What Happened, Miss Simone?

by Alan Light

  Like so many, Simone gave credit to Martin Luther King Jr. for first exposing her to activism. “I didn’t get political until Martin Luther King came along,” she said. “I wanted to be a classical pianist because there was no black classical pianist, but I wasn’t focused on ‘black,’ if you understand the difference.”

  Though he helped open her eyes and her attitudes, however, Simone would often express her reservations about Dr. King’s practice of nonviolent protest. “I never did agree too much with Martin Luther King,” Simone said. “He was popular, but I never believed with him.” The first time that Simone met Dr. King, she immediately said to him, “I’m not nonviolent.” He considered that and replied, “Okay, I’m glad to meet you.” She extended her hand and said, “I’m so glad to meet you, too.”

  Racial justice was simmering in Nina Simone’s consciousness, but in 1963 a series of events would forever transform her life, her music, and her politics, radicalizing her into a figure identified with a particular brand of civil rights activism. First Medgar Evers, an activist and organizer, and the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi, was shot in his own driveway on June 12, 1963. He died in a hospital in Jackson after initially being denied entry because of his race.

  In August, King delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech in front of 250,000 people gathered on the capital’s Mall, the culmination of the March on Washington. That day, Simone was playing a concert in Detroit and saw the coverage of the march on television. According to Stroud, Nina went “ballistic” because she hadn’t been invited to participate in the demonstration.

  Then on September 15—just a month after Simone played a concert at Birmingham’s Miles College, supporting the campaign for desegregation—four young girls were killed when a bomb exploded while they were attending Bible class at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in that very city. It was a profound and transformative moment for the civil rights movement, the murder of innocent children presenting in stark and absolute terms the stakes of the fight and the intolerable level of hatred and violence being directed at African Americans.

  After the Birmingham bombing, Simone felt compelled to commit to the fight for racial equality in a deeper and more active way. Maybe it was because she had a daughter of her own now and the deaths of those little girls touched her as a mother, but on that day something in her caught fire.

  “When they killed those children is when I said, ‘I have to start using my talent to help black people,’ ” she said. “When they killed the little girls in Alabama, that’s when I changed.”

  “It also put in perspective her childhood,” Carrol Waymon said about the event’s impact on Nina. “The town was segregated, but we never talked about it, it was just there. She began to reflect on the fact that had she not been black, she would have been in Juilliard, would have been in Curtis.”

  Her immediate impulse was to get violent, retreating to her garage and trying to build a zip gun, but within a few hours of hearing the news Simone had channeled her ravaged emotions into something else. She sat down and wrote a new song. Having previously dismissed the pop audience because “all they wanted to get was the words,” she now embraced the emotional power that a lyric could carry. The melody was surprisingly upbeat, bouncy in a Broadway sort of way (in the recording, she said, “This is a show tune, but the show hasn’t been written for it yet”). The cheerful style of the arrangement made the contrast with the lyrics all the more striking:

  Alabama’s gotten me so upset

  Tennessee made me lose my rest

  And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam!

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  Picket lines, school boycotts

  They try to say it’s a communist plot

  All I want is equality

  For my sister, my brother, my people, and me

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  Oh, but this whole country is full of lies

  You’re all gonna die and die like flies

  I don’t trust you any more

  You keep on saying, “Go slow! Go slow!”

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  Do things gradually (Do it slow)

  But bring more tragedy (Do it slow)

  Why don’t you see it? Why don’t you feel it?

  I don’t know, I don’t know

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  You don’t have to live next to me

  Just give me my equality

  Alabama’s gotten me so upset

  Tennessee made me lose my rest

  And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam!

  “Mississippi Goddam” marked a dividing line in Simone’s career. When she premiered the song at Carnegie Hall in March 1964, she introduced a level of outrage and immediacy unlike anything else in the protest movement. This was not couched in biblical language, not a metaphorical yearning for freedom and progress: she was naming names and demanding answers. “You’re all gonna die and die like flies,” “You don’t have to live next to me,” “Mississippi Goddam.”

