Hypnotic: The Reverie of Nina Simone

The Reverie of Nina Simone

HYPNOTIC

LUKE FULTZ

HYPNOTIC

LUKE FULTZ

l fFULTZ PRESSSAN FRANCISCO

HYPNOTICTHE REVERIE OF NINA SIMONE

First published in 2012Copyright © 2012 by Luke Fultz

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including

photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher,

except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Fultz Press San Francisco, CA 94132

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication dataHYPNOTIC The Reverie of Nina Simone / Luke Fultz

1. Music. 2. Civil Rights. 3. Inspirational ISBN 0-525-47433-1

First Edition

To the feeling we get when discovering something new, and not wanting to let go.

CONTENTS

MORNING YEARSBABY GENIUS 12

SCRAPED KNEES 22

BOY CRAZY 34

AFTERNOON YEARSNEW NAME, SAME FACE 48

BETWEEN BLACK AND WHITE KEYS 58

MERCURY RISING 68

EVENING YEARSSHOULDERS OF GIANTS 80

WHERE I CALL HOME 90

MUSIC KEEPS SPINNING 100

MORNINGYEARS

Baby Genius

15

She was one of the most extraordinary

artists of the twentieth century,

an icon of American music. She

was the consummate musical storyteller, a

griot as she would come to learn, who used

her remarkable talent to create a legacy of

liberation, empowerment, passion, and love

through a magnificent body of works. She

earned the moniker ‘High Priestess of Soul’

for she could weave a spell so seductive and

hypnotic that the listener lost track of time

and space as they became absorbed in it.

16

HYPNOTIC

She was who the world would come to know as Nina Simone. When Nina Simone died on April 21, 2003, she left a timeless treasure trove of musical magic spanning over four decades from her first hit, the 1959 Top 10 classic “I Loves You Porgy,” to “A Single Woman,” the title cut from her one and only 1993 Elektra album. While thirty-three years separate those recordings, the element of honest emotion is the glue that binds the two together – it is that approach to every piece of work that became Nina’s uncompromising musical trademark.

By the end of her life, Nina was enjoying an unprecedented degree of recognition. Her music was enjoyed by the masses due to the CD revolution, discovery on the Internet, and exposure through movies and television. Nina had sold over one million CDs in the last decade of her life, making her a global catalog best-seller.

No one website can fully explore the many nuances and flavors that made up the more than 40 original al-bums in the Nina Simone library. This site and accompanying radio station contain many of Nina’s finest works. However, we might not have had the chance to witness the breathtaking range of material Nina could cover if she hadn’t taken the path she did.

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina on February 21st, 1933, Nina’s prodigious talent as a musician was evident early on when she started playing piano by ear at the age of three. Her mother, a Methodist minister, and her father, a handyman and preacher himself, couldn’t ignore young Eunice’s God-given gift of music. Raised in the church on the straight and narrow, her parents taught her right from wrong, to carry herself

with dignity, and to work hard. She played piano – but didn’t sing – in her mother’s church, displaying remark-able talent early in her life. Able to play virtually anything by ear, she was soon studying classical music with an Englishwoman named Muriel Mazzanovich, who had moved to the small southern town. It was from these humble roots that Eunice developed a lifelong love of Johann Sebastian Bach, Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven and Schubert.

After graduating valedictorian of her high school class, the community raised money for a scholarship for Eunice to study at Julliard in New York City before applying to the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her family had already moved to the City Of Brotherly Love, but Eunice’s hopes for a career as a

pioneering African American classical pianist were dashed when the school denied her admission. To the end, she herself would claim that racism was the reason she did not attend. While her original dream was unfulfilled, Eunice ended up with an incredible worldwide career as Nina Simone – almost by default.

To survive, she began teaching music to local students. One fateful day in 1954, looking to supplement her income, Eunice auditioned to sing at the Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Word spread about this new singer and pianist who was dipping into the songbooks of Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and the like, transforming popular tunes of the day into a unique synthesis of jazz, blues, and classical music. Her rich, deep velvet vocal tones, combined with her mastery of the keyboard, soon attracted club

BABY GENIUS

17

goers up and down the East Coast. In order to hide the fact that she was singing in bars, Eunice’s mother would refer to the practice as “working in the fires of hell”, overnight Eunice Waymon became Nina Simone by taking the nickname “Nina” meaning “little one” in Spanish and “Simone” after the actress Simone Signoret.

At the age of twenty-four, Nina came to the attention of the record industry. After submitting a demo of songs she had recorded during a performance in New Hope, Pennsylvania, she was signed by Syd Nathan, owner of the Ohio-based King Records (home to James Brown), to his Jazz imprint, Bethlehem Records. The boisterous Nathan had insisted on choosing songs for her debut set, but eventually relented and allowed Nina to delve in the repertoire she had been performing at clubs up and down the eastern seaboard. One of Nina’s stated musical

influences was Billie Holiday and her inspired reading of “Porgy” (from “Porgy & Bess”) heralded the arrival of a new talent on the national scene. At the same mammoth 13 hour session in 1957, recorded in New York City, Nina also cut “My Baby Just Cares For Me,” previously recorded by Nate King Cole, Count Basie, and Woody Herman. The song was used by Chanel in a perfume commercial in Europe in the 1980’s and it became a massive hit for Nina, a British chart topper at #5, and thus a staple of her repertoire for the rest of her career.

Nina Simone’s stay with Bethlehem Records was short lived and in 1959, after moving to New York City, she was signed by Joyce Selznik, the eastern talent scout for Colpix Records, a division of Columbia Pictures. Months after the release of her debut LP for the label (1959‘s The Amazing Nina Simone), Nina was performing at her

first major New York City venue, the mid-Manhattan-located Town Hall. Sensing that her live performances would capture the essential spontaneity of her artistry, Colpix opted to record her September 12, 1959 show. “You Can Have Him,” a glorious torch song previ-ously cut by Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald, was one of the highlights of the evening. The song opened with a dazzling keyboard arpeggio that would become her sig-

nature for decades. So momentous was the Town Hall performance that it inspired some of the same musi-cians, featuring the vocals of Nina’s only daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, to do a tribute to a sold out audience over forty five years later.

As Nina’s reputation as an engaging live performer grew, it wasn’t long before she was asked to perform at the prestigious Newport Jazz Festival. Accompanied on the June 30th,1960 show by Al Schackman, a guitarist who would go on to become Nina’s longest-running musical colleague, bassist Chris White, and drummer Bobby Hamilton, the dynamic show was recorded by the Colpix. The subsequent release in 1961 of the old blues tune

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North

Carolina on February 21st, 1933, Nina’s

prodigious talent as a musician was evident

early on when she started playing piano by ear at the age of three.

18

HYPNOTIC

Raised in the church on the straight and narrow, her parents taught her right from wrong, to carry herself with dignity, and to

work hard.

BABY GENIUS

19

“Trouble In Mind” as a single gave Nina her third charted record. Her stay with Colpix resulted in some won-derful albums – nine in all – included Nina’s version of Bessie Smith’s blues classic “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out.” Issued as a single in 1960, it became Nina’s second charted Pop and R&B hit and one of two Colpix tracks to achieve such a feat during her five year stint with the label. Other stand out tracks from that era were the soulful song “Cotton Eyed Joe,” the torch tune “The Other Women,” and the Norwegian folk rendi-tion of “Black Is The Colour Of My True Love’s Hair” – all beautiful examples of Nina Simone at her storytelling best, painting a vivid picture with her skill as a lyrical interpreter. During this time with the label, Nina recorded one civil rights song, Oscar Brown Jr.’s “Brown Baby,” which was included on her fifth album for the label, At

The Village Gate. “Critics started to talk about what sort of music I was playing,” writes Nina in her 1991 auto-biography I Put A Spell On You, “and tried to find a neat slot to file it away in. It was difficult for them because I was playing popular songs in a classical style with a classical piano technique influenced by cocktail jazz. On top of that I included spirituals and children’s song in my performances, and those sorts of songs were automatically identified with the folk movement. So, saying what sort of music I played gave the critics problems because there was something from everything in there, but it also meant I was appreciated across the board – by jazz, folk, pop and blues fans as well as admirers of classical music.” Clearly Nina Simone was not an artist who could be easily classified.

Nina’s Colpix recordings cemented her appeal to a nightclub based U.S. audience. Once she moved to Phillips, a division of Dutch owned Mercury Records, she was ready to expand her following globally. Her first LP for the

label, 1964’s In Concert, signaled Nina’s undaunting stand for freedom and justice for all, stamping her irrevo-cably as a pioneer and inspirational leader in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Her own original “Mississippi Goddam” was banned throughout the South but such a response made no difference in Nina’s unyielding com-mitment to liberty; subsequent groundbreaking recordings for Philips like “Four Women” (recorded September 1965) and “Strange Fruit” continued to keep Nina in the forefront of the few performers willing to use music as a vehicle for social commentary and change. Such risks were seldom taken by artists during that time of such dramatic civil upheaval. For years, Nina felt there was much about the way that she made her living that was less then appealing. One gets a sense of that in the following passage from I Put A Spell on You where she explains

her initial reluctance to perform material that was tied to the Civil Rights Movement. “Nightclubs were dirty, making records was dirty, popular music was dirty and to mix all that with politics seemed senseless and demean-ing. And until songs like ‘Mississippi Goddam’ just burst out of me, I had musical problems as well. How can you take the memory of a man like [Civil Rights activist] Medgar Evers and reduce all that he was to three and a half minutes and a simple tune? That was the musical side of it I shied away from; I didn’t like ‘protest music’ because a lot of it was so simple and unimaginative it stripped the dignity away from the people it was trying to celebrate. But the Alabama church bombing and the murder of Medgar Evers stopped that argument and with ‘Mississippi Goddam,’ I realized there was no turning back.”

20

HYPNOTIC

Nina was deeply affected by these two events. In 1962, she had befriended noted playwright Lorraine Hansberry and spoke often with her about the Civil Rights Movement. While she was moved by her conversa-tions with Hansberry, it took the killing of Medgar Evers and the four girls in Birmingham to act as catalysts for a transformation of Nina’s career.

There were many sides to Nina Simone. Among her most amazing recordings were the original and so-soulful version “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” and “I Put A Spell On You” (which had reached to #23 in the U.S. charts), eerily moody, unrestrained, drama to the max; “Ne Me Quitte Pas” tender, poignant, filled with melan-choly; and with gospel-like fervor, the hypnotic voodoo of “See-Line Woman.” In her own unrivaled way, Nina also loved to venture into the more earthy side of life. After she signed with RCA Records in 1967 (a deal her then husband/manager Andy Stroud had negotiated), her very first recordings for the label included the saucy

“Do I Move You?” and the undeniably sexual “I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl” which were from the concept album entitled Nina Sings The Blues. Backed by a stellar cast of New York CIty session musicians, the album was far and away Nina’s most down-home recording session. By this time, Nina had become central to a circle of African American playwrights, poets, and writers all centered in Harlem along with the previously mentioned Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. The outcome from one of the relationships became a highlight of the LP with the song “Backlash Blues,” a song that’s lyrics originated from the last poem Langston Hughes submitted for publication prior to his death in May, 1967 and gave to Nina.

Nina’s seven years with RCA produced some remarkable recordings, ranging from two songs featured in the Broadway musical “Hair” (combined into a medley, “Ain’t Got No – I Got Life,” a #2 British hit in 1968) to a

Simone-ified version of George Harrison’s “Here Comes The Sun,” which remained in Nina’s repertoire all the way through to her final performance in 2002. Along the way at RCA, songs penned by Bob Dylan (“Just Like A Woman”), the brothers Gibb (“To Love Somebody”), and Tina Turner (“Funkier Than A Mosquito’s Tweeter”) took pride of place alongside Nina’s own anthem of empowerment, the classic “To Be Young, Gifted, & Black,” a song written in memory of Nina’s good friend Lorraine Hansberry. The title of the song coming from a play Hansberry had been working on just prior to her death.

After Nina left RCA, she spent a good deal of the 1970’s and early 1980’s living in Liberia, Barbados, England, Belgium, France, Switzerland and The Netherlands. In 1978, for the first time since she left RCA, Nina was con-vinced by U.S. jazz veteran Creed Taylor to make an album for his CTI label. This would be her first new studio

album in six years and she recorded it in Belgium with strings and background vocals cut in New York City. With the kind of “clean” sound that was a hallmark of CTI recordings, the Nina Simone album that emerged was sim-ply brilliant. Nina herself would later claimed that she ”hated” the record but many fans strongly disagreed. With an eighteen piece string section conducted by David Mathews (known for his arrangements on James Brown’s re-cords), the results were spectacular. The title track, Randy Newman’s evocative “Baltimore,” was an inspired Nina Simone choice. It had a beautifully constructed reggae-like beat and used some of the finest musicians producer Creed Taylor could find including Nina’s guitarist and music director, Al Schackman.

Aside from 1982′s Fodder On My Wings that Nina recorded for Carrere Records, two albums she made of the independent VPI label in Hollywood (Nina’s Back and Live And Kickin’) in 1985, and a 1987 Live At Vine

BABY GENIUS

21

Raised in the church on the straight and narrow, her parents

taught her right from wrong, to carry herself with dignity,

and to work hard.

Street set recorded for Verve, Nina Simone did not make another full length album until Elektra A&R executive Michael Alago persuaded her to record again. After much wining and dining, Nina finally signed on the dotted line. Elektra tapped producer Andre Fischer, noted conductor Jeremy Lubbock, and a trio of respected musicians to provide the suitable environment for this highly personal reading of “A Single Woman,” which became the centerpiece and title track for Nina Simone’s final full length album.

With two marriages behind her in 1993 she settled in Carry-le-Rout, near Aix-en-Provence in Southern France. She would continue to tour through the 1990’s and became very much ‘the single woman’ she sang about on her last label recording. She rarely traveled without an entourage, but if you were fortunate enough to get to know the woman behind the music you could glimpse the solitary soul that understood the pain of being misun-derstood. It was one of Nina’s many abilities to comprehend the bittersweet qualities of life and then parlay them

into a song that made her such an enduring and fascinating person.

In her autobiography, Nina Simone writes that her function as an artist is “…to make people feel on a deep level. It’s dif-ficult to describe because it’s not something you can analyze; to get near what it’s about you have to play it. And when you’ve caught it, when you’ve got the audience

hooked, you always know because it’s like electricity hanging in the air.” It was that very electricity that made her such an im-portant artist to so many and it will be that electricity that continues to turn on new people all over the world for years to come.

Nina Simone died in her sleep at her home in Carry-le-Rout, Bouches-du-Rhone on April 21, 2003. Her fu-neral service was attended by Miriam Makeba, Patti Labelle, poet Sonia Sanchez, actor Ossie Davis and hundreds of others. Elton John sent a floral tribute with the message, “You were the greatest and I love you”.

She was one of the most extraordinary artists of the twentieth century, an icon of American music. She was the consummate musical storyteller, a griot as she would come to learn, who used her remarkable talent to create a legacy of liberation, empowerment, passion, and love through a magnificent body of works. She earned the moni-ker ‘High Priestess of Soul’ for she could weave a spell so seductive and hypnotic that the listener lost track of time and space as they became absorbed in the moment. She was who the world would come to know as Nina Simone.

When Nina Simone died on April 21, 2003, she left a timeless treasure trove of musical magic spanning over four decades from her first hit, the 1959 Top 10 classic “I Loves You Porgy,” to “A Single Woman,” the title cut from her one and only 1993 Elektra album. While thirty-three years separate those recordings, the element of honest emotion is the glue that binds the two together – it is that approach to every piece of work that became Nina’s uncompromising musical trademark.

22

HYPNOTIC


No one website can fully explore the many nuances and flavors that made up the more than 40 original al-bums in the Nina Simone library. This site and accompanying radio station contain many of Nina’s finest works. However, we might not have had the chance to witness the breathtaking range of material Nina could cover if she hadn’t taken the path she did.

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina on February 21st, 1933, Nina’s prodigious talent as a musician was evident early on when she started playing piano by ear at the age of three. Her mother, a Methodist

minister, and her father, a handyman and preacher himself, couldn’t ignore young Eunice’s God-given gift of music. Raised in the church on the straight and narrow, her parents taught her right from wrong, to carry herself with dignity, and to work hard. She played piano – but didn’t sing – in her mother’s church, displaying remarkable talent early in her life. Able to play virtually anything by ear, she was soon studying classical music with an Englishwoman named Muriel Mazzanovich, who had moved to the small southern town. It was from these humble roots that Eunice developed a lifelong love of Johann Sebastian Bach, Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven and Schubert.

