by Alan Light
Even after her best performing days had passed, though, Simone’s influence endured. “To me, she was the quintessential woman: strong, unafraid, brutally honest, genuine, vulnerable, soulful and passionate,” Alicia Keys wrote. “She made me want to practice the piano twenty hours a day until my skill was as great as hers. She made me want to live life, learn and experience it earnestly and use my voice to say SOMETHING!! Say something that could ring true in the spirit of the people.”
Other wildly successful artists also took cues from Simone. At 1994’s American Music Awards, on the heels of her performance in The Bodyguard, Whitney Houston—then arguably the biggest pop star in the world—constructed a medley that cemented her own place within American musical history’s lineage, while paying homage to the honored position Nina held there. For the performance’s opening, Houston chose Simone’s very first single and highest-charting song in the United States, “I Loves You, Porgy,” belting the George and Ira Gershwin song Nina had made famous before launching into “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” the show-stopping climax from the musical Dreamgirls. Houston concluded the appearance by tearing into a wrenching version of The Bodyguard’s “I Have Nothing,” seamlessly fusing multiple decades of black female passion and strength in ten minutes. And when the night ended, Whitney walked away with eight AMAs, the most trophies ever awarded to a female performer in a single night.
That same year, Jeff Buckley included his achingly emotional version of “Lilac Wine”—a song Simone recorded in 1966—on Grace, the one and only album he released in his short lifetime, a record that influenced everyone from Radiohead to Coldplay to Miley Cyrus, who released her own cover of “Lilac Wine” in 2014. In 1996, Lauryn Hill name-checked Simone on “Ready or Not,” the first single from the Fugees’ Grammy-winning, six-times platinum album The Score. (“While you’re imitating Al Capone / I’ll be Nina Simone / Defecating on your microphone,” L. Boogie rhymed.)
Simone’s own music maintained a steady cultural presence. Her brassy “Feeling Good” continues to pop up in numerous TV shows (including the cultural sensation Sex and the City) and singing competitions, a swaggering jolt of old-school girl power. It’s a Nina standard that’s been covered by George Michael, Michael Bublé, and the rock band Muse. In 2008, during his historic presidential campaign, Barack Obama revealed that he too was a Nina Simone fan. On a list of his top ten songs, he put her 1965 recording of “Sinnerman”—a song she had learned in her childhood at revival meetings led by her mother—at number 5, in between the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” and “Touch the Sky” by rapper Kanye West. (Toward the end of his tenure, Obama may have signaled a change in his own mood by including “Feeling Good” as his Simone selection on a playlist for Spotify.)
West, in fact, introduced Simone’s work to still more listeners, sampling her recordings numerous times on productions for other artists and on his own albums—most controversially, using a segment of her chillingly matter-of-fact version of “Strange Fruit” for his 2013 “Blood on the Leaves,” an appropriation leading many to question the incorporation of a groundbreaking composition written to protest the lynching of southern black men into a song that most listeners assumed was only about a breakup, groupies, and drugs.
More recently, though, interest in Simone has escalated dramatically. A feature film project has spent years in limbo; though Mary J. Blige was initially cast in the starring role, the part eventually went to Zoe Saldana, sparking ongoing protest that Nina Simone, writer of “Four Women,” should not be portrayed by a lighter-skinned actress. After lengthy delays, the movie was scheduled for release in December 2015.
In the meantime, the spirit of Simone figured prominently in 2014’s acclaimed Beyond the Lights, which starred Gugu Mbatha-Raw as the rising, ambitious R&B star Noni Jean. “Nina Simone, she’s sort of like the ghost throughout the movie,” said Mbatha-Raw. “Artists like Nina Simone and India.Arie represented the more soulful side of where Noni wants to be, even though she is in this sort of packaged persona.”
By February 2015, mentions of Simone were spiking in connection with major events in music. In the week leading up to the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, Bob Dylan was honored by the MusiCares charity. Following performances of his songs by the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and Jack White, Dylan unexpectedly stole the show with a lengthy, freewheeling speech looking back over his own history, influences, and inspirations.
“Nina Simone, I used to cross paths with her in New York City in the Village Gate nightclub,” said Dylan. “She was an artist I definitely looked up to. She recorded some of my songs that she learned directly from me, sitting in a dressing room. She was an overwhelming artist, piano player, and singer. Very strong woman, very outspoken and dynamite to see perform. That she was recording my songs validated everything that I was about. Nina was the kind of artist that I loved and admired.”
Also in February, John Legend and Common won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for “Glory,” their theme to Ava DuVernay’s film Selma, a retelling of the 1965 voting rights march led by Martin Luther King Jr. Legend—who had included “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” written by Dr. Billy Taylor but popularized by Simone, on his 2008 collaboration with the Roots, Wake Up!—began his acceptance speech by stating that “Nina Simone said it’s an artist’s duty to reflect the times in which we live. We wrote this song for a film that was based on events that were fifty years ago, but we say Selma is now, because the struggle for justice is right now.”