  This kind of directness was becoming familiar in the new wave of protest songs like Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War,” but it marked new territory for a black artist: Sam Cooke’s majestic but still veiled commentary in “A Change Is Gonna Come” was considered a daring step when it came out nine months later. (The Birmingham bombing was also the inspiration for John Coltrane’s moving, stately instrumental elegy “Alabama.”)

  “There is something about a woman,” said comedian and activist Dick Gregory. “If you look at all the suffering that black folks went through, not one black man would dare sing ‘Mississippi Goddam.’ Not one black man would say what Billie Holiday did about being lynched [in “Strange Fruit”]—they wasn’t lynching women, they was lynching men, but it was women that talked about it, and nobody told them to talk about it. No manager going to tell you to talk about this, it’s just something inside of them.

  “ ‘Mississippi Goddam’—that’s using God’s name in vain. She said it, talking about ‘Mississippi, goddamn you.’ We all wanted to say it, but she said it. That’s the difference that set her aside from the rest of them.”

  The expletive in the title meant the song was banned by numerous radio stations (though it’s unlikely that it would have gotten significant airplay anyway, given its unabashedly political rhetoric). When Simone appeared on The Steve Allen Show, the host—a sometime jazz pianist, who a few years earlier had humiliated Elvis Presley by making him sing “Hound Dog” to an actual basset—was impressively mature about the situation, expressing his frustration that they had to refer to the song as “Mississippi Blank-Blank” (“I think everybody up this late at night who can afford to pay for a television set is adult enough to recognize that one not only hears that expression, but probably most of you say it when you hit your thumb with a hammer”), and encouraging viewers at home to scream out the offending word when she reached that point in the chorus.

  There was no going back from “Mississippi Goddam.” Simone would say that it was the point of demarcation, not only in the content of her material, but also in her actual vocal sound. “Mom said that her voice broke,” said Lisa, “and that if you listen to her songs, there was pre–getting mad and post–getting mad. She’s singing love songs, and her voice and her approach is much lighter. And then from ‘Mississippi Goddam’ on, it was as if her voice just dropped, and it never returned to its former octave.”

  “There are people who see injustice and it becomes a part of them, and they can’t run from it, and I think that Nina Simone was one of those people,” said Ilyasah Shabazz, another one of Malcolm X’s daughters. “When she was younger, she was fortunate. She didn’t know about racism per se, she wasn’t so conscious of injustice. And once she became completely aware of it, she couldn’t turn around and continue to play classical music, she had to write about the things that she was feeling. I think that sometimes these things become so overwhelming, they challenge the core of who you are.”
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  Spared from some of segregation’s worst elements in Tryon, Simone was shocked when she was kept away from her white friend and when her parents were sent to the back row at her recital. Protected by the hermetic insularity of classical training, she was stunned when she didn’t make the cut at Curtis. Even after coming to New York, she moved in glamorous creative and intellectual circles, where the civil rights struggle was a project to support and tackle. But now, as children were being murdered and innocent men assassinated, she could no longer be surprised by the evils and injustices of American racism. It was time to get to work.

  Those in Simone’s music circles saw a shift in her ambition, though it was nascent. “I think she felt she could influence people, but I don’t think she knew how to influence them,” said George Wein. “She tried to influence by telling them directly, in a way they didn’t want to hear. People like to be influenced artistically, not verbally, and she would talk to the audience in a very strong way during the middle of her performance. What really influenced them was the song that she was singing, and she wanted that when she wrote a song like ‘Mississippi Goddam’—I mean, that was an influence, and I think she really felt she was carrying a message.”

  On the front lines of the civil rights movement, Simone’s message was loud. Andrew Young—later a congressman, the mayor of Atlanta, and the US ambassador to the United Nations—was a ground-level organizer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the 1960s, and he remembered the moment that he first heard a recording of Simone.