After graduating valedictorian of her high school class, the community raised money for a scholarship for Eunice to study at Julliard in New

York City before applying to the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her family had already moved to the City Of Brotherly Love, but Eunice’s hopes for a career as a pioneering African American classical pianist were dashed when the school denied her admission. To the end, she herself would claim that racism was the reason she did not attend. While her original dream was unfulfilled, Eunice ended up with an incredible worldwide

career as Nina Simone – almost by default.

To survive, she began teaching music to local students. One fateful day in 1954, looking to supple-ment her income, Eunice auditioned to sing at the

BABY GENIUS

23

Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Word spread about this new singer and pianist who was dipping into the songbooks of Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and the like, transform-ing popular tunes of the day into a unique synthesis of jazz, blues, and classical music. Her rich, deep velvet vocal tones, combined with her mastery of the keyboard, soon attracted club goers up and down the East Coast. In order to hide the fact that she was singing in bars, Eunice’s mother would refer to the practice as “working in the fires of hell”, overnight Eunice Waymon became Nina Simone by taking the nickname “Nina” meaning “little one” in Spanish and “Simone” after the actress Simone Signoret.

At the age of twenty-four, Nina came to the attention of the record industry. After submitting a demo of songs she had recorded during a performance in New Hope, Pennsylvania, she was signed by Syd Nathan, owner of

the Ohio-based King Records (home to James Brown), to his Jazz imprint, Bethlehem Records. The boisterous Nathan had insisted on choosing songs for her debut set, but eventually relented and allowed Nina to delve in the repertoire she had been performing at clubs up and down the eastern seaboard. One of Nina’s stated musical influences was Billie Holiday and her inspired reading of “Porgy” (from “Porgy & Bess”) heralded the arrival of a new talent on the national scene. At the same mammoth 13 hour session in 1957, recorded in New York City, Nina also cut “My Baby Just Cares For Me,” previously recorded by Nate King Cole, Count Basie, and Woody Herman. The song was used by Chanel in a perfume commercial in Europe in the 1980’s and it became a massive hit for Nina, a British chart topper at #5, and thus a staple of her repertoire for the rest of her career.

Nina Simone’s stay with Bethlehem Records was short lived and in 1959, after moving to New York City, she was signed by Joyce Selznik, the eastern talent scout for Colpix Records, a division of Columbia Pictures. Months

after the release of her debut LP for the label (1959‘s The Amazing Nina Simone), Nina was performing at her first major New York City venue, the mid-Manhattan-located Town Hall. Sensing that her live performances would capture the essential spontaneity of her artistry, Colpix opted to record her September 12, 1959 show.

Scraped Knees

25

Her mother, a Methodist minister,

and her father, a handyman

and preacher himself, couldn’t

ignore young Eunice’s God-given gift of

music. Raised in the church on the straight

and narrow, her parents taught her right from

wrong, to carry herself with dignity, and to

work hard. She played piano – but didn’t

sing – in her mother’s church, displaying

remarkable talent early in her life. Able to

play virtually anything by ear, she was soon

studying classical music.

26

HYPNOTIC

She was one of the most extraordinary artists of the twentieth century, an icon of American music. She was the consummate musical storyteller, a griot as she would come to learn, who used her remarkable talent to create a legacy of liberation, empowerment, passion, and love through a magnificent body of works.

She earned the moniker ‘High Priestess of Soul’ for she could weave a spell so seductive and hypnotic that the listener lost track of time and space as they became absorbed in the moment. She was who the world would come to know as Nina Simone.

When Nina Simone died on April 21, 2003, she left a timeless treasure trove of musical magic spanning over four decades from her first hit, the 1959 Top 10 classic “I Loves You Porgy,” to “A Single Woman,” the title cut from her one and only 1993 Elektra album. While thirty-three years separate those recordings, the element of

honest emotion is the glue that binds the two together – it is that approach to every piece of work that became Nina’s uncompromising musical trademark.


No one website can fully explore the many nuances and flavors that made up the more than 40 original al-bums in the Nina Simone library. This site and accompanying radio station contain many of Nina’s finest works. However, we might not have had the chance to witness the breathtaking range of material Nina could cover.

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina on February 21st, 1933, Nina’s prodigious talent as a musician was evident early on when she started playing piano by ear at the age of three. Her mother, a Methodist minister, and her father, a handyman and preacher himself, couldn’t ignore young Eunice’s God-given gift of music. Raised in the church on the straight and narrow, her parents taught her right from wrong, to carry herself with dignity, and to work hard. She played piano – but didn’t sing – in her mother’s church, displaying remark-able talent early in her life. Able to play virtually anything by ear, she was soon studying classical music with an Englishwoman named Muriel Mazzanovich, who had moved to the small southern town. It was from these hum-ble roots that Eunice developed a lifelong love of Johann Sebastian Bach, Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven and Schubert.

SCRAPED KNEES

27

After graduating valedictorian of her high school class, the community raised money for a scholarship for Eunice to study at Julliard in New York City before applying to the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her family had already moved to the City Of Brotherly Love, but Eunice’s hopes for a career as a pioneering African American classical pianist were dashed when the school denied her admission. To the end, she herself would claim that racism was the reason she did not attend. While her original dream was unfulfilled, Eunice ended up with an incredible worldwide career as Nina Simone – almost by default.

To survive, she began teaching music to local students. One fateful day in 1954, looking to supplement her income, Eunice auditioned to sing at the Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Word spread about this new singer and pianist who was dipping into the songbooks of Gershwin, Cole Porter,

Richard Rodgers, and the like, transforming popular tunes of the day into a unique synthe-sis of jazz, blues, and classical music. Her rich, deep velvet vocal tones, combined with her mastery of the keyboard, soon attracted club goers up and down the East Coast. In order to hide the fact that she was singing in bars, Eunice’s mother would refer to the practice as

“working in the fires of hell”, overnight Eunice Waymon became Nina Simone by taking the nickname “Nina” meaning “little one” in Spanish and “Simone” after the actress Simone Signoret.

At the age of twenty-four, Nina came to the attention of the record industry. After submitting a demo of songs she had recorded during a performance in New Hope, Pennsylvania, she was signed by Syd Nathan, owner of the Ohio-based King Records (home to James Brown), to his Jazz imprint, Bethlehem Records. The boisterous Nathan had insisted on choosing songs for her debut set, but eventually relented and allowed Nina to delve in the repertoire she had been performing at clubs up and down the eastern seaboard. One of Nina’s stated musical influences was Billie Holiday and her inspired reading of “Porgy” (from “Porgy & Bess”) heralded the arrival of a

It was from these humble roots that Eunice

developed a lifelong love of Johann Sebastian

Bach, Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven and Schubert.

28

HYPNOTIC

new talent on the national scene. At the same mammoth 13 hour session in 1957, recorded in New York City, Nina also cut “My Baby Just Cares For Me,” previously recorded by Nate King Cole, Count Basie, and Woody Herman. The song was used by Chanel in a perfume com-mercial in Europe in the 1980’s and it became a massive hit for Nina, a British chart topper at #5, and thus a staple of her repertoire.

Nina Simone’s stay with Bethlehem Records was short lived and in 1959, after moving to New York City, she was signed by Joyce Selznik, the eastern talent scout for Colpix Records, a division of Columbia Pictures. Months after the release of her debut LP for the label (1959‘s The Amazing Nina Simone), Nina was performing at her first major New York City venue, the

mid-Manhattan-located Town Hall. Sensing that her live performances would capture the essential spontaneity of her artistry, Colpix opted to record her September 12, 1959 show. “You Can Have Him,” a glorious torch song previously cut by Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald, was one of the highlights of the evening. The song opened with a dazzling keyboard arpeggio that would become her signature for decades. So momentous was the Town Hall per-formance that it inspired some of the same musicians, featuring the vocals of Nina’s only daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, to do a tribute to a sold out audience over forty five years later.

As Nina’s reputation as an engaging live performer grew, it wasn’t long before she was asked to perform at the prestigious Newport Jazz Festival. Accompanied on the June 30th,1960 show by Al Schackman, a guitarist

SCRAPED KNEES

29

who would go on to become Nina’s longest-running musical colleague, bassist Chris White, and drummer Bobby Hamilton, the dynamic show was recorded by the Colpix. The subsequent release in 1961 of the old blues tune “Trouble In Mind” as a single gave Nina her third charted record.

Her stay with Colpix resulted in some wonderful albums – nine in all – included Nina’s version of Bessie Smith’s blues classic “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out.” Issued as a single in 1960, it became Nina’s second charted Pop and R&B hit and one of two Colpix tracks to achieve such a feat during her five year stint with the label. Other stand out tracks from that era were the soulful song “Cotton Eyed Joe,” the torch tune “The Other Women,” and the Norwegian folk rendition of “Black Is The Colour Of My True Love’s Hair” – all beautiful examples of Nina Simone at her storytelling best, painting a vivid picture with her skill as a lyrical

interpreter. During this time with the label, Nina recorded one civil rights song, Oscar Brown Jr.’s “Brown Baby,” which was included on her fifth album for the label, At The Village Gate.

“Critics started to talk about what sort of music I was playing,” writes Nina in her 1991 autobiography I Put A Spell On You, “and tried to find a neat slot to file it away in. It was difficult for them because I was playing popular songs in a classical style with a classical piano technique influenced by cocktail jazz. On top of that I included spirituals and children’s song in my performances, and those sorts of songs were automatically iden-tified with the folk movement. So, saying what sort of music I played gave the critics

problems because there was something from everything in there, but it also meant I was appreciated across the board – by jazz, folk, pop and blues fans as well as admir-ers of classical music.” Clearly Nina Simone was not an artist who could be easily classified.

Nina’s Colpix recordings cemented her appeal to a nightclub based U.S. audi-ence. Once she moved to Phillips, a division of Dutch owned Mercury Records, she was ready to expand her following globally. Her first LP for the label, 1964’s In Concert, signaled Nina’s undaunting stand for freedom and

30

HYPNOTIC

justice for all, stamping her irrevocably as a pioneer and inspirational leader in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Her own original “Mississippi Goddam” was banned throughout the South but such a response made no differ-ence in Nina’s unyielding commitment to liberty; subsequent groundbreaking recordings for Philips like “Four Women” (recorded September 1965) and “Strange Fruit” continued to keep Nina in the forefront of the few performers willing to use music as a vehicle for social commentary and change. Such risks were seldom taken by artists during that time of such dramatic civil upheaval.

For years, Nina felt there was much about the way that she made her living that was less then appealing. One gets a sense of that in the following passage from I Put A Spell on You where she explains her initial reluctance to perform material that was tied to the Civil Rights Movement.

“Nightclubs were dirty, making records was dirty, popular music was dirty and to mix all that with politics seemed senseless and demeaning. And until songs like ‘Mississippi Goddam’ just burst out of me, I had musical problems as well. How can you take the memory of a man like [Civil Rights activist] Medgar Evers and reduce all that he was to three and a half minutes and a simple tune? That was the musical side of it I shied away from; I didn’t like ‘protest music’ because a lot of it was so simple and unimaginative it stripped the dignity away from the people it was trying to celebrate. But the Alabama church bombing and the murder of Medgar Evers stopped that argument and with ‘Mississippi Goddam,’ I realized there was no turning back.”

Nina was deeply affected by these two events. In 1962, she had befriended noted playwright Lorraine

Hansberry and spoke often with her about the Civil Rights Movement. While she was moved by her conversa-tions with Hansberry, it took the killing of Medgar Evers and the four girls in Birmingham to act as catalysts for a transformation of Nina’s career.

There were many sides to Nina Simone. Among her most amazing recordings were the original and so-soulful version “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” and “I Put A Spell On You” (which had reached to #23 in the U.S. charts), eerily moody, unrestrained, drama to the max; “Ne Me Quitte Pas” tender, poignant, filled with melan-choly; and with gospel-like fervor, the hypnotic voodoo of “See-Line Woman.” In her own unrivaled way, Nina also loved to venture into the more earthy side of life. After she signed with RCA Records in 1967 (a deal her

SCRAPED KNEES

31

Her mother, a Methodist minister, and her father, a

handyman and preacher himself, couldn’t ignore young Eunice’s

God-given gift of music.

32

HYPNOTIC

then husband/manager Andy Stroud had ne-gotiated), her very first recordings for the label included the saucy “Do I Move You?” and the undeniably sexual “I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl” which were

from the concept album entitled Nina Sings The Blues. Backed by a stellar cast of New York CIty session musicians, the album was far and away Nina’s most down-home recording session. By

this time, Nina had be-come central to a circle of African American playwrights, poets, and writers all centered in Harlem along with the previously mentioned Lorraine Hansberry,

It was difficult for them because I was

playing popular songs in a classical style with a

classical piano technique influenced by cocktail jazz. On top of that I

included spirituals and children’s song in my

performances, and those sorts of songs were

automatically identified with the folk movement.

SCRAPED KNEES

33

James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. The outcome from one of the relationships became a highlight of the LP with the song “Backlash Blues,” a song that’s lyrics originated from the last poem Langston Hughes submitted for publication prior to his death in May, 1967 and gave to Nina.

Nina’s seven years with RCA produced some remarkable recordings, ranging from two songs featured in the Broadway musical “Hair” (combined into a medley, “Ain’t Got No – I Got Life,” a #2 British hit in 1968) to a Simone-ified version of George Harrison’s “Here Comes The Sun,” which remained in Nina’s repertoire all the way through to her final performance in 2002. Along the way at RCA, songs penned by Bob Dylan (“Just Like A Woman”), the brothers Gibb (“To Love Somebody”), and Tina Turner (“Funkier Than A Mosquito’s Tweeter”) took pride of place alongside Nina’s own anthem of empowerment, the classic “To Be Young, Gifted, & Black,”

a song written in memory of Nina’s good friend Lorraine Hansberry. The title of the song coming from a play Hansberry had been working on just prior to her death.

After Nina left RCA, she spent a good deal of the 1970’s and early 1980’s living in Liberia, Barbados, England, Belgium, France, Switzerland and The Netherlands. In 1978, for the first time since she left RCA, Nina was con-vinced by U.S. jazz veteran Creed Taylor to make an album for his CTI label. This would be her first new studio album in six years and she recorded it in Belgium with strings and background vocals cut in New York City. With the kind of “clean” sound that was a hallmark of CTI recordings, the Nina Simone album that emerged was sim-ply brilliant. Nina herself would later claimed that she ”hated” the record but many fans strongly disagreed. With

an eighteen piece string section conducted by David Mathews (known for his arrangements on James Brown’s re-cords), the results were spectacular. The title track, Randy Newman’s evocative “Baltimore,” was an inspired Nina Simone choice. It had a beautifully constructed reggae-like beat and used some of the finest musicians around at the time.

Aside from 1982′s Fodder On My Wings that Nina recorded for Carrere Records, two albums she made of the independent VPI label in Hollywood (Nina’s Back and Live And Kickin’) in 1985, and a 1987 Live At Vine Street set recorded for Verve, Nina Simone did not make another full length album until Elektra A&R executive Michael Alago persuaded her to record again. After much wining and dining, Nina finally signed on the dotted

34

HYPNOTIC

line. Elektra tapped producer Andre Fischer, noted conductor Jeremy Lubbock, and a trio of respected musicians to provide the suitable environment for this highly personal reading of “A Single Woman,” which became the centerpiece and title track for Nina Simone’s final full length album.

With two marriages behind her in 1993 she settled in Carry-le-Rout, near Aix-en-Provence in Southern France. She would continue to tour through the 1990’s and became very much ‘the single woman’ she sang about on her last label recording. She rarely traveled without an entourage, but if you were fortunate enough to get to know the woman behind the music you could glimpse the solitary soul that understood the pain of being misun-derstood. It was one of Nina’s many abilities to comprehend the bittersweet qualities of life and then parlay them into a song that made her such an enduring and fascinating person.

In her autobiography, Nina Simone writes that her function as an artist is “…to make people feel on a deep level. It’s difficult to describe because it’s not something you can analyze; to get near what it’s about you have to play it. And when you’ve caught it, when you’ve got the audience hooked, you always know because it’s like electricity hanging in the air.” It was that very electricity that made her such an important artist to so many and it will be that electricity that continues to turn on new people all over the world for years to come. Nina Simone died in her sleep at her home in Carry-le-Rout, Bouches-du-Rhone on April 21, 2003. Her funeral service was attended by Miriam Makeba, Patti Labelle, poet Sonia Sanchez, actor Ossie Davis and hundreds of others. Elton John sent a floral tribute with the message, “You were the greatest and I love you”. .