And that same month, Grammy-winning singer/bass player Meshell Ndegeocello, who has worked with such artists as Madonna, John Mellencamp, and the Rolling Stones, played a tribute show to Simone as part of the Lincoln Center American Songbook series; she had previously released an album in 2012 titled Pour une me Souveraine: A Dedication to Nina Simone. Asked about her ability to inhabit the songs of another artist, Ndegeocello noted that this was precisely the inspiration she took from Simone.
“Nina [was] great at that,” she said. “Look at her version of ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.’ I think [the Animals] have sold more records, but hers is the quintessential version. Her ability to take a Leonard Cohen song (‘Suzanne’) and make it her own is a testament of her improvisational ability and greatness, and that’s definitely the one thing I try to celebrate with her, is that she’s the one who inspired me to look at songs just as songs and try to put your own character inside of them.”
Why was there such a sudden burst of attention for an artist who had been dead for a dozen years? How had public consciousness remained so high for someone who had only grazed the pop charts a few times and who had no songs that had penetrated mass nostalgia sufficiently to stay in circulation on oldies radio?
“Fifty years after her prominence, Nina Simone is now reaching her peak,” wrote Salamishah Tillet in the New York Times. “Today Simone’s multitudinous identity captures the mood of young people yearning to bring together our modern movements for racial, gender and sexual equality.”
Maybe in the months of Ferguson and Baltimore (following the death of Freddie Gray, her 1978 recording of Randy Newman’s song “Baltimore”—“Oh, Baltimore / Ain’t it hard just to live”—was being widely shared on social media), and the resurgence of protest by and for black Americans, Nina Simone’s music, image, and history had a new resonance. Writing in The Nation, Syreeta McFadden asserted that “at this critical moment in our national life, Simone’s voice has once again reached an urgent pitch, her music and activism has captured our cultural imagination again.” Or maybe the majesty, purity, and distinctiveness of her work mean that it’s always there, waiting for those who will discover and appreciate its power on its own terms.
Simone presumably would have welcomed the ongoing vitality of her music; she was certainly never shy about expressing her disappointment that she was underappreciated. “I really thought that this planet automatically rewarded you for excellence,” she said. “I
really thought that, because I felt that the planet knew its own deficit, its own lack of music. I thought it appreciated its artists. We work, they give us money or they give us food, whatever.”
Her fight for acceptance had to do with her race, no question, but also with her uncompromising aesthetic and personality. And though it may not have served her purposes to say so, she was apparently aware of these nuances. “For films or interviews, she’s always said, ‘They didn’t accept me because I was black,’ ” recalled De Bruin. “But she told me, ‘Gerrit, they couldn’t accept my freedom in music, and that’s why they didn’t want me.’ But that was not for the outside world.”
But Nina Simone found other rewards in her complex, thorny life and was continually striving for more. She claimed that she had tried virtually all the world’s religions at some point to see what they each had to offer. In one interview—for one of the numerous false starts at a memoir, which eventually resulted in 1991’s often fascinating, wildly inaccurate, maddeningly uneven I Put a Spell on You—she was asked whether she could find God in her own music.
“Of course, all the time,” she replied. “How do you explain what it feels like to get on the stage and make poetry that you know sinks into the hearts and souls of people who are unable to express it? How do you talk about that? There aren’t many words, but in some way you know that tonight was a good thing. You got to them. That’s God.
“I am very aware that I am an instrument,” she continued. “I have fights with God every day. I tell him, ‘Unless you do such and such a thing, I’m not going to play anymore. I’m not going to sing anymore. I’m not going to let anybody know I’m around.’ I’ve been given the gift of being able to play by ear, having perfect pitch, having things that ordinary people do not have. When you have this gift, you must give it back to the world. That’s the only way you’re going to get it off your back. I don’t know if I can explain any better than that what God is.”
CHAPTER 1
I was born a child prodigy, darling. I was born a genius.
Nina Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, on February 21, 1933, the sixth of eight children. The Waymon family was rounded out by sisters Lucille, Dorothy, and Frances and brothers John Irvin, Carrol, Harold, and Sam. Perhaps foreshadowing the instability that would go on to define much of her life, her father, John Divine Waymon, worked various odd jobs, never sticking with one craft for too long; mother Mary Kate was the granddaughter of slaves and came from a family of preachers (fifteen of them in all, according to Simone). She carried on that storied tradition and became a traveling Methodist minister, supplementing the spare income with cleaning and domestic work.
Tryon was a resort town, which created—superficially, at least—a more liberal racial atmosphere than in most of the South. “It was not as rigidly segregated as other towns,” said Carrol Waymon, who would later become an educator and activist, forming the Africana Studies Program at San Diego State University. Black neighborhoods scattered through Tryon. This also meant that black people interacted more frequently with white people than they might in other places, playing sports together and working at the resort.
Still, there was only so far such contact could go. “One of my brothers’ friends who must have been, I don’t know, nineteen, seventeen, something, it was found that he was going with one of the white girls,” said Carrol. “It was hush-hush, I didn’t know about it. He had to get out of town one night, so we went, ‘Why did he leave so soon?’ I began to understand he was not supposed to be going with whites.”