  Young and Stokely Carmichael lived in the same dormitory at Howard University, and during their freshman year Carmichael played a Simone album over and over. Young went to the record store and bought an album for the first time—a copy of Nina Simone at Town Hall.

  He noted that at all social gatherings at the time, whether parties or demonstrations, the same music was a constant; Simone was providing the soundtrack for a movement in need of inspiration, solace, and relief. “Every home I went to had Nina Simone—I mean, every one,” he said. “For all of the people in the civil rights movement, it was an identity, you know what I mean? Her music was just sort of what you heard.”

  In early 1964, as she was unleashing the force of “Mississippi Goddam” on the world, her own involvement in and relationship to the movement were still evolving. She performed at some benefit concerts but wasn’t yet clear on the role she should play. “There was a concert in Chicago where there were some very high-power people there in the civil rights movement,” said Schackman. “They had a big reception afterward, and Vernon Jordan from the Urban League goes up to her. She never really liked to demonstrate for civil rights, or ‘Hey, there’s gonna be a benefit, would you appear?’ ‘Yeah, how much? It’s about the money, I want to get paid.’

  “So Vernon comes up to her and says, ‘Nina, how come you’re not more active in civil rights?’ And she says, ‘Active in civil rights? Motherfucker, I am civil rights!’ ”

  —

  The second Nina Simone concert at Carnegie Hall took place on March 21, 1964. This time, tickets sold out. Spurred by her unapologetically controversial music, Simone was really a star. When she would return to Carnegie Hall in the years that followed, Stroud would no longer promote the shows himself—now the real players wanted a piece of the action.

  The first week of April, she recorded overdubs and fixes for the album that would become In Concert. Though it opens with a languid “I Loves You, Porgy,” the songs from the show that were chosen for the LP added to the sense that she was charging into an outspoken protest through song, though in a way that kept her distinct flavor. The album also included an original number called “Old Jim Crow,” a commentary on the Jim Crow segregation laws, and a modified, satirical version of the folk song “Go Limp,” about a mother begging her daughter not to join the NAACP because they would “rock you and roll you and shove you into bed.”

  In Concert also marked the first recording of a song that Simone did not perform often—she said it was too emotionally demanding—but that became one of her signatures: “Pirate Jenny,” from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera. In Simone’s hands, the tale of a lowly maid fantasizing about taking revenge against the contemptuous people in her town took on a very different, very clear subtext. The narrative—a “black freighter” sweeping into the harbor, destroying the town, and bringing the residents to Jenny, who orders the pirates to kill everyone and then sails off with them—could be understood only as a call for retaliation against racist America.

  Langston Hughes singled out “Pirate Jenny” as a favorite, and Angela Davis wrote that as a young activist, at a time when virtually all of the dominant voices of protest were male, “here was a black woman musician redefining the content of this song to depict the collective rage of black women domestic workers….She helped to introduce gender into our ways of imagining radical change.”

  “She was an actress,” noted Stanley Crouch. “A real good one, a serious actress, because I remember a guy who taught theater and he used to play ‘Pirate Jenny’ all the time for his class. He says, ‘Now this is the part here—it’s not that good a part, but Nina Simone makes you think it’s a great part.’ That’s what a performer can do, she can really make you believe all those words. And she was good at that.”

  The version of “Pirate Jenny” on In Concert was actually less extreme than the ways she would sometimes deliver the song. Sometimes when she reached a part of the song when Jenny sings, “Kill them now or kill them later,” families who had brought their children to the show would flee the theater.

  Simone archivist Roger Nupie pointed out that her interpretation of “Pirate Jenny” was one of many times that she was able to convert material from another source into a protest song. The concept of killing everyone who stands in the way of your freedom was, he said, “a very Simone idea,” but she was able to transform other songs, like Charles Aznavour’s love song “Tomorrow Is My Turn,” into something that was resonant for her mission and was also entirely her own.