She was one of the most extraordinary artists of the twentieth century, an icon of American music. She was the consummate musical storyteller, a griot as she would come to learn, who used her remarkable talent to cre-ate a legacy of liberation, empowerment, passion, and love through a magnificent body of works.She earned the moniker ‘High Priestess of Soul’ for she could weave a spell so seductive and hypnotic that the listener lost track of time and space as they became absorbed in the moment. She was who the world would come to know as Nina Simone.

When Nina Simone died on April 21, 2003, she left a timeless treasure trove of musical magic spanning over four decades from her first hit, the 1959 Top 10 classic “I Loves You Porgy,” to “A Single Woman,” the title cut

SCRAPED KNEES

35

from her one and only 1993 Elektra album. While thirty-three years separate those recordings, the element of honest emotion is the glue that binds the two together – it is that approach to every piece of work that became Nina’s uncompromising musical trademark.


No one website can fully explore the many nuances and flavors that made up the more than 40 original al-bums in the Nina Simone library. This site and accompanying radio station contain many of Nina’s finest works. However, we might not have had the chance to witness the breathtaking range of material Nina could cover.

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina on February 21st, 1933, Nina’s prodigious talent as a musician was evident early on when she started playing piano by ear at the age of three. Her mother, a Methodist minister, and her father, a handyman and preacher himself, couldn’t ignore young Eunice’s God-given gift of music. Raised in the church on the straight and narrow, her parents taught her right from wrong, to carry herself with dignity, and to work hard. She played piano – but didn’t sing – in her mother’s church, displaying remark-able talent early in her life. Able to play virtually anything by ear, she was soon studying classical music with an Englishwoman named Muriel Mazzanovich, who had moved to the small southern town. It was from these humble roots that Eunice developed a lifelong love of Johann Sebastian Bach, Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven and

Schubert. After graduating valedictorian of her high school class, the community raised money for a scholarship for Eunice to study at Julliard in New York City before applying to the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her family had already moved to the City Of Brotherly Love, but Eunice’s hopes for a career as a pioneering African American classical pianist were dashed when the school denied her admission. To the end, she herself would claim that racism was the reason she did not attend. While her original dream was unfulfilled, Eunice ended up with an incredible worldwide career as Nina Simone – almost by default.

Boy Crazy

37

Eunice made so much progress that

in 1943, when she was ten, she

gave her first piano recital at the

town library. There she not only experienced

her first applause, but also had her first

encounter with racism: during the recital her

parents were removed from the first row to

accommodate some whites. This episode was

a traumatic experience for her and may be

the origin of her commitment to the fight for

freedom and civil rights. With the financial

help of some local supporters, Eunice left

38

HYPNOTIC

North Carolina in 1950 and attend a summer course at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, the same school that Miles Davis attended. After New York her family moved to Philadelphia. She auditioned at the pres-tigious Curtis Institute in Philadelphia but was rejected, so she took private lessons from Vladimir Sokoloff, who was for many years head of the accompanying department at the Curtis Institute.

In order to support herself and pay for further lessons she became an accompanist for a singing teacher. Later, in 1954, she took a job as a singer-pianist in the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City, adopting the stage name Nina Simone. Nina was a pet name that a boyfriend gave her (niña means “girl” in Spanish), and Simone was chosen for its dignified sound (from the French actress Simone Signoret) .

It was at Midtown Bar, where Nina Simone sang, played and improvised, that her career took off. Subsequently she played in several Philadelphia clubs. Recognized as a talented pianist, she was given a recording session with Bethlehem Records in 1957, where she recorded 14 tracks.

Simone’s first album Little Girl Blue (11 tracks), published in 1958 and also known as Jazz as played in an Exclusive Side Street Club, was a great success, first in Philadelphia and New York, and then in the whole USA. The single released from that recording (featuring “I Loves You Porgy” and “He Needs Me”) became a national Rhythm & Blues hit (placing 13th) in the summer of 1959, selling over a million copies.

Thirty years later another selection from the same album, “My Baby Just Cares for Me” was adopted as the theme for a British television advert for Chanel No 5 perfume, and reached 5th place on the English pop

charts. Bethlehem make use of the remaining three tracks recorded by Nina for the collective album And Her Friends, released when Nina have already signed with Colpix.

In 1958 Nina Simone briefly married Don Ross, and divorced him the next year.Thanks to the success of her first recordings, in 1959 Simone signed with Colpix (Columbia Pictures Records),

a collaboration that would last until 1964. Nina recorded 10 albums while signed to Colpix: six studio and four “live” albums. She recorded some songs of Columbia film soundtracks (including “Wild Is The Wind”, “Sayonara”, “Samson and Delilah”) as well as a new version of the Bethlehem hit “I Loves You Porgy”.

In 1961 she recorded the traditional song “The House of the Rising Sun”. The same song was recorded by Bob Dylan in his debut album, issued in March 1962 and subsequently by the Animals in 1963. In the summer of

BOY CRAZY

39

1964, “The House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals was at the top of the American and English charts, on the eve of the band’s USA tour (part of the “British invasion”).

In 1961 Nina marries Andy Stroud, a New York detective and the following year their daughter Lisa Celeste Stroud is born. Their marriage will end in divorce in 1970. In 1964, Nina Simone began her association with Philips, a Mercury subsidiary. This collaboration lasted for three years during which Nina recorded seven albums. One of the first songs recorded during the Philips period is “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”, from then on asso-ciated with her name. The songs is covered by the Animals in 1965, the same year in which Nina publishes “I Put a Spell on You”, a 1956’s song by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. This song is also immediately covered (August 1965) by the Alan Price Set, the group founded by organist Alan Price after his departures from the Animals.

During her association with Philips, and after the jazz and black periods, Nina wrote her first protest song “Mississippi Goddam!” following the murders of Medgar Evers in Mississippi (June 1963) and four black school-children in Alabama (September 1963).

In 1966 Nina switches to RCA (her last long-term affiliation with an American label and where she wouls stay until 1974) in a deal negotiated by her husband who acted as her manager and to whom some compositions were credited. From the summer of 1968 through the end of 1969, “all of her recordings were produced by her hus-band-manager, although we can assume that it was really Nina who was making the final selections of repertoire and essentially masterminding the sessions” according to David Nathan.

While at RCA Nina records nine albums and some of her most popular songs. Her version of “Ain’t Got No/I Got Life”, a medley from the 60s musical Hair, got to N. 2 in UK and her soul version of “To Love Somebody” by the Bee Gees was a UK top 10 hit in the Spring of 1969. “To Be Young, Gifted And Black”, inspired by a play of the same name by Lorraine Hansberr (a friend of Nina’s) was recorded by Aretha Franklin in 1972.

Embittered by racism, Nina renounced her homeland in 1969 and became a wanderer, roaming the world. She lived in Barbados, Liberia (with the encouragement of Miriam Makeba), Switzerland, France, Trinidad, Netherlands, Belgium and UK at various times. In 1970 she and Stroud split up, and Nina attempt to manage herself and work with her brother Sam Waymon.

40

HYPNOTIC

Little Girl BlueSit there

And count your fingers What can you do

Old girl you’re through Sit there

Count your little fingers Unhappy little girl blue

Sit thereCount the raindrops

Falling on you It’s time you knew

All you can ever count on Are the raindrops

That fall on little girl blue Won’t you just sit there

Count the little raindrops Falling on you

Cos it’s time you knew All you can ever count on

Are the raindrops That fall on little girl blue

No use old girl You might as well surrender

Cos your hopes Are getting slender and slender

Why won’t somebody send A tender blue boy

To cheer up little girl blue

BOY CRAZY

41

In 1974 she leaves RCA. In 1978 Nina was arrested, and soon released, for withholding taxes in 1971-73 in protest at her government’s undeclared war in Vietnam. The same year she made the LP Baltimore for the CTI label and in 1982 the LP Fodder on my Wings for a Swiss label.

In 1985 she records Nina’s back and Live and Kickin in US. In 1987 her previously-mentioned European suc-cess with “My Baby Just Cares For Me” brought Nina back into the public eye: her music was featured in 1992 movie Point Of No Return, with the lead character using Nina as inspiration. The same year she records Let It Be Me at The Vine Street Bar & Grill in Hollywood for Verve Records.

Nina moved to the southern French town of Bouc-Bel-Air near Aix-en-Provence, France in 1993 and died April 21st, 2003 in Carry-le-Rouet, Bouches-du-Rhône, France.

A protest singer, jazz singer, pianist, arranger and composer, Nina Simone is a great artist who defies easy clas-sification. She is all of these: a jazz-rock-pop-folk-black musician. In fact, we can find her biography in jazz, rock, pop, black and soul literature. Her style and her hits provided many singers and groups with material for hits of their own. Eunice Kathleen Waymon was born on February 21st 1933 in Tryon, North Carolina, USA, the sixth of eight children (four boys and four girls). Early on in life she revealed a prodigious musical talent playing the piano and singing with her sisters in their mother’s choir at the local church. In 1939 at the age of six, a benefactor paid for her first piano lessons. Eunice made so much progress that in 1943, when she was ten, she gave her first piano recital at the town library. There she not only experienced her first applause, but also had her first encounter with

racism: during the recital her parents were removed from the first row to accommodate some whites. This episode was a traumatic experience for her and may be the origin of her commitment to the fight for freedom and civil rights.

With the financial help of some local supporters, Eunice left North Carolina in 1950 and attend a summer course at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, the same school that Miles Davis attended. After New York her family moved to Philadelphia. She auditioned at the prestigious Curtis Institute in Philadelphia but was re-jected, so she took private lessons from Vladimir Sokoloff, who was for many years head of the accompanying de-partment at the Curtis Institute. In order to support herself and pay for further lessons she became an accompanist

42

HYPNOTIC

for a singing teacher. Later, in 1954, she took a job as a singer-pianist in the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City, adopting the stage name Nina Simone. Nina was a pet name that a boyfriend gave her (niña means “girl” in Spanish), and Simone was chosen for its dignified sound (from the French actress Simone Signoret) .

It was at Midtown Bar, where Nina Simone sang, played and improvised, that her career took off. Subsequently she played in several Philadelphia clubs. Recognized as a talented pianist, she was given a recording session with Bethlehem Records in 1957, where she recorded 14 tracks.

Simone’s first album Little Girl Blue (11 tracks), published in 1958 and also known as Jazz as played in an Exclusive Side Street Club, was a great success, first in Philadelphia and New York, and then in the whole USA.

The single released from that recording (featuring “I Loves You Porgy” and “He Needs Me”) became a national Rhythm & Blues hit (placing 13th) in the summer of 1959, selling over a million copies.

Thirty years later another selection from the same album, “My Baby Just Cares for Me” was adopted as the theme for a British television advert for Chanel No 5 perfume, and reached 5th place on the English pop charts. Bethlehem make use of the remaining three tracks recorded by Nina for the collective album And Her Friends, released when Nina have already signed with Colpix. In 1958 Nina Simone briefly married Don Ross, and divorced him the next year.

Thanks to the success of her first recordings, in 1959 Simone signed with Colpix (Columbia Pictures Records), a collaboration that would last until 1964. Nina recorded 10 albums while signed to Colpix: six studio and

four “live” albums. She recorded some songs of Columbia film soundtracks (including “Wild Is The Wind”, “Sayonara”, “Samson and Delilah”) as well as a new version of the Bethlehem hit “I Loves You Porgy”.

In 1961 she recorded the traditional song “The House of the Rising Sun”. The same song was recorded by Bob Dylan in his debut album, issued in March 1962 and subsequently by the Animals in 1963. In the summer of 1964, “The House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals was at the top of the American and English charts, on the eve of the band’s USA tour (part of the “British invasion”).

In 1961 Nina marries Andy Stroud, a New York detective and the following year their daughter Lisa Celeste Stroud is born. Their marriage will end in divorce in 1970.

BOY CRAZY

43

I wanted him from the moment I saw him. I might not have been able to say exactly what I felt when I looked over at Edney but I knew that what ever it was, I wanted more.

44

HYPNOTIC

In 1964, Nina Simone began her association with Philips, a Mercury subsidiary. This collaboration lasted for three years during which Nina recorded seven albums. One of the first songs recorded during the Philips period is “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”, from then on associated with her name. The songs is covered by the Animals in 1965, the same year in which Nina publishes “I Put a Spell on You”, a 1956’s song by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. This song is also immediately covered (August 1965) by the Alan Price Set, the group founded by organist Alan Price after his departures from the Animals. During her association with Philips, and after the jazz and black peri-ods, Nina wrote her first protest song “Mississippi Goddam!” following the murders of Medgar Evers in Mississippi (June 1963) and four black schoolchildren in Alabama (September 1963).

In 1966 Nina switches to RCA (her last long-term affiliation with an American label and where she wouls stay until 1974) in a deal negotiated by her husband who acted as her manager and to whom some compositions were

credited. From the summer of 1968 through the end of 1969, “all of her recordings were pro-duced by her husband-manager, although we can assume that it was really Nina who was making the final selections of repertoire and essentially masterminding the sessions” according to David Nathan.

While at RCA Nina records nine albums and some of her most popular songs. Her version of “Ain’t Got No/I Got Life”, a medley from the 60s musical Hair, got to N. 2 in UK and her soul version of “To Love Somebody” by the Bee Gees was a UK top 10 hit in the Spring of 1969. “To Be Young, Gifted And Black”, inspired by a play of the same name by Lorraine Hansberr.

BOY CRAZY

45



In 1985 she records Nina’s back and Live and Kickin in US. In 1987 her previously-mentioned European suc-cess with “My Baby Just Cares For Me” brought Nina back into the public eye: her music was featured in 1992

movie Point Of No Return, with the lead character using Nina as inspiration. The same year she records Let It Be Me at The Vine Street Bar & Grill in Hollywood for Verve Records. Nina moved to the southern French town of Bouc-Bel-Air near Aix-en-Provence, France in 1993 and died April 21st, 2003 in Carry-le-Rouet, Bouches-du-Rhône, France. Traveling was a part of her life and she met many people along the way. Africa was another place that she had fond memories for. Her music traveled far and wide and would make people anxious to meet this legend. Like the globe of many different terains, Nina also covered many terains throughout her career. A protest singer, jazz singer, pianist, arranger and composer, Nina Simone is a great artist who defies easy classification. She is all of these: a jazz-rock-pop-folk-black musician. In fact, we can find her biography in jazz, rock, pop, black and soul literature.

With the financial help of some local supporters, Eunice left North Carolina in 1950 and attend a

summer course at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, the same school that Miles Davis attended.

46

HYPNOTIC

With the financial help of some local supporters, Eunice left North Carolina in 1950 and attend a summer course at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, the same school that Miles Davis attended. After New York her family moved to Philadelphia. She auditioned at the prestigious Curtis Institute in Philadelphia but was rejected, so she took private lessons from Vladimir Sokoloff, who was for many years head of the accompanying department at the Curtis Institute.

In order to support herself and pay for further lessons she became an accompanist for a singing teacher. Later, in 1954, she took a job as a singer-pianist in the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City, adopting the stage name Nina Simone. Nina was a pet name that a boyfriend gave her (niña means “girl” in Spanish), and Simone was chosen for its dignified sound (from the French actress Simone Signoret) .

It was at Midtown Bar, where Nina Simone sang, played and improvised, that her career took off. Subsequently she played in several Philadelphia clubs. Recognized as a talented pianist, she was given a recording sesion with Bethlehem Records in 1957, where she recorded 14 tracks.

Simone’s first album Little Girl Blue (11 tracks), published in 1958 and also known as Jazz as played in an Exclusive Side Street Club, was a great success, first in Philadelphia and New York, and then in the whole USA. The single released from that recording (featuring “I Loves You Porgy” and “He Needs Me”) became a national Rhythm & Blues hit (placing 13th) in the summer of 1959, selling over a million copies.

Thirty years later another selection from the same album, “My Baby Just Cares for Me” was adopted as the theme for a British television advert for Chanel No 5 perfume, and reached 5th place on the English pop

charts. Bethlehem make use of the remaining three tracks recorded by Nina for the collective album And Her Friends, released when Nina have already signed with Colpix.

In 1958 Nina Simone briefly married Don Ross, and divorced him the next year.Thanks to the success of her first recordings, in 1959 Simone signed with Colpix (Columbia Pictures Records),

a collaboration that would last until 1964. Nina recorded 10 albums while signed to Colpix: six studio and four “live” albums. She recorded some songs of Columbia film soundtracks (including “Wild Is The Wind”, “Sayonara”, “Samson and Delilah”) as well as a new version of the Bethlehem hit “I Loves You Porgy”.

In 1961 she recorded the traditional song “The House of the Rising Sun”. The same song was recorded by Bob Dylan in his debut album, issued in March 1962 and subsequently by the Animals in 1963. In the summer of

BOY CRAZY

47

1964, “The House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals was at the top of the American and English charts, on the eve of the band’s USA tour (part of the “British invasion”).

