in its list of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. “I heard her sing a song in French—I didn’t even know what she was saying, and I started crying,” Mary J. Blige told the magazine. “Then she goes from that to ‘Mississippi Goddam,’ singing it like a church record, but she’s cursing out the system. Nina could sing anything, period.”

  “She was hip-hop twenty years before the beats arrived,” writer/musician David Was, best known as part of the band Was (Not Was), told NPR in 2005. “In the 1960s, no black woman was any more ‘gangsta’ than Nina Simone….Nina Simone may have been embittered by racism and social injustice, but that gave shape to her persona as a kind of female black Bob Dylan, albeit with a bit more swing than twang and an unmistakable passion and intensity that remain unrivaled to this day.”

  Simone herself would not allow her work to be reduced simply to a product of anger, a push-button reaction to white racism that could be dismissed without an acknowledgment of the music’s layers. “I sing from intelligence,” she said. “I sing from letting them know that I know who they are, and what they have done to my people around the world. That’s not anger—anger has its place, and fire moves things. But I sing from intelligence.”

  That intellect was noticed by many of the leading black thinkers and writers of her time, including Langston Hughes and LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), who became her fans and champions. Simone’s good friend James Baldwin spoke of her artistic role in a 1973 interview. He addressed the concept of the artist as lover and offered that Simone and Billie Holiday (a singer with whom Simone was often linked, in a comparison that she would always be sensitive about) were at once poets and lovers because they “gave you back your experience…and you recognized it for the first time because [they were] in and out of it…and made it possible for you to bear it.”

  From her earliest days onstage, Simone’s live performances were their own kind of drama. She was always quick to cut a concert short or scold an audience if they were not giving her their full attention, and those tendencies were exacerbated in the latter half of her career; her shows could be scattershot, and she sometimes didn’t bother to show up. “White people had Judy Garland,” Richard Pryor once said. “We had Nina.”

  But witnesses agree that when she was at her best her power onstage could be astonishing, transformative. “When you saw her in person, she could make you believe whatever it was she wanted to make you believe,” said jazz writer and cultural critic Stanley Crouch.

  Simon
e seems to have been better suited for recording in front of an audience rather than in a studio; though of course live settings ran the risk of disaster, they also offered the chance to capture her at her most passionate and intense, displaying the playfulness and engagement that proved harder for her to reveal in the colder confines of a studio. She was well aware of her power as a performer, her gift for transmuting raw energy into a message. She once described her own reactions to music as a child in terms that were vibrantly physical: “Anything musical made me quiver ecstatically, as if my body were a violin and somebody was drawing a bow across it.” Early in her career, she would prepare for a show the way an athlete scopes out a stadium before a big game—pacing the theater to get a sense of the sound and sightlines from different seats, feeling out the vibe of the city, the day, the crowd. It was an exercise in mapping out the best way into her audience’s heads.

  “Actually, what I do when I’m at my best is mass hypnosis,” she said. “You can hypnotize an entire audience and make them feel a certain way. I think about what they’re feeling, because I’m making sure they feel a certain way. And I know when I’ve got them.

  “It’s a spell that you cast. You start with a certain song and you build the mood with it. Another song that’s related to the first song, and the third song is related to the second song, and so forth and so on, until you reach a certain climax in feeling. And by that time you’ve got them hypnotized. I always know that they’re with me when I hear nothing but silence—then you’ve got them.”

  George Wein, the legendary promoter of the Newport Jazz and Newport Folk Festivals, booked some of Simone’s most triumphant shows (her 1960 Newport debut) and some of her most disastrous (a 1977 Carnegie Hall appearance, when she canceled just a few hours before the doors opened and left town without telling anyone). “She didn’t copy anybody, she was an original artist—and there are very few that are original artists,” he said. “When you have that unique talent, that talent that is only yours, that only belongs to you, you are creating and giving something that people have never heard before. And that’s why she was great—and I use the word ‘great’ advisedly, ’cause she was great.”