  In Concert was also Simone’s first release for a new label, Philips Records. The company’s Dutch owner, Wilhelm Langenberg, had heard “Mississippi Goddam” and become obsessed with Simone. He came to America to find her, showing up backstage at the Village Gate. “He was a gigantic man, he must have weighed three thousand pounds,” said Simone. He informed her that he was there to take her back and sign her to his company.

  The rapid-fire batch of recordings she had submitted to Colpix for the advance to buy her house had freed her up to sign with a new label, so she and Stroud worked out a deal with a man she called “my real daddy for about ten years.” The towering, bombastic Langenberg was not intimidated by Stroud (who was part Dutch himself). “He used to tell Andy, ‘Look at you, you have no color. You don’t even know who you are,’ ” according to Simone. “He said, ‘Nina has color and she has the weight of forty million people on her back. You must be gentle with her.’ ”

  Though In Concert reached only number 102 on Billboard’s rankings, it was the highest she had charted since the 1960 Newport album. When Simone hit the road again, though, something had changed.

  She had started keeping a diary on tour, beginning in February 1964, and the early jottings were brief and trivial. She noted that Andrew had sent her six cards on her birthday, that she had been shocked when Cassius Clay knocked out Sonny Liston, that she had watched a TV show that demonstrated how to make masks out of papier-mâché. She expressed concern for her daughter while she was on the road, asking if Lisa was being bathed properly and was taking vitamins.

  Even when she returned to New York, her thoughts were more superficial rather than dwelling on any personal or social issues. She bragged about going to a fashion show wearing a new Chanel suit (“I loved it”). But whereas these notes had been carefree and glib, after the Carnegie Hall show and the release of “Mississippi Goddam” the entries’ tone shifted, becoming melancholy. In May
1964 she wrote:

  Washington D.C. yesterday, Saturday ha[d] a severe attack of depression—the pain excruciating for 3 performances (did not change street clothes) Performances good Sunday—lost my desire to live realized that there was no reason to continue anything—washing my face, hair—No desire for sex, talk, nothing. lost desire to try anything…

  Though her words don’t address it directly, tension was building between Simone and Stroud, as they engaged in a battle over the trajectory of her career. As she became closer to figures in the civil rights movement, she was being pulled in a more radical direction. Stroud had promised her that she would become a “rich black bitch,” and things had been proceeding according to his plan until she became, in his words, “side-tracked with the revolution.”

  “She was becoming successful,” he said. “She was getting airplay all over the country, magazines, doing college concerts. The fight and the hunger to get ahead in her career, to obtain success and money, was all happening at the same time as these other things were with the civil rights. I was busy trying to control her, keep her from ruining what I had built up.”

  In Syracuse, she began lecturing the audience, chastising them about their attitudes on civil rights, and they started booing. Stroud said that he told her that they had paid their money to hear her romantic songs, not to be scolded from the stage. “They don’t want to be told not to hate niggers,” he said. “This is not the place to preach.”

  Lisa Simone saw the seeds of her parents’ eventual breakup in this conflict. “He wanted her to be able to win all the awards, and to become the huge star that he knew that she could be,” she said. “Whereas she wanted something more—there was something missing, some meaning, and she realized that she could utilize the stage as a platform from which to speak out and feel like she was doing something meaningful for her people.”

  Stroud maintained that what was most difficult wasn’t the clash with his ambitions for Simone but the fact that she still desired commercial acceptance and spent her money accordingly. “She wanted everything that money and success could buy,” he said. “She’d see Nancy Wilson and Aretha and Gladys Knight and Diahann Carroll—Diahann was on Broadway and film and TV and doing the guest spots, and she’s like, ‘Why am I not there?’ I’d go, ‘Well, because of “Mississippi Goddam” and the other things that you refuse not to throw in the faces of the audience.’