In 1961 Nina marries Andy Stroud, a New York detective and the following year their daughter Lisa Celeste Stroud is born. Their marriage will end in divorce in 1970.In 1964, Nina Simone began her association with Philips, a Mercury subsidiary. This collaboration lasted for three years during which Nina recorded seven albums. One of the first songs recorded during the Philips period is “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”, from then on asso-ciated with her name. The songs is covered by the Animals in 1965, the same year in which Nina publishes “I Put a Spell on You”, a 1956’s song by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. This song is also immediately covered (August 1965) by the Alan Price Set, the group founded by organist Alan Price after his departures from the Animals.

During her association with Philips, and after the jazz and black periods, Nina wrote her first protest song “Mississippi Goddam!” following the murders of Medgar Evers in Mississippi (June 1963) and four black school-children in Alabama (September 1963).

In 1966 Nina switches to RCA (her last long-term affiliation with an American label and where she wouls stay until 1974) in a deal negotiated by her husband who acted as her manager and to whom some compositions were credited. From the summer of 1968 through the end of 1969, “all of her recordings were produced by her hus-band-manager, although we can assume that it was really Nina who was making the final selections of repertoire and essentially masterminding the sessions” according to David Nathan.

While at RCA Nina records nine albums and some of her most popular songs. Her version of “Ain’t Got No/I

Got Life”, a medley from the 60s musical Hair, got to N. 2 in UK and her soul version of “To Love Somebody” by the Bee Gees was a UK top 10 hit in the Spring of 1969. “To Be Young, Gifted And Black”, inspired by a play of the same name by Lorraine Hansberr (a friend of Nina’s) was recorded by Aretha Franklin in 1972.


AFTERNOONYEARS

New Name, Same Face

51

In order to support herself and pay

for further lessons she became an

accompanist for a singing teacher. Later,

in 1954, she took a job as a singer-pianist in

the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City,

adopting the stage name Nina Simone. Nina

was a pet name that a boyfriend gave her

(niña means “girl” in Spanish), and Simone

was chosen for its dignified sound (from the

French actress Simone Signoret) .

It was at Midtown Bar, where Nina Simone

sang, played and improvised, that her career

52

HYPNOTIC

took off. She was one of the most extraordinary artists of the twentieth century, an icon of American music. She was the consummate musical storyteller, a griot as she would come to learn, who used her remarkable talent to create a legacy of liberation, empowerment, passion, and love through a magnificent body of works.


When Nina Simone died on April 21, 2003, she left a timeless treasure trove of musical magic spanning over four decades from her first hit, the 1959 Top 10 classic “I Loves You Porgy,” to “A Single Woman,” the title cut from her one and only 1993 Elektra album. While thirty-three years separate those recordings, the element of honest emotion is the glue that binds the two together – it is that approach to every piece of work that became Nina’s uncompromising musical trademark.

By the end of her life, Nina was enjoying an unprec-edented degree of recognition. Her music was enjoyed by the masses due to the CD revolution, discovery on the Internet, and exposure through movies and tele-vision. Nina had sold over one million CDs in the last decade of her life, making her a global catalog best-seller.

No one website can fully explore the many nuances and flavors that made up the more than 40 original albums in the Nina Simone library. This site and ac-companying radio station contain many of Nina’s finest

works. However, we might not have had the chance to witness the breathtaking range of material Nina could cover if she hadn’t taken the path she did.

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina on February 21st, 1933, Nina’s prodigious tal-ent as a musician was evident early on when she started playing piano by ear at the age of three. Her mother, a Methodist minister, and her father, a handyman and preacher himself, couldn’t ignore young Eunice’s

NEW NAME, SAME FACE

53

God-given gift of music. Raised in the church on the straight and narrow, her parents taught her right from wrong, to carry herself with dignity, and to work hard. She played piano – but didn’t sing – in her mother’s church, displaying remarkable talent early in her life. Able to play virtually anything by ear, she was soon studying classical music with an Englishwoman named Muriel Mazzanovich, who had moved to the small southern town. It was from these humble roots that

Eunice developed a lifelong love of Johann Sebastian Bach, Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven and Schubert.

After graduating valedictorian of her high school class, the community raised money for a scholarship for Eunice to study at Julliard in New York City before applying to the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her family had already moved to the City Of Brotherly Love, but Eunice’s hopes for a career as

a pioneering African American classical pianist were dashed when the school denied her admission. To the end, she herself would claim that racism was the reason she did not attend. While her original dream was un-fulfilled, Eunice ended up with an incredible worldwide career as Nina Simone – almost by default.

To survive, she began teaching music to local stu-dents. One fateful day in 1954, looking to supplement her income, Eunice auditioned to sing at the Midtown

Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Word spread about this new singer and pianist who was dipping into the songbooks of Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and the like, transforming popular tunes of the day into a unique synthesis of jazz, blues, and classical music. Her rich, deep velvet vo-cal tones, combined with her mastery of the keyboard, soon attracted club goers up and down the East Coast.

54

HYPNOTIC

In order to hide the fact that she was singing in bars, Eunice’s mother would refer to the practice as “working in the fires of hell”, overnight Eunice Waymon became Nina Simone by taking the nickname “Nina” meaning “little one” in Spanish and “Simone” after the actress Simone Signoret.

At the age of twenty-four, Nina came to the atten-tion of the record industry. After submitting a demo of songs she had recorded during a performance in New

Hope, Pennsylvania, she was signed by Syd Nathan, owner of the Ohio-based King Records (home to James Brown), to his Jazz imprint, Bethlehem Records. The boisterous Nathan had insisted on choosing songs for her debut set, but eventually relented and allowed Nina to delve in the repertoire she had been perform-ing at clubs up and down the eastern seaboard. One of Nina’s stated musical influences was Billie Holiday and

NEW NAME, SAME FACE

55

her inspired reading of “Porgy” (from “Porgy & Bess”) heralded the arrival of a new talent on the national scene. At the same mammoth 13 hour session in 1957, recorded in New York City, Nina also cut “My Baby Just Cares For Me,” previously recorded by Nate King Cole, Count Basie, and Woody Herman.

The song was used by Chanel in a perfume com-mercial in Europe in the 1980’s and it became a mas-sive hit for Nina, a British chart topper at #5, and

thus a staple of her repertoire for the rest of her career. Nina Simone’s stay with Bethlehem Records was short lived and in 1959, after moving to New York City, she was signed by Joyce Selznik, the eastern talent scout for Colpix Records, a division of Columbia Pictures. Months after the release of her debut LP for the la-bel (1959‘s The Amazing Nina Simone), Nina was performing at her first major New York City venue, the mid-Manhattan-located Town Hall. Sensing that

56

HYPNOTIC

her live performances would capture the essential spontaneity of her artistry, Colpix opted to record her September 12, 1959 show. “You Can Have Him,” a glorious torch song previously cut by Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald, was one of the highlights of the eve-ning. The song opened with a dazzling keyboard arpeg-gio that would become her signature for decades. So momentous was the Town Hall performance that it inspired some of the same musicians, featuring the vocals

of Nina’s only daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, to do a trib-ute to a sold out audience over forty five years later.

As Nina’s reputation as an engaging live performer grew, it wasn’t long before she was asked to perform at the prestigious Newport Jazz Festival. Accompanied on the June 30th,1960 show by Al Schackman, a guitar-ist who would go on to become Nina’s longest-running musical colleague, bassist Chris White, and drummer Bobby Hamilton, the dynamic show was recorded by

the Colpix. The subsequent release in 1961 of the old blues tune “Trouble In Mind” as a single gave Nina her third charted record.

Her stay with Colpix resulted in some wonderful albums – nine in all – included Nina’s version of Bessie Smith’s blues classic “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out.” Issued as a single in 1960, it became Nina’s second charted Pop and R&B hit and one of two Colpix tracks to achieve such a feat during her five year

stint with the label. Other stand out tracks from that era were the soulful song “Cotton Eyed Joe,” the torch tune “The Other Women,” and the Norwegian folk rendition of “Black Is The Colour Of My True Love’s Hair” – all beautiful examples of Nina Simone at her storytelling best, painting a vivid picture with her skill as a lyrical interpreter. During this time with the label, Nina recorded one civil rights song, Oscar Brown Jr.’s “Brown Baby,” which was included on her fifth album

NEW NAME, SAME FACE

57

for the label, At The Village Gate. “Critics started to talk about what sort of music I was playing,” writes Nina in her 1991 autobiography I Put A Spell On You, “and tried to find a neat slot to file it away in. It was difficult for them because I was playing popular songs in a classical style with a classical piano technique influ-enced by cocktail jazz. On top of that I included spiri-tuals and children’s song in my performances, and those sorts of songs were automatically identified with the

folk movement. So, saying what sort of music I played gave the critics problems because there was something from everything in there, but it also meant I was ap-preciated across the board – by jazz, folk, pop and blues fans as well as admirers of classical music.” Clearly Nina Simone was not an artist who could be easily clas-sified. Nina’s Colpix recordings cemented her appeal to a nightclub based U.S. audience. Once she moved to

Word spread about this new singer and pianist who was dipping into the songbooks of Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and the

like, transforming popular tunes of the day into a

unique synthesis of jazz, blues, and classical music.

58

HYPNOTIC

Nina was performing at her first major New York City venue, the mid-Manhattan-located Town

Hall. Sensing that her live performances would capture

the essential spontaneity of her artistry, Colpix opted to record her

September 12, 1959 show.

NEW NAME, SAME FACE

59

Phillips, a division of Dutch owned Mercury Records, she was ready to expand her following globally. Her first LP for the label, 1964’s In Concert, signaled Nina’s undaunting stand for freedom and justice for all, stamp-ing her irrevocably as a pioneer and inspirational leader in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Her own original “Mississippi Goddam” was banned throughout the South but such a response made no difference in Nina’s unyielding commitment to liberty; subsequent ground-breaking recordings for Philips like “Four Women” (recorded September 1965) and “Strange Fruit” contin-

ued to keep Nina in the forefront of the few performers willing to use music as a vehicle for social commentary and change. Such risks were seldom taken by artists during that time of such dramatic civil upheaval.

For years, Nina felt there was much about the way that she made her living that was less then appealing. One gets a sense of that in the following passage from I Put A Spell on You where she explains her initial re-luctance to perform material that was tied to the Civil

Rights Movement. “Nightclubs were dirty, making records was dirty, popular music was dirty and to mix all that with politics seemed senseless and demeaning. And until songs like ‘Mississippi Goddam’ just burst out of me, I had musical problems as well.

How can you take the memory of a man like [Civil Rights activist] Medgar Evers and reduce all that he was to three and a half minutes and a simple tune? That was the musical side of it I shied away from; I didn’t like ‘protest music’ because a lot of it was so simple and unimaginative it stripped the dignity away

from the people it was trying to celebrate. But the Alabama church bombing and the murder of Medgar Evers stopped that argument and with ‘Mississippi Goddam,’ I realized there was no turning back.” Nina was deeply affected by these two events. In 1962, she had befriended noted playwright Lorraine Hansberry.

Between The Keys

61

In 1961 she recorded the traditional

song “The House of the Rising Sun”.

The same song was recorded by Bob

Dylan in his debut album, issued in March

1962 and subsequently by the Animals in

1963. In the summer of 1964, “The House of

the Rising Sun” by the Animals was at the

top of the American and English charts, on

the eve of the band’s USA tour (part of the

“British invasion”). In 1961 Nina marries

Andy Stroud, a New York detective and the

following year their daughter Lisa Celeste

62

HYPNOTIC

Stroud is born. Eunice Kathleen Waymon was born on February 21st 1933 in Tryon, North Carolina, USA, the sixth of eight children (four boys and four girls). Early on in life she revealed a prodigious musical talent playing the piano and singing with her sisters in their mother’s choir at the local church. In 1939 at the age of six, a benefac-

tor paid for her first piano lessons. Eunice made so much progress

that in 1943, when she was ten, she gave her first piano recital at the town library. There she not only experienced her first applause, but also had her first encounter with racism: during the recital her parents were removed from the first

row to accommodate some whites. This episode was a traumatic expe-rience for her and may be the origin of her commitment to the fight for freedom and civil rights.

With the financial help of some local supporters, Eunice left North Carolina in 1950 and attend a sum-mer course at the Juilliard School

of Music in New York, the same school that Miles Davis attended. After New York her family moved to Philadelphia. She auditioned at the prestigious Curtis Institute in Philadelphia but was rejected, so she took private lessons from Vladimir Sokoloff, who was for many years head of the accompany-ing department at the Curtis.

In order to support herself and pay for further lessons she became an accompanist for a singing teach-er. Later, in 1954, she took a job as a singer-pianist in the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City, adopting the stage name Nina Simone. Nina was a pet name that a boyfriend gave her (niña means “girl” in

Spanish), and Simone was chosen for its dignified sound (from the French actress Simone Signoret) .

It was at Midtown Bar, where Nina Simone sang, played and improvised, that her career took off. Subsequently she played in several Philadelphia clubs. Recognized as a talented pianist, she was given a

recording session with Bethlehem Records in 1957, where she record-ed 14 tracks.

Simone’s first album Little Girl Blue (11 tracks), published in 1958 and also known as Jazz as played in an Exclusive Side Street Club, was a great success, first in Philadelphia and New York, and then in the whole USA. The single released

from that recording (featuring “I Loves You Porgy” and “He Needs Me”) became a national Rhythm & Blues hit (placing 13th) in the sum-mer of 1959, selling over a million copies.

Thirty years later another selec-tion from the same album, “My Baby Just Cares for Me” was ad-

opted as the theme for a British television advert for Chanel No 5 perfume, and reached 5th place on the English pop charts. Bethlehem make use of the remaining three tracks recorded by Nina for the collective album And Her Friends, released when Nina have signed.

In 1958 Nina Simone briefly

BETWEEN THE KEYS

63

married Don Ross, and divorced him the next year.

Thanks to the success of her first recordings, in 1959 Simone signed with Colpix (Columbia Pictures Records), a collaboration that would last until 1964. Nina recorded 10 albums while signed to Colpix: six studio and four “live” albums. She recorded some songs

of Columbia film soundtracks (including “Wild Is The Wind”, “Sayonara”, “Samson and Delilah”) as well as a new version of the Bethlehem hit “I Loves You Porgy”.

In 1961 she recorded the tra-ditional song “The House of the Rising Sun”. The same song was recorded by Bob Dylan in his debut

album, issued in March 1962 and subsequently by the Animals in 1963. In the summer of 1964, “The House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals was at the top of the American and English charts, on the eve of the band’s USA tour (part of the “British invasion”).

In 1961 Nina marries Andy

Stroud, a New York detective and the following year their daughter Lisa Celeste Stroud is born. Their marriage will end in divorce in 1970.

In 1964, Nina Simone began her association with Philips, a Mercury subsidiary. This collaboration lasted for three years during which Nina recorded seven albums. One

of the first songs recorded during the Philips period is “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”, from then on associated with her name. The songs is covered by the Animals in 1965, the same year in which Nina publishes “I Put a Spell on You”, a 1956’s song by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. This song is also immedi-

ately covered (August 1965) by the Alan Price Set, the group founded by organist Alan Price after his departures from the Animals.

During her association with Philips, and after the jazz and black periods, Nina wrote her first protest song “Mississippi Goddam!” follow-ing the murders of Medgar Evers

in Mississippi (June 1963) and four black schoolchildren in Alabama (September 1963).

In 1966 Nina switches to RCA (her last long-term affiliation with an American label and where she wouls stay until 1974) in a deal negotiated by her husband who acted as her manager and to whom some compositions were credited.

From the summer of 1968 through the end of 1969, “all of her record-ings were produced by her husband-manager, although we can assume that it was really Nina who was making the final selections of repertoire and essentially masterminding the ses-sions” according to David Nathan.

While at RCA Nina records

nine albums and some of her most popular songs. Her version of “Ain’t Got No/I Got Life”, a medley from the 60s musical Hair, got to N. 2 in UK and her soul version of “To Love Somebody” by the Bee Gees was a UK top 10 hit in the Spring of 1969. “To Be Young, Gifted And

64

HYPNOTIC

Black”, inspired by a play of the same name by Lorraine Hansberr (a friend of Nina’s) was recorded by Aretha Franklin in 1972.

Embittered by racism, Nina renounced her homeland in 1969 and became a wanderer, roaming the world. She lived in Barbados, Liberia (with the encouragement of Miriam Makeba), Switzerland,

France, Trinidad, Netherlands, Belgium and UK at various times. In 1970 she and Stroud split up, and Nina attempt to manage her-self and work with her brother Sam Waymon.