By Carrol’s count, the Waymons lived in about seven different houses in the area. Frances, the youngest, described one of the residences as “a wooden house that was not much to be desired”—very old, with a brick stove, an outhouse, no insulation, and a porch that had been enclosed to serve as an extra bedroom.
“You went out and you brought in buckets of water,” she said. “We had big round tin tubs, they call them. You heated the water on the wooden stove, that’s how you took your Saturday night bath. It was such an ordeal that everybody took baths on Saturday night. And we had a garden, we had pigs and cows and chickens. We were very poor.”
Despite the family’s poverty, Nina Simone’s earliest images of her childhood were pleasant enough. “My first conscious memory of my mother is her singing while she cooks, while she washed clothes,” she said. “She was always cheerful. We had a farm, a little bitsy one. Momma used to churn buttermilk on an old-fashioned churn and she showed me how to do it.
“Most of all I remember being with the other kids. Momma would cook for us, and sometimes she would say, ‘I don’t know where I’m going to get dinner.’ Sometimes we didn’t have much to eat and she would pray, and then by the time evening came on, we’d have enough food.”
To stretch the rations and feed her family of ten, Mary Kate would make what she called “Waymon Specials”—dumplings or a concoction called vinegar pie. She canned fruits and vegetables to eat during the winter. “Momma never seemed to worry about being poor or hungry,” Simone said. “We weren’t ever hungry ’cause Momma knew how to not do that. It is true we were very poor, but we didn’t feel the poverty because of the way she did things.”
The singer’s first recollections of her father were also charmingly bucolic. More approachable than her mother, he was lighthearted, even mischievous, and he and Eunice had a genuine intimacy, a special bond. “My daddy putting me on his knee, rocking me to patty-cake, my dad playing with me—I was his pet,” she said. “He had an old jalopy, a Model A Ford, and that thing used to make all kinds of noises; I could hear him clear across town coming home and I would run up the hill, through the woods, to be there when he crossed that particular spot, to jump on the running board and go home with him. I would do this every day.”
“His whole life was playing,” she said in another instance. “He played at everything. He didn’t tell us any jokes, we were too young. But he was playful, always.”
John Waymon’s flair for entertaining—including his distinctive “double whistle”—was more than just a way to amuse his family and keep their spirits light. In fact, he and Mary Kate had started out performing onstage together. “Daddy loved the ‘St. Louis Blues,’ had his spats, he could dance and sing,” said Carrol. “He’d play his guitar, and he also played the harmonica, he was excellent at that. Had he not met Mother, he would have probably gone on to be on the stage.”
But when Mary Kate started preaching, after they were married, it put an end to his performing career. John worked as a barber, a truck driver; he even started a dry-cleaning business. He had what his daughter Frances described as an entrepreneurial spirit and was a pillar of the church community. As a business owner, he could proudly call himself middle class.
But when the Depression hit, John’s options dwindled. Around 1931, he closed his businesses down and lost his trucks. He took work as a handyman, a caretaker for white families, a cook at a lakeside Boy Scout camp. But by the time Eunice was born, he was mostly working in the garden for sustenance and anything he might sell or trade.
Some of this slowdown, though, might have had more to do with his health than with the country’s dire economic straits. He had a blockage in his small intestine, and in 1936 he had an operation. After the surgery, a rubber tube was inserted into the stomach so it could drain, and the wound needed to be exposed in order to be washed and bathed. And this condition meant that the sole responsibility of supporting the family fell on Mary Kate.
Eunice, age three, was tasked with nursing her father back to health. “I would take him for a walk every day and fix his meals, and I was so happy,” she said. “He loved the heat, and he had these raw eggs that had to be beaten up with a little vanilla and a little sugar, and it tasted so good I used to get a little bit for myself. But I had to feed him this every day and take him for a walk.”
There were additional upheavals during this time, too. During his recovery, the Waymon house
burned down in the middle of the night. They moved once, then again to a town called Lynn, where their house was so primitive that not only did it not have indoor plumbing, it didn’t even have an outhouse; the family had to use the woods as the bathroom.
The conditions were so poor that the Waymons left and stayed with a relative back in Tryon, then finally resettled in a house of their own again. Despite this, John hadn’t fully lost his political spirit—serving on the town council, he led a protest against a poll tax and had the law changed—but a decade of illness and financial insecurity was weighing on him.
“He was energetic, active, well accepted, well respected,” said Carrol, “and had to go from being on his way to great things to the bottom economically, and it just knocked him for a loop.”
Whether John’s own problems were a cause or merely an effect, the Waymon family was fracturing. Eldest brother John Irvin fought with his father and left home at sixteen, completely vanishing from the Waymons’ lives for more than ten years. With the advent of World War II, Carrol enlisted in the army.
“There was a lot of conflict between my mother and father, and there was a lot of conflict between Dad and the children,” said Frances. “I never met my oldest brother until some thirty-one years of my life, because he left home because of Dad. My mother was very independent, very strong-willed, very determined. Very strongly committed, very, very religious. She is a pillar of strength, and highly respected.
“I felt like some of the frustration came from the fact that maybe Mom was more dominant. I feel that that added to that frustration, with Dad constantly trying to be respected as the head of the household.”