In 1974 she leaves RCA. In 1978 Nina was arrested, and soon

released, for withholding taxes in 1971-73 in protest at her govern-ment’s undeclared war in Vietnam. The same year she made the LP Baltimore for the CTI label and in 1982 the LP Fodder on my Wings for a Swiss label.

In 1985 she records Nina’s back

and Live and Kickin in US. In 1987 her previously-mentioned European success with “My Baby Just Cares For Me” brought Nina back into the public eye: her music was featured in 1992 movie Point Of No Return, with the lead character using Nina as inspiration. The same year she records Let It Be Me at The Vine Street Bar & Grill in Hollywood for

Verve Records. Nina moved to the southern French town of Bouc-Bel-Air near Aix-en-Provence, France in 1993 and died April 21st, 2003 in Carry-le-Rouet, Bouches-du-Rhône, France.

A protest singer, jazz singer, pianist, arranger and composer,

Nina Simone is a great artist who defies easy classification. She is all of these: a jazz-rock-pop-folk-black musician. In fact, we can find her biography in jazz, rock, pop, black and soul literature. One should sample her albums from each year. Her style and her hits prove this.

She was one of the most ex-traordinary artists of the twentieth century, an icon of American music. She was the consummate musi-cal storyteller, a griot as she would come to learn, who used her re-markable talent to create a legacy of liberation, empowerment, passion, and love through a magnificent body of works.

She earned the moniker ‘High Priestess of Soul’ for she could weave a spell so seductive and hypnotic that the listener lost track of time and space as they became absorbed in the moment. She was who the world would come to know as Nina Simone. When Nina Simone died on April 21, 2003,

BETWEEN THE KEYS

65

66

HYPNOTIC

she left a timeless treasure trove of musical magic spanning over four decades from her first hit, the 1959 Top 10 classic “I Loves You Porgy,” to “A Single Woman,” the title cut from her one and only 1993 Elektra album. While thirty-three years separate those recordings, the element of honest emotion is the

glue that binds the two together – it is that approach to every piece of work that became Nina’s uncom-promising musical trademark.

By the end of her life, Nina was enjoying an unprecedented de-gree of recognition. Her music was enjoyed by the masses due to the CD revolution, discovery on the

Internet, and exposure through movies and television. Nina had sold over one million CDs in the last decade of her life, making her a global catalog best-seller.

No one website can fully explore the many nuances and flavors that made up the more than 40 original albums in the Nina Simone library.

This site and accompanying radio station contain many of Nina’s fin-est works. However, we might not have had the chance to witness the breathtaking range of material Nina could cover if she hadn’t taken the path she did.

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon

ImagesShe does not know her beauty,

She thinks her brown glory She thinks her brown body has no glory

If she could dance naked, Under palm trees And see her image in the river

She would know yes she would knowBut there are no palm trees in the street,

No palm trees in the street, And dish water gives back no images

She does not know her beauty, She thinks her brown body has no glory

If she could dance naked, Under palm trees And see her image in the river

She would know yes she would knowBut there are no palm trees in the street,

No palm trees in the street, And dish water gives back no images

BETWEEN THE KEYS

67

in Tryon, North Carolina on February 21st, 1933, Nina’s pro-digious talent as a musician was evident early on when she started playing piano by ear at the age of three. Her mother, a Methodist minister, and her father, a handy-man and preacher himself, couldn’t ignore young Eunice’s God-given

gift of music. Raised in the church on the straight and narrow, her par-ents taught her right from wrong, to carry herself with dignity, and to work hard. She played piano – but didn’t sing – in her mother’s church, displaying remarkable talent early in her life. Able to play

virtually anything by ear, she was soon studying classical music with an Englishwoman named Muriel Mazzanovich, who had moved to the small southern town. It was from these humble roots that Eunice developed a lifelong love of Johann Sebastian Bach, Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven and Schubert.

After graduating valedictorian

of her high school class, the com-munity raised money for a scholar-ship for Eunice to study at Julliard in New York City before applying to the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her family had already moved to the City Of Brotherly Love, but Eunice’s hopes for a career as a pioneering African

American classical pianist were dashed when the school denied her admission. To the end, she herself would claim that racism was the reason she did not attend. While her original dream was unfulfilled, Eunice ended up with an incredible worldwide career as Nina Simone – almost by default.

To survive, she began teaching music to local students. One fateful day in 1954, looking to supplement her income, Eunice auditioned to sing at the Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Word spread about this new singer and pianist who was dipping into the songbooks of Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard

Rodgers, and the like, transform-ing popular tunes of the day into a unique synthesis of jazz, blues, and classical music. Her rich, deep velvet vocal tones, combined with her mastery of the keyboard, soon attracted club goers up and down the East Coast. In order to hide the fact that she was singing in bars,

Eunice’s mother would refer to the practice as “working in the fires of hell”, overnight Eunice Waymon became Nina Simone by taking the nickname “Nina” meaning “little one” in Spanish and “Simone” after the actress Simone Signoret.

At the age of twenty-four, Nina came to the attention of the record

68

HYPNOTIC

industry. After submitting a demo of songs she had recorded dur-ing a performance in New Hope, Pennsylvania, she was signed by Syd Nathan, owner of the Ohio-based King Records (home to James Brown), to his Jazz imprint, Bethlehem Records. The boisterous Nathan had insisted on choosing

songs for her debut set, but eventu-ally relented and allowed Nina to delve in the repertoire she had been performing at clubs up and down the eastern seaboard. One of Nina’s stated musical influences was Billie Holiday and her inspired reading of “Porgy” (from “Porgy & Bess”)

heralded the arrival of a new tal-ent on the national scene. At the same mammoth 13 hour session in 1957, recorded in New York City, Nina also cut “My Baby Just Cares For Me,” previously recorded by Nate King Cole, Count Basie, and Woody Herman. The song was used by Chanel in a perfume commer-

cial in Europe in the 1980’s and it became a massive hit for Nina, a British chart topper at #5, and thus a staple of her repertoire for the rest of her career.

Nina Simone’s stay with Bethlehem Records was short lived and in 1959, after moving to New

York City, she was signed by Joyce Selznik, the eastern talent scout for Colpix Records, a division of Columbia Pictures. Months after the release of her debut LP for the label (1959‘s The Amazing Nina Simone), Nina was performing at her first major New York City venue, the mid-Manhattan-located Town Hall. Sensing that her live

BETWEEN THE KEYS

69

performances would capture the essential spontaneity of her art-istry, Colpix opted to record her September 12, 1959 show. “You Can Have Him,” a glorious torch song previously cut by Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald, was one of the highlights of the evening. The song opened with a dazzling keyboard arpeggio that would become her sig-

nature for decades. So momentous was the Town Hall performance that it inspired some of the same musicians, featuring the vocals of Nina’s only daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, to do a tribute to a sold out audience over forty five years later.

As Nina’s reputation as an engag-ing live performer grew, it wasn’t

long before she was asked to per-form at the prestigious Newport Jazz Festival. Accompanied on the June 30th,1960 show by Al Schackman, a guitarist who would go on to be-come Nina’s longest-running musi-cal colleague, bassist Chris White, and drummer Bobby Hamilton, the dynamic show was recorded by the

Colpix. The subsequent release in 1961 of the old blues tune “Trouble In Mind” as a single gave Nina her third charted record.

Her stay with Colpix resulted in some wonderful albums – nine in all – included Nina’s version of Bessie Smith’s blues classic

“Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out.” Issued as a single in 1960, it became Nina’s second charted Pop and R&B hit and one of two Colpix tracks to achieve such a feat during her five year stint with the label. Other stand out tracks from that era were the soulful song “Cotton Eyed Joe,” the torch

tune “The Other Women,” and the Norwegian folk rendition of “Black Is The Colour Of My True Love’s Hair” . “Baltimore,” was an inspired Nina Simone choice. It had a beauti-fully constructed reggae-like beat and used some of the finest musicians.

Mercury Rising

71

During her association with Philips,

and after the jazz and black

periods, Nina wrote her first

protest song “Mississippi Goddam!” following

the murders of Medgar Evers in Mississippi

(June 1963) and four black schoolchildren

in Alabama (September 1963). In 1966

Nina switches to RCA (her last long-term

affiliation with an American label and

where she would stay until 1974) in a deal

negotiated by her husband at the time, who

acted as her manager.

72

HYPNOTIC

She was one of the most ex-traordinary artists of the twentieth century, an icon of American music. She was the consummate musi-cal storyteller, a griot as she would come to learn, who used her re-markable talent to create a legacy of liberation, empowerment, passion, and love through a magnificent body of works.

She earned the moniker ‘High

Priestess of Soul’ for she could weave a spell so seductive and hypnotic that the listener lost track of time and space as they became absorbed in the moment. She was who the world would come to know as Nina Simone.

When Nina Simone died on April 21, 2003, she left a timeless

treasure trove of musical magic spanning over four decades from her first hit, the 1959 Top 10 classic “I Loves You Porgy,” to “A Single Woman,” the title cut from her one and only 1993 Elektra album. While thirty-three years separate those recordings, the element of honest emotion is the glue that

binds the two together – it is that approach to every piece of work that became Nina’s uncompromis-ing musical trademark.

By the end of her life, Nina was enjoying an unprecedented de-gree of recognition. Her music was enjoyed by the masses due to the CD revolution, discovery on the Internet, and exposure through

movies and television. Nina had sold over one million CDs in the last decade of her life, making her a global catalog best-seller.

No one website can fully explore the many nuances and flavors that made up the more than 40 original albums in the Nina Simone library. This site and accompanying radio

station contain many of Nina’s fin-est works. However, we might not have had the chance to witness the breathtaking range of material Nina could cover if she hadn’t taken the path she did.

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina on February 21st, 1933, Nina’s

prodigious talent as a musician was evident early on when she started playing piano by ear at the age of three. Her mother, a Methodist minister, and her father, a handy-man and preacher himself, couldn’t ignore young Eunice’s God-given gift of music. Raised in the church on the straight and narrow, her par-ents taught her right from wrong, to carry herself with dignity, and

to work hard. She played piano – but didn’t sing – in her mother’s church, displaying remarkable talent early in her life. Able to play virtually anything by ear, she was soon studying classical music with an Englishwoman named Muriel Mazzanovich, who had moved to the small southern town. It

was from these humble roots that Eunice developed a lifelong love of Johann Sebastian Bach, Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven and Schubert.

After graduating valedictorian of her high school class, the com-munity raised money for a scholar-ship for Eunice to study at Julliard in New York City before applying

MERCURY RISING

73

to the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her family had already moved to the City Of Brotherly Love, but Eunice’s hopes for a career as a pioneering African American classical pianist were dashed when the school denied her admission. To the end, she herself would claim that racism was the reason she did not attend. While

her original dream was unfulfilled, Eunice ended up with an incredible worldwide career as Nina Simone – almost by default.

To survive, she began teaching music to local students. One fateful day in 1954, looking to supplement her income, Eunice auditioned to sing at the Midtown Bar & Grill

on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Word spread about this new singer and pianist who was dipping into the songbooks of Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and the like, transform-ing popular tunes of the day into a unique synthesis of jazz, blues, and classical music. Her rich, deep

velvet vocal tones, combined with her mastery of the keyboard, soon attracted club goers up and down the East Coast. In order to hide the fact that she was singing in bars, Eunice’s mother would refer to the practice as “working in the fires of hell”, overnight Eunice Waymon became Nina Simone by taking the nickname “Nina” meaning “little one” in Spanish and “Simone” after

the actress Simone Signoret.At the age of twenty-four, Nina

came to the attention of the record industry. After submitting a demo of songs she had recorded dur-ing a performance in New Hope, Pennsylvania, she was signed by Syd Nathan, owner of the Ohio-based King Records (home to

James Brown), to his Jazz imprint, Bethlehem Records. The boisterous Nathan had insisted on choosing songs for her debut set, but eventu-ally relented and allowed Nina to delve in the repertoire she had been performing at clubs up and down the eastern seaboard. One of Nina’s stated musical influences was Billie

Holiday and her inspired reading of “Porgy” (from “Porgy & Bess”) heralded the arrival of a new tal-ent on the national scene. At the same mammoth 13 hour session in 1957, recorded in New York City, Nina also cut “My Baby Just Cares For Me,” previously recorded by Nate King Cole, Count Basie, and Woody Herman. The song was used

by Chanel in a perfume commer-cial in Europe in the 1980’s and it became a massive hit for Nina, a British chart topper at #5, and thus a staple of her repertoire for the rest of her career.

Nina Simone’s stay with Bethlehem Records was short lived and in 1959, after moving to New

York City, she was signed by Joyce Selznik, the eastern talent scout for Colpix Records, a division of Columbia Pictures. Months after the release of her debut LP for the label (1959‘s The Amazing Nina Simone), Nina was performing at her first major New York City venue, the mid-Manhattan-located

74

HYPNOTIC

mississippi goddamThe name of this tune is Mississippi Goddam

And I mean every word of itAlabama’s got me so upset

Tennessee made me lose my restAnd everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

Alabama’s got me so upset Tennessee made me lose my rest

And everybody knows about Mississippi GoddamCan’t you see it can’t you feel it

It’s all in the airI can’t stand the pressure much longer

Somebody say a prayerAlabama’s got me so upset

Tennessee made me lose my restAnd everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

This is a show tune But the show hasn’t been written for it yet

Hound dogs on my trail Schoolchildren sitting in jail

Black cat crossed my path I think every day’s gonna be my last

Lord have mercy on this land of mineWe’re all gonna get it in due time

I don’t belong here I don’t belong thereI’ve even stopped believing in prayer

Don’t tell me I tell you Me and my people just about do

I’ve been there so I know Keep on saying go slow

But that’s just the trouble too slowWashing the windows too slow

Picking the cotton too slowYou’re just plain rotten too slow

Too damn lazy too slowThinking’s crazy too slow

Where am I going What am I doing

I don’t know I don’t knowJust try to do your very best

Stand up be counted with all the restCos everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

I bet you thought I was kidding didn’t you

Picket lines school boycotsThey try to say it’s a communist plot

All I want is equalityFor my sister my brother my people and me

Yes you lied to me all these yearsYou told me to wash and clean my ears

And talk real fine just like a ladyAnd you’d stop calling me Sister Sady

Oh but this whole country is full of liesYou’re all gonna die and die like flies

I don’t trust you anymoreYou keep on saying go slow go slow

But that’s just the trouble too slowDesegregation too slow

Mass participation too slowUnification too slow

Do things gradually too slowWill bring more tragedy too slow

Why don’t you see it why don’t you feel itI don’t know I don’t know

You don’t have to live next to meJust give me my equality

And everybody knows about MississippiEverybody knows about Alabama

Everybody knows about Mississippi GoddamThat’s it

MERCURY RISING

75

Town Hall. Sensing that her live performances would capture the essential spontaneity of her art-istry, Colpix opted to record her September 12, 1959 show. “You Can Have Him,” a glorious torch song previously cut by Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald, was one of the highlights of the evening. The song

opened with a dazzling keyboard arpeggio that would become her sig-nature for decades. So momentous was the Town Hall performance that it inspired some of the same musicians, featuring the vocals of Nina’s only daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, to do a tribute to a sold out audience over forty five years later.

As Nina’s reputation as an engag-

ing live performer grew, it wasn’t long before she was asked to per-form at the prestigious Newport Jazz Festival. Accompanied on the June 30th,1960 show by Al Schackman, a guitarist who would go on to be-come Nina’s longest-running musi-cal colleague, bassist Chris White,

and drummer Bobby Hamilton, the dynamic show was recorded by the Colpix. The subsequent release in 1961 of the old blues tune “Trouble In Mind” as a single gave Nina her third charted record.

Her stay with Colpix resulted in some wonderful albums – nine

in all – included Nina’s version of Bessie Smith’s blues classic “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out.” Issued as a single in 1960, it became Nina’s second charted Pop and R&B hit and one of two Colpix tracks to achieve such a feat during her five year stint with the label. Other stand out

tracks from that era were the soulful song “Cotton Eyed Joe,” the torch tune “The Other Women,” and the Norwegian folk rendition of “Black Is The Colour Of My True Love’s Hair” – all beautiful examples of Nina Simone at her storytelling best, painting a vivid picture with her skill as a lyrical interpreter. During this time with the label,

Nina recorded one civil rights song, Oscar Brown Jr.’s “Brown Baby,” which was included on her fifth album for the label, At The Village Gate.

“Critics started to talk about what sort of music I was playing,” writes Nina in her 1991 autobiog-

raphy I Put A Spell On You, “and tried to find a neat slot to file it away in. It was difficult for them be-cause I was playing popular songs in a classical style with a classical pi-ano technique influenced by cock-tail jazz. On top of that I included spirituals and children’s song in my

performances, and those sorts of songs were automatically identified with the folk movement. So, saying what sort of music I played gave the critics problems because there was something from everything in there, but it also meant I was appreciated across the board – by jazz, folk, pop and blues fans as well as admirers

of classical music.” Clearly Nina Simone was not an artist who could be easily classified.

Nina’s Colpix recordings cement-ed her appeal to a nightclub based U.S. audience. Once she moved to Phillips, a division of Dutch owned Mercury Records, she was ready to expand her following globally. Her first LP for the label, 1964’s In

Concert, signaled Nina’s undaunt-ing stand for freedom and justice for all, stamping her irrevocably as a pioneer and inspirational leader in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Her own original “Mississippi Goddam” was banned throughout the South but such a response made

no difference in Nina’s unyielding commitment to liberty; subsequent groundbreaking recordings for Philips like “Four Women” (record-ed September 1965) and “Strange Fruit” continued to keep Nina in the forefront of the few performers willing to use music as a vehicle

76

HYPNOTIC

MERCURY RISING

77

for social commentary and change. Such risks were seldom taken by artists during that time of such dra-matic civil upheaval.

For years, Nina felt there was much about the way that she made her living that was less then ap-pealing. One gets a sense of that in the following passage from I Put A

Spell on You where she explains her initial reluctance to perform mate-rial that was tied to the Civil Rights Movement.

“Nightclubs were dirty, making records was dirty, popular mu-sic was dirty and to mix all that with politics seemed senseless and

demeaning. And until songs like ‘Mississippi Goddam’ just burst out of me, I had musical problems as well. How can you take the memory of a man like [Civil Rights activist] Medgar Evers and reduce all that he was to three and a half minutes and a simple tune? That was the musi-cal side of it I shied away from; I didn’t like ‘protest music’ because a

lot of it was so simple and unimagi-native it stripped the dignity away from the people it was trying to celebrate. But the Alabama church bombing and the murder of Medgar Evers stopped that argument and with ‘Mississippi Goddam,’ I real-ized there was no turning back.”

Nina was deeply affected by these

two events. In 1962, she had be-friended noted playwright Lorraine Hansberry and spoke often with her about the Civil Rights Movement. While she was moved by her conver-sations with Hansberry, it took the killing of Medgar Evers and the four girls in Birmingham to act as catalysts for a transformation of Nina’s career.

There were many sides to Nina Simone. Among her most amazing recordings were the original and so-soulful version “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” and “I Put A Spell On You” (which had reached to #23 in the U.S. charts), eerily moody, unrestrained, drama to the max; “Ne Me Quitte Pas” tender,

poignant, filled with melancholy; and with gospel-like fervor, the hypnotic voodoo of “See-Line Woman.” In her own unrivaled way, Nina also loved to venture into the more earthy side of life. After she signed with RCA Records in 1967 (a deal her then husband/

78

HYPNOTIC

manager Andy Stroud had negoti-ated), her very first recordings for the label included the saucy “Do I Move You?” and the undeniably sexual “I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl” which were from the concept album entitled Nina Sings The Blues. Backed by a stellar cast of New York CIty session musicians, the album was far and away Nina’s

most down-home recording ses-sion. By this time, Nina had be-come central to a circle of African American playwrights, poets, and writers all centered in Harlem along with the previously mentioned Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. The out-come from one of the relationships

became a highlight of the LP with the song “Backlash Blues,” a song that’s lyrics originated from the last poem Langston Hughes submitted for publication prior to his death in May, 1967 and gave to Nina.

Nina’s seven years with RCA produced some remarkable re-cordings, ranging from two songs

featured in the Broadway musical “Hair” (combined into a medley, “Ain’t Got No – I Got Life,” a #2 British hit in 1968) to a Simone-ified version of George Harrison’s “Here Comes The Sun,” which remained in Nina’s repertoire all the way through to her final perfor-mance in 2002. Along the way at RCA, songs penned by Bob Dylan

(“Just Like A Woman”), the broth-ers Gibb (“To Love Somebody”), and Tina Turner (“Funkier Than A Mosquito’s Tweeter”) took pride of place alongside Nina’s own anthem of empowerment, the classic “To Be Young, Gifted, & Black,” a song written in memory of Nina’s good friend Lorraine Hansberry. The

title of the song coming from a play Hansberry had been working on just prior to her death.

After Nina left RCA, she spent a good deal of the 1970’s and early 1980’s living in Liberia, Barbados, England, Belgium, France, Switzerland and The Netherlands.

In 1978, for the first time since she left RCA, Nina was convinced by U.S. jazz veteran Creed Taylor to make an album for his CTI label. This would be her first new studio album in six years and she recorded it in Belgium with strings and back-ground vocals cut in New York City. With the kind of “clean” sound that was a hallmark of CTI record-

ings, the Nina Simone album that emerged was simply brilliant. Nina herself would later claimed that she ”hated” the record but many fans strongly disagreed. With an eigh-teen piece string section conducted by David Mathews (known for his arrangements on James Brown’s re-cords), the results were spectacular.

The title track, Randy Newman’s evocative “Baltimore,” was an in-spired Nina Simone choice. It had a beautifully constructed reggae-like beat and used some of the finest musicians producer Creed Taylor could find including Nina’s guitarist and music director, Al Schackman.

Aside from 1982′s Fodder On

MERCURY RISING

79

My Wings that Nina recorded for Carrere Records, two albums she made of the independent VPI label in Hollywood (Nina’s Back and Live And Kickin’) in 1985, and a 1987 Live At Vine Street set recorded for Verve, Nina Simone did not make another full length album until Elektra A&R execu-tive Michael Alago persuaded her

to record again. After much win-ing and dining, Nina finally signed on the dotted line. Elektra tapped producer Andre Fischer, noted conductor Jeremy Lubbock, and a trio of respected musicians to pro-vide the suitable environment for this highly personal reading of “A Single Woman,” which became the centerpiece and title track for Nina

Simone’s final full length album.With two marriages behind her

in 1993 she settled in Carry-le-Rout, near Aix-en-Provence in Southern France. She would con-tinue to tour through the 1990’s and became very much ‘the single woman’ she sang about on her last label recording. She rarely traveled without an entourage, but if you

were fortunate enough to get to know the woman behind the music you could glimpse the solitary soul that understood the pain of being misunderstood. It was one of Nina’s many abilities to comprehend the bittersweet qualities of life and then parlay them into a song that made her such an enduring and fascinat-ing person. She was a true master.

In her autobiography, Nina Simone writes that her function as an artist is “…to make people feel on a deep level. It’s difficult to describe because it’s not some-thing you can analyze; to get near what it’s about you have to play it. And when you’ve caught it, when you’ve got the audience hooked, you always know because it’s like

electricity hanging in the air.” It was that very electricity that made her such an important artist to so many and it will be that electric-ity that continues to turn on new people all over the world for years to come. Nina Simone dreamed in her sleep at her home in Carry-le-

Rout, Bouches-du-Rhone on April 21, 2003. Her funeral service was attended by Miriam Makeba, Patti Labelle, poet Sonia Sanchez, actor Ossie Davis and hundreds of others. Elton John sent a floral tribute with a message.

EVENINGYEARS

Shoulders of Giants

83

While at RCA Nina records

nine albums and some of

her most popular songs.

Her version of “Ain’t Got No/I Got Life”,

a medley from the 60s musical Hair, got to

N. 2 in UK and her soul version of “To Love

Somebody” by the Bee Gees was a UK top

10 hit in the Spring of 1969. “To Be Young,

Gifted And Black”, inspired by a play of the

same name by Lorraine Hansberr (a friend of

Nina’s) was recorded by the talented Aretha

Franklin in 1972.

84

HYPNOTIC

She was one of the most extraordinary artists of the twentieth century, an icon of American mu-sic. She was the consum-mate musical storyteller, a griot as she would come to learn, who used her remarkable talent to cre-ate a legacy of liberation, empowerment, passion, and love through a mag-nificent body of works.


When Nina Simone died on April 21, 2003, she left a timeless treasure trove of musical magic spanning over four de-cades from her first hit, the 1959 Top 10 classic “I Loves You Porgy,” to “A Single Woman,” the title cut from her one and

only 1993 Elektra album. While thirty-three years separate those recordings, the element of honest emotion is the glue that binds the two together – it is that approach to every piece of work that became Nina’s uncompromising musical trademark.

By the end of her life, Nina was enjoying an unprecedented degree of recognition. Her music was enjoyed by the masses due to the CD revolution, discovery on the Internet,

and exposure through movies and television. Nina had sold over one million CDs in the last decade of her life, mak-ing her a global catalog best-seller.

No one website can fully explore the many nuances and flavors that made up the more than 40 original albums in the Nina Simone library. This site and accompany-ing radio station contain many of Nina’s finest works. However, we might not have had the chance to witness the breathtak-ing range of material Nina

could cover if she hadn’t taken the path she did.

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina on February 21st, 1933, Nina’s prodi-gious talent as a musician was evident early on when she started playing piano

by ear at the age of three. Her mother, a Methodist minister, and her father, a handyman and preacher himself, couldn’t ignore young Eunice’s God-given gift of music. Raised in the church on the straight and narrow, her parents taught her right from wrong, to carry herself with dignity, and to work

hard. She played piano – but didn’t sing – in her mother’s church, display-ing remarkable talent early in her life. Able to play virtually anything by ear, she was soon study-ing classical music with an Englishwoman named Muriel Mazzanovich, who had moved to the small southern town. It was from these humble roots that Eunice developed a lifelong love of Johann Sebastian Bach, Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven and Schubert.

After graduating vale-dictorian of her high school class, the com-munity raised money for a scholarship for Eunice to study at Julliard in New York City before applying to the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her family had already moved to the City Of Brotherly Love, but Eunice’s hopes for a career as a pioneering African American clas-sical pianist were dashed when the school denied her admission. To the end, she herself would claim that racism was the reason she did not attend. While her original dream was unfulfilled, Eunice ended up with an incred-ible worldwide career as Nina Simone – almost by default.

To survive, she began teaching music to lo-cal students. One fateful day in 1954, looking to

By this time, Nina had become central to a circle of African American playwrights, poets,

and writers all centered in Harlem along with the

previously mentioned Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin and

Langston Hughes.

SHOULDERS OF GIANTS

85

supplement her income, Eunice auditioned to sing at the Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Word spread about this new singer and pianist who was dipping into the songbooks of Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and the like, transforming popular tunes of the day into a unique synthesis of jazz, blues, and classical mu-sic. Her rich, deep velvet vocal tones, combined with her mastery of the keyboard, soon attracted club goers up and down the East Coast. In order to hide the fact that she was singing in bars, Eunice’s mother would refer to the practice as “working in the fires of hell”, over-night Eunice Waymon became Nina Simone by taking the nickname “Nina” meaning “little one” in Spanish and “Simone” after the actress Simone Signoret.

At the age of twenty-four, Nina came to the attention of the record industry. After submitting a demo of songs she had recorded during a per-formance in New Hope, Pennsylvania, she was signed by Syd Nathan, owner of the Ohio-based King Records (home to James Brown), to his Jazz imprint, Bethlehem Records. The boisterous Nathan had insisted on choosing songs for her debut set, but eventually relented and allowed Nina to delve in the repertoire she had been performing at clubs up and down the eastern seaboard. One of Nina’s stated musi-cal influences was Billie Holiday and her inspired reading of “Porgy” (from “Porgy & Bess”) heralded the arrival of a new talent on the national scene. At the same mammoth 13 hour session in 1957, re-corded in New York City, Nina also cut “My Baby Just Cares For Me,” previ-ously recorded by Nate King Cole, Count Basie, and Woody Herman. The song was used by Chanel in a perfume commercial in Europe in the 1980’s and it became a massive hit for Nina, a British chart topper at #5, and thus a staple of her rep-ertoire for the rest of her career.

Nina Simone’s stay with Bethlehem Records was short lived and in 1959, after moving to

New York City, she was signed by Joyce Selznik, the eastern talent scout for Colpix Records, a divi-sion of Columbia Pictures. Months after the release of her debut LP for the la-bel (1959‘s The Amazing Nina Simone), Nina was performing at her first ma-jor New York City venue, the mid-Manhattan-lo-cated Town Hall. Sensing that her live performances would capture the es-sential spontaneity of her artistry, Colpix opted to record her September 12, 1959 show. “You Can Have Him,” a glorious torch song previously cut by Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald, was one of the highlights of the evening. The song opened with a dazzling keyboard arpeggio that would become her signature for decades. So momentous was the Town Hall performance that it inspired some of the same musicians, featuring the vocals of Nina’s only

daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, to do a tribute to a sold out audience over forty five years later.

As Nina’s reputation as an engaging live per-former grew, it wasn’t long before she was asked to perform at the prestigious Newport Jazz Festival. Accompanied on the June 30th,1960 show by Al Schackman, a guitarist who would go on to be-come Nina’s longest-run-ning musical colleague, bassist Chris White, and drummer Bobby Hamilton, the dynamic show was recorded by the Colpix. The subsequent release in 1961 of the old blues tune “Trouble In Mind” as a single gave Nina her third charted record.

Her stay with Colpix resulted in some wonder-ful albums – nine in all – included Nina’s version of Bessie Smith’s blues clas-sic “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out.” Issued as a single in 1960, it became Nina’s second charted Pop and R&B hit and one of two Colpix tracks to achieve such a feat during her five year stint with the label. Other stand out tracks from that era were the soulful song “Cotton Eyed Joe,” the torch tune “The Other Women,” and the Norwegian folk rendition of “Black Is The Colour Of My True Love’s Hair” – all beautiful examples of

86

HYPNOTIC

Nina Simone at her sto-rytelling best, painting a vivid picture with her skill as a lyrical interpreter. During this time with the label, Nina recorded one civil rights song, Oscar Brown Jr.’s “Brown Baby,” which was included on her fifth album for the la-bel, At The Village Gate.

“Critics started to talk about what sort of music I was playing,” writes Nina in her 1991 autobiography I Put A Spell On You, “and tried to find a neat slot to file it away in. It was difficult for them be-cause I was playing popu-lar songs in a classical style with a classical piano technique influenced by cocktail jazz. On top of that I included spiritu-als and children’s song in my performances, and those sorts of songs were automatically identified

with the folk movement. So, saying what sort of music I played gave the critics problems because there was something from everything in there, but it also meant I was appreci-ated across the board – by jazz, folk, pop and blues fans as well as admirers of classical music.” Clearly Nina Simone was not an artist who could be easily classified.

Nina’s Colpix record-ings cemented her ap-peal to a nightclub based U.S. audience. Once she moved to Phillips, a division of Dutch owned Mercury Records, she was ready to expand her fol-lowing globally. Her first LP for the label, 1964’s In Concert, signaled Nina’s undaunting stand for freedom and justice for all, stamping her irrevocably as a pioneer and inspira-tional leader in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Her own original “Mississippi Goddam” was banned throughout the South but such a response made no differ-ence in Nina’s unyielding commitment to liberty;

subsequent groundbreak-ing recordings for Philips like “Four Women” (recorded September 1965) and “Strange Fruit” continued to keep Nina in the forefront of the few performers willing to

use music as a vehicle for social commentary and change. Such risks were seldom taken by artists during that time of such dramatic civil upheaval.

For years, Nina felt there was much about the way that she made her liv-ing that was less then ap-pealing. One gets a sense of that in the following passage from I Put A Spell

on You where she explains her initial reluctance to perform material that was tied to the Civil Rights Movement.

“Nightclubs were dirty, making records was dirty, popular music was dirty

and to mix all that with politics seemed senseless and demeaning. And until songs like ‘Mississippi Goddam’ just burst out of me, I had musical prob-lems as well. How can you take the memory of a man like [Civil Rights activist] Medgar Evers and reduce all that he was to three and a half minutes and a simple tune? That was the musical side of it I shied away from; I didn’t like ‘protest music’ because a lot of it was so simple and unimaginative it stripped the dignity away from the people it was try-ing to celebrate. But the Alabama church bombing

four womenMy skin is black my arms are long

My hair is whooly my back is strongStrong enough to take the pain

Inflicted again and againWhat do they call me

My name is Aunt Sarah My name is Aunt Sarah Aunt Sarah

My skin is yellow my hair is longBetween two worlds I do belong

My father was rich and whiteHe forced my mother late one

nightWhat do they call meMy name is Safronia My name is Safronia

SHOULDERS OF GIANTS

87

and the murder of Medgar Evers stopped that argu-ment and with ‘Mississippi Goddam,’ I realized there was no turning back.”

Nina was deeply af-fected by these two events. In 1962, she had befriended noted play-wright Lorraine Hansberry and spoke often with her about the Civil Rights Movement. While she was moved by her conver-sations with Hansberry, it took the killing of Medgar Evers and the four girls in Birmingham to act as catalysts for a transforma-tion of Nina’s career.

There were many sides to Nina Simone. Among her most amaz-ing recordings were the original and so-soulful

version “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” and “I Put A Spell On You” (which had reached to #23 in the U.S. charts), eerily moody, unrestrained, drama to the max; “Ne Me Quitte Pas” tender, poignant, filled with melancholy; and with gospel-like fervor, the hypnotic voodoo of “See-Line Woman.” In

her own unrivaled way, Nina also loved to ven-ture into the more earthy side of life. After she signed with RCA Records in 1967 (a deal her then husband/manager Andy Stroud had negotiated), her very first recordings for the label included the saucy “Do I Move You?” and the undeniably sexual “I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl” which were from the concept album entitled Nina Sings The Blues. Backed by a stel-

lar cast of New York CIty session musicians, the album was far and away Nina’s most down-home recording session. By this time, Nina had become central to a circle of African American play-wrights, poets, and writers all centered in Harlem along with the previ-ously mentioned Lorraine

Hansberry, James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. The outcome from one of the relationships became a highlight of the LP with the song “Backlash Blues,” a song that’s lyrics origi-nated from the last poem Langston Hughes submit-ted for publication prior to his death in May, 1967 and gave to Nina.

Nina’s seven years with RCA produced some remarkable recordings, ranging from two songs featured in the Broadway musical “Hair” (combined into a medley, “Ain’t Got No – I Got Life,” a #2 British hit in 1968) to a Simone-ified version of George Harrison’s “Here Comes The Sun,” which remained in Nina’s reper-toire all the way through to her final performance in 2002. Along the way at RCA, songs penned by Bob Dylan (“Just Like A Woman”), the brothers Gibb (“To Love Somebody”), and Tina Turner (“Funkier Than A Mosquito’s Tweeter”) took pride of place alongside Nina’s own anthem of empowerment, the classic

“To Be Young, Gifted, & Black,” a song written in memory of Nina’s good friend Lorraine Hansberry. The title of the song com-ing from a play Hansberry had been working on just prior to her death.

After Nina left RCA, she spent a good deal of the 1970’s and early 1980’s living in Liberia, Barbados, England, Belgium, France, Switzerland and The Netherlands. In 1978, for the first time since she left RCA, Nina was con-vinced by U.S. jazz veter-an Creed Taylor to make an album for his CTI label. This would be her first new studio album in six years and she recorded it in Belgium with strings and background vocals cut in New York City, with the kind of “clean” sound that was a hallmark.

My skin is tan my hair is fineMy hips invite you my mouth like

wineWhose little girl am I

Anyone who has money to buyWhat do they call me

My name is Sweet Thing My name is Sweet Thing

My skin is brown my manner is tough

I’ll kill the first mother I seeMy life has been rough

I’m awfully bitter these daysBecause my parents were slaves

What do they call meMy name is Peaches

88

HYPNOTIC



When Nina Simone died on April 21, 2003, she left a timeless treasure trove of musical magic spanning over four de-cades from her first hit, the 1959 Top 10 classic “I Loves You Porgy,” to “A Single Woman,” the title cut from her one and

only 1993 Elektra album. While thirty-three years separate those recordings, the element of honest emotion is the glue that binds the two together – it is that approach to every piece of work that became Nina’s uncompromising musical trademark.

By the end of her life, Nina was enjoying an unprecedented degree of recognition. Her music was enjoyed by the masses due to the CD revolution, discovery on the Internet, and exposure through movies and television. Nina had sold over one million CDs in the last decade of her life, mak-ing her a global catalog best-seller.

No one website can fully explore the many nuances and flavors that made up the more than 40 original albums in the Nina Simone library. This site and accompany-ing radio station contain

many of Nina’s finest works. However, we might not have had the chance to witness the breathtak-ing range of material Nina could cover if she hadn’t taken the path she did.

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina on February 21st, 1933, Nina’s prodi-gious talent as a musician was evident early on when she started playing piano by ear at the age of three. Her mother, a Methodist minister, and her father, a handyman and preacher himself, couldn’t ignore young Eunice’s God-given gift of music. Raised in the church on the straight and narrow, her parents taught her right from wrong, to carry herself with dignity, and to work hard. She played piano – but didn’t sing – in her mother’s church, display-ing remarkable talent early in her life. Able to play virtually anything by ear, she was soon studying

classical music with an Englishwoman named Muriel Mazzanovich, who had moved to the small southern town. It was from these humble roots that Eunice developed a lifelong love of Johann Sebastian Bach, Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven and Schubert.

After graduating vale-dictorian of her high school class, the com-munity raised money for a scholarship for Eunice to study at Julliard in New York City before applying to the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her family had already moved to the City Of Brotherly Love, but Eunice’s hopes for a career as a pioneering African American clas-sical pianist were dashed when the school denied her admission. To the end, she herself would claim that racism was the reason she did not attend. While her original dream

SHOULDERS OF GIANTS

89

90

HYPNOTIC

was unfulfilled, Eunice ended up with an incred-ible worldwide career as Nina Simone – almost by default.

To survive, she began teaching music to lo-cal students. One fateful day in 1954, looking to supplement her income, Eunice auditioned to sing at the Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Word spread about this new singer and pianist who was dipping into the songbooks of Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and the like, transforming popular tunes of the day into a unique synthesis of jazz, blues, and classical mu-sic. Her rich, deep velvet vocal tones, combined with her mastery of the keyboard, soon attracted club goers up and down the East Coast. In order to hide the fact that she was singing in bars, Eunice’s mother would refer to the practice as “working in the fires of hell”, over-night Eunice Waymon became Nina Simone by taking the nickname “Nina” meaning “little one” in Spanish and

“Simone” after the actress Simone Signoret.

At the age of twenty-four, Nina came to the attention of the record industry. After submitting a demo of songs she had recorded during a per-formance in New Hope, Pennsylvania, she was signed by Syd Nathan, owner of the Ohio-based King Records (home to James Brown), to his Jazz imprint, Bethlehem Records. The boisterous Nathan had insisted on choosing songs for her debut set, but eventually relented and allowed Nina to delve in the repertoire she had been performing at clubs up and down the eastern seaboard. One of Nina’s stated musi-cal influences was Billie Holiday and her inspired reading of “Porgy” (from “Porgy & Bess”) heralded the arrival of a new talent on the national scene. At the same mammoth 13 hour session in 1957, re-corded in New York City, Nina also cut “My Baby Just Cares For Me,” previ-ously recorded by Nate King Cole, Count Basie, and Woody Herman. The song was used by Chanel in a perfume commercial

in Europe in the 1980’s and it became a massive hit for Nina, a British chart topper at #5, and thus a staple of her rep-ertoire for the rest of her career.

Nina Simone’s stay with Bethlehem Records was short lived and in 1959, after moving to New York City, she was signed by Joyce Selznik, the eastern talent scout for Colpix Records, a divi-sion of Columbia Pictures. Months after the release of her debut LP for the la-bel (1959‘s The Amazing Nina Simone), Nina was performing at her first ma-jor New York City venue, the mid-Manhattan-lo-cated Town Hall. Sensing that her live performances would capture the es-sential spontaneity of her artistry, Colpix opted to record her September 12, 1959 show. “You Can Have Him,” a glorious torch song previously cut by Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald, was one of the highlights of the evening. The song opened with a dazzling keyboard arpeggio that would become her signature for decades. So momentous was the Town

Hall performance that it inspired some of the same musicians, featuring the vocals of Nina’s only daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, to do a tribute to a sold out audience over forty five years later.

As Nina’s reputation as an engaging live per-former grew, it wasn’t long before she was asked to perform at the prestigious Newport Jazz Festival. Accompanied on the June 30th,1960 show by Al Schackman, a guitarist who would go on to be-come Nina’s longest-run-ning musical colleague, bassist Chris White, and drummer Bobby Hamilton, the dynamic show was recorded by the Colpix. The subsequent release in 1961 of the old blues tune “Trouble In Mind” as a single gave Nina her third charted record.

Her stay with Colpix resulted in some wonder-ful albums – nine in all – included Nina’s version of Bessie Smith’s blues clas-sic “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out.” Issued as a single in 1960, it became Nina’s second charted Pop and R&B hit and one of two

SHOULDERS OF GIANTS

91

Colpix tracks to achieve such a feat during her five year stint with the label. Other stand out tracks from that era were the soulful song “Cotton Eyed Joe,” the torch tune “The Other Women,” and the Norwegian folk rendition of “Black Is The Colour Of My True Love’s Hair” – all beautiful examples of Nina Simone at her sto-rytelling best, painting a vivid picture with her skill as a lyrical interpreter. During this time with the label, Nina recorded one civil rights song, Oscar Brown Jr.’s “Brown Baby,” which was included on her fifth album for the la-bel, At The Village Gate.

“Critics started to talk about what sort of music I was playing,” writes Nina in her 1991 autobiography I Put A Spell On You, “and tried to find a neat slot to file it away in. It was difficult for them be-cause I was playing popu-lar songs in a classical style with a classical piano technique influenced by cocktail jazz. On top of that I included spiritu-als and children’s song in my performances, and those sorts of songs were

automatically identified with the folk movement. So, saying what sort of music I played gave the critics problems because there was something from everything in there, but it also meant I was appreci-ated across the board – by jazz, folk, pop and blues fans as well as admirers of classical music.” Clearly Nina Simone was not an artist who could be easily classified.

Nina’s Colpix record-ings cemented her ap-peal to a nightclub based U.S. audience. Once she moved to Phillips, a division of Dutch owned Mercury Records, she was ready to expand her fol-lowing globally. Her first LP for the label, 1964’s In Concert, signaled Nina’s undaunting stand for freedom and justice for all, stamping her irrevocably as a pioneer and inspira-tional leader in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Her own original “Mississippi Goddam” was banned throughout the South but such a response made no difference in Nina’s unyielding com-mitment to liberty; sub-sequent groundbreaking recordings for Philips like

“Four Women” (recorded September 1965) and “Strange Fruit” continued to keep Nina in the fore-front of the few perform-ers willing to use music as a vehicle for social commentary and change. Such risks were seldom taken by artists during that time of such dramatic civil upheaval.

For years, Nina felt there was much about the way that she made her liv-ing that was less then ap-pealing. One gets a sense of that in the following passage from I Put A Spell on You where she explains her initial reluctance to perform material that was tied to the Civil Rights Movement.

“Nightclubs were dirty, making records was dirty, popular music was dirty and to mix all that with politics seemed senseless and demeaning. And until songs like ‘Mississippi Goddam’ just burst out of me, I had musical prob-lems as well. How can you take the memory of a man like [Civil Rights activist] Medgar Evers and reduce all that he was to three and a half minutes and a simple tune? That was the

musical side of it I shied away from; I didn’t like ‘protest music’ because a lot of it was so simple and unimaginative it stripped the dignity away from the people it was try-ing to celebrate. But the Alabama church bombing and the murder of Medgar Evers stopped that argu-ment and with ‘Mississippi Goddam,’ I realized there was no turning back.”

Nina was deeply af-fected by these two events. In 1962, she had befriended noted play-wright Lorraine Hansberry and spoke often with her about the Civil Rights Movement. While she was moved by her conver-sations with Hansberry, it took the killing of Medgar Evers and the four girls in Birmingham to act as catalysts for a transforma-tion of Nina’s career.

There were many sides to Nina Simone. Among her most amaz-ing recordings were the original and so-soulful version “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” and “I Put A Spell On You” (which had reached to #23 in the U.S. charts), ee-rily moody, unrestrained, drama to the max.

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Embittered by racism, Nina

renounced her homeland in 1969

and became a wanderer, roaming the

world. She lived in Barbados, Liberia (with

the encouragement of Miriam Makeba),

Switzerland, France, Trinidad, Netherlands,

Belgium and UK at various times. In 1970

she and Stroud split up, and Nina attempt

to manage herself and work with her brother

Sam Waymon. In 1974 she leaves RCA. In

1978 Nina was arrested, and soon released,

for withholding taxes in 1971-73 in protest

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at her government’s un-declared war in Vietnam. The same year she made the LP Baltimore for the CTI label and in 1982 the LP Fodder on my Wings for a Swiss

label. In 1985 she records Nina’s back and Live and Kickin in US. In 1987 her previously-mentioned European success with “My Baby Just Cares For Me” brought Nina back

into the public eye: her music was featured in 1992 movie Point Of No Return, with the lead character using Nina as inspiration. The same

year she records Let It Be Me at The Vine Street Bar & Grill in Hollywood for Verve Records.

WHERE I CALL HOME

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She earned the moniker ‘High Priestess of Soul’ for she could weave a spell so seductive and hypnotic that the listener lost track of time and space as they

became absorbed in the moment. She was who the world would come to know as Nina Simone.

When Nina Simone died on April 21, 2003, she left a timeless treasure trove of musical magic spanning over four de-cades from her first hit, the 1959 Top 10 classic “I Loves You Porgy,” to “A Single Woman,” the title cut from her one and only 1993 Elektra album. While thirty-three years separate those recordings, the element of honest emotion is the glue that binds the two together – it is that approach to every piece of work that became Nina’s uncompromising musical trademark.

By the end of her life, Nina was enjoying an unprecedented degree of recognition. Her music was enjoyed by the masses due to the CD revolution, discovery on the Internet, and exposure through movies and television. Nina had sold over one million CDs in the last

decade of her life, mak-ing her a global catalog best-seller.

No one website can fully explore the many nuances and flavors that made up the more than 40 original albums in the Nina Simone library. This site and accompany-ing radio station contain many of Nina’s finest works. However, we might not have had the chance to witness the breathtak-ing range of material Nina could cover if she hadn’t taken the path she did.

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina on February 21st, 1933, Nina’s prodi-gious talent as a musician was evident early on when she started playing piano by ear at the age of three. Her mother, a Methodist minister, and her father, a handyman and preacher himself, couldn’t ignore young Eunice’s God-given gift of music. Raised in

the church on the straight and narrow, her parents taught her right from wrong, to carry herself with dignity, and to work hard. She played piano – but didn’t sing – in her mother’s church, display-ing remarkable talent early in her life. Able to play virtually anything by ear, she was soon study-ing classical music with an Englishwoman named Muriel Mazzanovich, who had moved to the small southern town. It was from these humble roots that Eunice developed a lifelong love of Johann Sebastian Bach, Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven and Schubert.

After graduating vale-dictorian of her high school class, the com-munity raised money for a scholarship for Eunice to study at Julliard in New York City before applying to the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her family had already moved to the City Of Brotherly Love, but Eunice’s hopes for a career as a pioneering African American clas-sical pianist were dashed when the school denied her admission. To the

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end, she herself would claim that racism was the reason she did not attend. While her original dream was unfulfilled, Eunice ended up with an incred-ible worldwide career as Nina Simone – almost by default.

To survive, she began teaching music to lo-cal students. One fateful day in 1954, looking to supplement her income, Eunice auditioned to sing at the Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Word spread about this new singer and pianist who was dipping into the songbooks of Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and the like, transforming popular tunes of the day into a unique synthesis of jazz, blues, and classical mu-sic. Her rich, deep velvet vocal tones, combined with her mastery of the keyboard, soon attracted club goers up and down the East Coast. In order to hide the fact that she was singing in bars, Eunice’s mother would refer to the practice as “working in the fires of hell”, over-night Eunice Waymon

became Nina Simone by taking the nickname “Nina” meaning “little one” in Spanish and “Simone” after the actress Simone Signoret.

At the age of twenty-four, Nina came to the attention of the record industry. After submitting a demo of songs she had recorded during a per-formance in New Hope, Pennsylvania, she was signed by Syd Nathan, owner of the Ohio-based King Records (home to

James Brown), to his Jazz imprint, Bethlehem Records. The boisterous Nathan had insisted on choosing songs for her debut set, but eventually relented and allowed Nina to delve in the repertoire she had been performing at clubs up and down the eastern seaboard. One of Nina’s stated musi-cal influences was Billie Holiday and her inspired reading of “Porgy” (from “Porgy & Bess”) heralded the arrival of a new talent on the national scene. At the same mammoth 13 hour session in 1957, re-corded in New York City, Nina also cut “My Baby Just Cares For Me,” previ-ously recorded by Nate

King Cole, Count Basie, and Woody Herman. The song was used by Chanel in a perfume commercial in Europe in the 1980’s and it became a massive hit for Nina, a British chart topper at #5, and thus a staple of her rep-ertoire for the rest of her career.

Nina Simone’s stay with Bethlehem Records was short lived and in 1959, after moving to New York City, she was signed by Joyce Selznik, the eastern talent scout for Colpix Records, a divi-sion of Columbia Pictures. Months after the release of her debut LP for the la-bel (1959‘s The Amazing Nina Simone), Nina was performing at her first ma-jor New York City venue, the mid-Manhattan-lo-cated Town Hall. Sensing that her live performances would capture the es-sential spontaneity of her artistry, Colpix opted to record her September 12, 1959 show. “You Can Have Him,” a glorious torch song previously cut by Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald, was one of the highlights of the evening. The song opened with a

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dazzling keyboard arpeggio that would become her signature for decades. So momentous was the Town Hall performance that it inspired some of the same musicians, featuring the vocals of Nina’s only daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, to do a tribute to a sold out audience over forty five years later.

As Nina’s reputation as an engaging live per-former grew, it wasn’t long

before she was asked to perform at the prestigious Newport Jazz Festival. Accompanied on the June 30th,1960 show by Al

Schackman, a guitarist who would go on to be-come Nina’s longest-run-ning musical colleague, bassist Chris White, and drummer Bobby

Hamilton, the dynamic show was recorded by the Colpix. The subsequent release in 1961 of the old blues tune “Trouble In Mind” as a single gave Nina her third charted record.

Her stay with Colpix resulted in some wonder-ful albums – nine in all – included Nina’s version of Bessie Smith’s blues clas-sic “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out.” Issued as a single in 1960, it became Nina’s second charted Pop and R&B hit and one of two Colpix tracks to achieve such a feat during her five year stint with the label. Other stand out tracks from that era were the soulful song “Cotton Eyed Joe,” the torch tune “The Other Women,” and the Norwegian folk rendition of “Black Is The Colour Of My True Love’s Hair” – all beautiful examples of Nina Simone at her sto-rytelling best, painting a vivid picture with her skill as a lyrical interpreter. During this time with the label, Nina recorded one civil rights song, Oscar Brown Jr.’s “Brown Baby,” which was included on her fifth album for the la-bel, At The Village Gate.

“Critics started to talk about what sort of music I was playing,” writes Nina in her 1991 autobiography I Put A Spell On You,

“and tried to find a neat slot to file it away in. It was difficult for them be-cause I was playing popu-lar songs in a classical style with a classical piano technique influenced by cocktail jazz. On top of that I included spiritu-als and children’s song in my performances, and those sorts of songs were automatically identified with the folk movement. So, saying what sort of music I played gave the critics problems because there was something from everything in there, but it also meant I was appreci-ated across the board – by jazz, folk, pop and blues fans as well as admirers of classical music.” Clearly

Come YeCome ye ye who would have peace

Hear me what I say nowI say come ye ye who would have peace

It’s time to learn how to prayI say come ye ye who have no fearOf what tomorrow brings child

Start praying for a better worldOf peace and all good things

I say come ye ye who still have hopeThat we can still survive now

Let’s work together as we should And fight to stay alive

I say come ye ye who would have loveIt’s time to take a stand

Don’t mind the dues it must be paidFor the love of your fellow man

I say come ye come yeWho would have hope Who would have peaceWho would have love Who would have peace

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Nina Simone was not an artist who could be easily classified.

Nina’s Colpix record-ings cemented her ap-peal to a nightclub based U.S. audience. Once she moved to Phillips, a division of Dutch owned Mercury Records, she was

ready to expand her fol-lowing globally. Her first LP for the label, 1964’s In Concert, signaled Nina’s undaunting stand for freedom and justice for all, stamping her irrevocably as a pioneer and inspira-tional leader in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Her own original “Mississippi Goddam” was banned throughout the South but such a response made no difference in Nina’s unyielding com-mitment to liberty; sub-sequent groundbreaking recordings for Philips like “Four Women” (recorded

September 1965) and “Strange Fruit” continued to keep Nina in the fore-front of the few perform-ers willing to use music as a vehicle for social commentary and change. Such risks were seldom taken by artists during that time of such dramatic civil upheaval.

For years, Nina felt there was much about the way that she made her liv-ing that was less then ap-pealing. One gets a sense of that in the following

passage from I Put A Spell on You where she explains her initial reluctance to perform material that was tied to the Civil Rights Movement.

“Nightclubs were dirty, making records was dirty, popular music was dirty and to mix all that with politics seemed senseless and demeaning. And until songs like ‘Mississippi

WHERE I CALL HOME

99

Goddam’ just burst out of me, I had musical prob-lems as well. How can you take the memory of a man like [Civil Rights activist] Medgar Evers and reduce all that he was to three and a half minutes and a simple tune? That was the musical side of it I shied away from; I didn’t like ‘protest music’ because a lot of it was so simple and unimaginative it stripped the dignity away from the people it was try-ing to celebrate. But the Alabama church bombing and the murder of Medgar Evers stopped that argu-ment and with ‘Mississippi

Goddam,’ I realized there was no turning back.”

Nina was deeply af-fected by these two events. In 1962, she had befriended noted play-wright Lorraine Hansberry and spoke often with her about the Civil Rights Movement. While she was moved by her conver-sations with Hansberry, it took the kill-ing of Medgar Evers and the four girls in Birmingham to act as catalysts for a transforma-tion of Nina’s career.

There

were many sides to Nina Simone. Among her most amazing recordings were the original and so-soulful

version “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” and “I Put A Spell On You” (which had reached to #23 in the

U.S. charts), eerily moody, unrestrained, drama to the max; “Ne Me Quitte Pas” tender, poignant, filled with melancholy; and with gospel-like fervor, the hypnotic voodoo of “See-Line Woman.” In her own unrivaled way, Nina also loved to ven-ture into the more earthy side of life. After she signed with RCA Records in 1967 (a deal her then husband/manager Andy Stroud had negotiated), her very first recordings for the label included the saucy “Do I Move You?” and the undeniably sexual “I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl” which were from the concept album entitled Nina Sings The Blues. Backed by a stel-lar cast of New York CIty session musicians, the album was far and away Nina’s most down-home recording session. By this time, Nina had become central to a circle of

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African American play-wrights, poets, and writers all centered in Harlem along with the previ-ously mentioned Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. The outcome from one of the relationships became a highlight of the LP with the song “Backlash Blues,” a song that’s lyrics origi-nated from the last poem Langston Hughes submit-ted for publication prior to his death in May, 1967 and gave to Nina.

Nina’s seven years with RCA produced some remarkable recordings, ranging from two songs featured in the Broadway musical “Hair” (combined into a medley, “Ain’t Got No – I Got Life,” a #2 British hit in 1968) to a Simone-ified version of George Harrison’s “Here Comes The Sun,” which remained in Nina’s reper-toire all the way through to her final performance in 2002. Along the way at RCA, songs penned

by Bob Dylan (“Just Like A Woman”), the brothers Gibb (“To Love Somebody”), and Tina Turner (“Funkier Than A Mosquito’s Tweeter”) took pride of place alongside Nina’s own anthem of empowerment, the classic “To Be Young, Gifted, & Black,” a song written in memory of Nina’s good friend Lorraine Hansberry. The title of the song com-ing from a play Hansberry had been working on just prior to her death.

After Nina left RCA, she spent a good deal of the 1970’s and early 1980’s living in Liberia, Barbados, England, Belgium, France, Switzerland and The Netherlands. In 1978, for the first time since she left RCA, Nina was convinced by U.S. jazz veteran Creed Taylor to make an album for his CTI label. This would be her first new studio al-bum in six years and she recorded it in Belgium

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with strings and back-ground vocals cut in New York City. With the kind of “clean” sound that was a hallmark of CTI record-ings, the Nina Simone album that emerged was simply brilliant. Nina herself would later claimed that she ”hated” the record but many fans strongly disagreed. With an eighteen piece string section conducted by David Mathews (known for his arrangements on James Brown’s records), the results were spec-tacular. The title track, Randy Newman’s evoca-tive “Baltimore,” was an inspired Nina Simone choice. It had a beautiful-ly constructed reggae-like beat and used some of the finest musicians producer Creed Taylor could find including Nina’s guitar-ist and music director, Al Schackman.

Aside from 1982′s Fodder On My Wings that Nina recorded for Carrere Records, two albums she made of the independent VPI label in Hollywood (Nina’s Back and Live And Kickin’) in 1985, and a 1987 Live At Vine Street set recorded for Verve, Nina Simone did not make another full length album until Elektra A&R executive Michael Alago persuaded her to record again. After much wining and dining, Nina finally signed on the dot-ted line. Elektra tapped

producer Andre Fischer, noted conductor Jeremy Lubbock, and a trio of respected musicians to provide the suitable en-vironment for this highly personal reading of “A Single Woman,” which became the centerpiece and title track for Nina Simone’s final full length album.

With two marriages behind her in 1993 she settled in Carry-le-Rout, near Aix-en-Provence in Southern France. She would continue to tour through the 1990’s and became very much ‘the single woman’ she sang about on her last label recording. She rarely traveled without an en-tourage, but if you were fortunate enough to get to know the woman behind the music you could glimpse the solitary soul that understood the pain of being misunderstood. It was one of Nina’s many abilities to comprehend the bittersweet qualities of life and then parlay them into a song that made her such an enduring and fascinating person.

Music Keeps Spinning

103

When Nina Simone died on

April 21, 2003, she left a

timeless treasure trove of

musical magic spanning over four decades

from her first hit, the 1959 Top 10 classic “I

Loves You Porgy,” to “A Single Woman,”

the title cut from her one and only 1993

Elektra album. While thirty-three years

separate those recordings, the element of

honest emotion is the glue that binds the two

together – it is that approach to every piece

of work that became Nina’s trademark.

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HYPNOTIC

To say Nina Simone was “one of a kind” is an under-statement. Her particular tal-ents and passions absorbed, in seemingly equal measure, Bach, southern spirituals and oddball pop hits. Her activities ranged from the radically political to party animal (she loved to strip off her clothes and dance the night away). Then, of course, there was Simone’s musical genius: that phenomenally ex-pressive yet flat-sounding voice,

coupled with possibly the best piano hands of her generation.

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, in 1933, Simone grew up poor but proud in the best ways. Her parents had been financially comfortable until the privations of the Great Depression, and never ceased striving to improve the lives of their eight children. As Simone herself wrote in her candid and fascinat-ing autobiography I Put A Spell on You (1991, written with Stephen Cleary), “Everything that happened to me as a child involved music.” She was picking out songs on her mother’s upright from the age of two, and soon thereafter began formal classical piano lessons.

The rest of Simone’s childhood would have

been amazing enough had she been a boy born with this sort of talent in 19th Century Vienna: she practiced as much as possible, all day, every day, preparing for auditions to classical conservatories. But for a black girl in the Jim Crow south, her devotion and unswerving self-assurance was miracu-lous. When, in her early 20s, Simone was shocked not to receive admission to Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music, she had to figure out how to make a living. In the course of playing accompaniment and club gigs, she ended up inventing her own musical genre.

The next stage of Simone’s life may be best construed from her musical path. Though she started in the fifties with coolly complex versions of jazz tunes such as “My Baby Just Cares for Me” and “Porgy,” Simone began to write her own songs by the 60s – spurred on by friendships with intellectuals and revolu-tionaries from James Baldwin to Stokely Carmichael. There’s more black history in the anthems “Young, Gifted and Black,” “Four Women,” and “Mississippi Goddam” than in many textbooks.

The years following the Black Power Movement’s peak were not always kind to those who’d been on the front lines. “I’d presumed I could change the world,” Simone wrote, “and had run down a dead-end street leaving my ca-reer, child, and husband way behind, neglected.” Pursued by ghosts – and the IRS – she left the United States by the mid-70s, rarely returning for any length of time until her death in 2003. Her last few decades may have been less creatively fertile than those that had come before; even so, she continued to draw sold-out crowds around the world.

By the end of her life, Nina was enjoying an unprecedented degree

of recognition. Her music was enjoyed by the masses due to the CD revolution, discovery on the Internet, and exposure through movies and television. Nina had sold over one million CDs in the

last decade of her life, making her a global catalog best-seller.

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105

Her activities ranged from the radically political to party animal (she loved to strip off her clothes and

dance the night away).

Her influence can be heard in artists from Rickie Lee Jones to the Roots, but there’s never been another artist quite like her.

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Oh Sinnerman where’re you gonna run toSinnerman where’re you gonna run toWhere’re you gonna run to all on that dayWell I run to the rock please hide meI run to the rock please hide meI run to the rock please hide me Lord all on

that dayBut the rock cried out I can’t hide youThe rock cried out I can’t hide youThe rock cried out I ain’t gonna hide you gal all on that dayI said rock what’s the matter with you rockDon’t you see I need you rockLord Lord Lord all on that day

So I run to the river it was bleedingI run to


107

the sea it was bleedingI run to the sea it was bleeding all on that daySo I run to the river it was boilingI run to the I sea it was boilingI run to the sea it was boiling all on that daySo I run to the Lord please hide me LordDon’t You see me praying don’t You see me down here prayingBut the Lord said go to the devilThe Lord said go to the devilHe said go to the devil all on that daySo I ran to the devil he was waitingI ran to the devil he was waitingI ran to the

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HYPNOTIC

To say Nina Simone was “one of a kind” is an understatement.

Her particular talents and passions

absorbed, in seemingly equal measure, Bach, southern spirituals

and oddball pop hits.


109

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Bet you


111

thought I was kidding

There were many sides to Nina Simone. Among her most amazing recordings were the original and so-soulful version “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” and “I Put A Spell On You” (which had reached to #23 in the U.S. charts), eerily moody, unrestrained, drama to the max; “Ne Me Quitte Pas” tender, poignant, filled with melan-choly; and with gospel-like fervor, the hypnotic voodoo of “See-Line Woman.” In her own unrivaled way, Nina also loved to venture into the more earthy side of life. After she signed with RCA Records in 1967 (a deal her then husband/manager Andy Stroud had negotiated), her very first recordings for the label included the saucy “Do I Move You?” and the undeniably sexual “I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl” which were from the concept album entitled Nina Sings The Blues. Backed by a stellar cast of New York CIty session musicians, the album was far and away Nina’s most down-home recording session. By this time, Nina had become central to a circle of African American playwrights, poets, and writers all centered in Harlem along with the previously mentioned Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. The outcome from one of the relationships became a highlight of the LP with the song “Backlash Blues,” a song that’s lyrics originated from the last poem Langston Hughes submitted for publication prior to his death in May, 1967 and gave to Nina.

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113

While at RCA Nina records nine albums and some of her most popular songs. Her version of “Ain’t Got No/I Got Life”, a medley from the 60s musical Hair, got to N. 2 in UK and her soul version of “To Love Somebody” by the Bee Gees was a UK top 10 hit in the Spring of 1969. “To Be Young, Gifted And Black”, inspired by a play of the same name by Lorraine Hansberr (a friend of Nina’s) was recorded by Aretha Franklin in 1972.



In 1985 she records Nina’s back and Live and Kickin in US. In 1987 her previously-mentioned European suc-cess with “My Baby Just Cares For Me” brought Nina back into the public eye: her music was featured in 1992 movie Point Of No Return, with the lead character using Nina as inspiration. The same year she records Let It Be Me at The Vine Street Bar & Grill in Hollywood for Verve Records.

Nina moved to the southern French town of Bouc-Bel-Air near Aix-en-Provence, France in 1993 and died April 21st, 2003 in Carry-le-Rouet, Bouches-du-Rhône, France.

A protest singer, jazz singer, pianist, arranger and composer, Nina Simone is a great artist who defies easy clas-sification. She is all of these: a jazz-rock-pop-folk-black musician. In fact, we can find her biography in jazz, rock, pop, black and soul literature. Her style and her hits provided many singers and groups with material for hits of their own.

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NOTESBOOKSSimone, N., Cleary, S.(1993). I Put a Spell on You New York:Da Capo Press

Lambert, D.B.(2009). Nina Simone The Biography London:Aurum Press Ltd

Cohodas, N.(2010). Princess Noire. New York:Pantheon Books

FILMVarious(2008). Jazz Icons: Nina Simone: Live in ‘65 & ‘68 Naxos of America DVD

WEB(2012) http://www.ninasimone.com/

(2012) http://www.boscarol.com/ninasimone/pages/php/alb_orig.php

(2012) http://www.emusic.com/listen/#/music-news/icon/nina-simone/

(2012) Google Search

MUSICToo much to write, needs to be listened to.

IMAGES and TEXTMultiple images and text taken from the web for educational purposes only in the

making of this book for a class project. Most images were altered for new design.

Hypnotic: The Reverie of Nina Simone

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