Nina Simone interlude
I believe we all could use a musical interlude right about now.
A happy one might be nice. But I’ve been thinking for quite some time of putting something up that features Nina Simone, a singer/pianist whose music I’ve loved since my high school years. And Ms. Simone was not usually a happy camper.
By all accounts, Simone was a troubled person. I saw her in concert a couple of times, and the last time (during the late 70s??) she expressed so much anger that the audience became visibly uneasy.
But what a musical genius she was! Trained as a classical pianist, but thwarted (she believed by racism) in her desire to make that her profession, she became one of the premier interpreters of jazz and pop classics, giving them a unique spin with her wonderful pianistic technique and her low and intensely expressive voice.
These two YouTube videos were recorded during a performance in London in 1985 at a venue called Ronnie Scott’s (recording available here). The night was hot (literally; Simone is sweating bullets). But there is something so raw and vulnerable in her manner that she makes it seem as though the audience is eavesdropping on the most intimate and private outpourings of her wounded heart:
Simone’s daughter, who is also a singer, said of her mother in an interview: “She was a genius, and most geniuses in history are not happy-go-lucky people. Their lives are tragic, but yet they’ve left their mark in history, and they have a gift, and there’s a lot of torment that goes along with that.”
I salute Simone’s gift.
i am assuming this is the royal we, where what me wants is projected onto everyone.. no? 🙂 (just kidding)
I saw her twice in the late 60s in Philadelphia. She was incredibly intense. Her performances were incredible. Thanks for reminding me, and letting others know about her talent. It’s sad that she was so tormented, but I’ve learned to accept and appreciate whatever a talent has to offer.
Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.
Nina Simone
Slavery has never been abolished from America’s way of thinking.
Nina Simone
I believe that America is going to die, die like flies, just like the song says.
Nina Simone
The worst thing about that kind of prejudice… is that while you feel hurt and angry and all the rest of it, it feeds you self-doubt. You start thinking, perhaps I am not good enough.
Nina Simone
I think the rich are too rich and the poor are too poor. I don’t think the black people are going to rise at all; I think most of them are going to die.
Nina Simone
My job is not done. I address my songs now to the third world. I am popular all over Asia and Africa and the Middle East, not to speak of South Africa, where I’m trying to go to see Nelson Mandela.
Nina Simone, Nina Simone Interview
From the beginning, it has been a no-no for a black man to touch a white woman.
Nina Simone, Nina Simone Interview
[which is why shakespeare wrote about othello…]
I do not believe in mixing of the races. You can quote me. I don’t believe in it, and I never have. I’ve never changed. I’ve never changed my hair. I’ve never changed my color, I have always been proud of myself, and my fans are proud of me for remaining the way I’ve always been. I married a white man one time, but he was a creep.
Nina Simone, Nina Simone Interview
I think the rich will eventually have to cave in too, because the economic situation around the world is not gonna tolerate the United States being on top forever.
Nina Simone, Nina Simone Interview
she is part of a large group who USED their talent and skills in music… arts, etc… to have a voice for communism…
In my own country for nearly a century I have been nothing but a nig ger.
W.E.B. Dubois
In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
Toni Morrison
Racism as a form of skin worship, and as a sickness and a pathological anxiety for America, is so great, until the poor whites — rather than fighting for jobs or education — fight to remain pink and fight to remain white. And therefore they cannot see an alliance with people that they feel to be inherently inferior.
Jesse Jackson
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line — the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War.
W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk
The whites were really brutishly ignorant, blitheringly, so they killed people sometimes – just came into the African-American community and maimed people because they didn’t agree with God’s choice for the colors of the people’s skin.
Maya Angelou
We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism.
Huey Newton
[edited for length by n-n]
When I was studying… there weren’t any black concert pianists. My choices were intuitive, and I had the technique to do it. People have heard my music and heard the classic in it, so I have become known as a black classical pianist.
Nina Simone
i said she didnt look hard…
THIS DAY IN HISTORY:
Mon, 1877-04-09
nina was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon (February 21, 1933 — April 21, 2003)
but how many africans will look up and see the history they erased from them? NOT EVEN BLACK HISTORY MONTH BRINGS UP SUCH…
sorry. hit enter.
they dont bring them up, as we only celebrate left communists…
Florence Price just doesnt follow the narrative..
the narrative that women were so oppressed they could not work that racism was so rampant no one could succeed.
yet. over and over i keep bringing up people who should NOT EXIST… if the revisionist history we life, think and believe was true…
Who founded the college that became the Bethune-Cookman University in Florida and founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935
Mary Jane McLeod Bethune (1875 – 1955)
but wait… how can a woman found a college if women werent allowed to attend college.
after all, a feminist yelled to me once… did you know that until recently a woman could not earn a harvard degree!!!
i said yup… she said that was an outrage, not to let women go to college…
i said, then you have no idea about radcliffe?
her ignorance is what allowes her to beleive then justify hatred, social justice, etc.
i can spend all day listing people who violate their history but who we dont know..
womens liberation was the 1960s…
and race was segregatgd from wilson
Who was the first black female newspaper publisher and editor in North America (in Ontario, Canada), and the first black woman to enroll in law school ( Howard University)?
Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823 – 1893)
http://www.lkwdpl.org/wihohio/cary-mar.htm
Who was the first woman bank president in America?
Maggie Lena Walker (1867- 1934)
http://www.distinguishedwomen.com/biographies/walker-ml.html
Who is considered the first black woman journalist who advocated for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery? Maria Stewart (1803 – 1879)
What African-American woman was born enslaved, gained her freedom in 1856, became a entrepreneur and philanthropist, and co-founded the first black church in Los Angles? Biddy Mason (1818 — 1891)
http://www.lkwdpl.org/wihohio/maso-bid.htm
Her grandson, Robert Curry Owens, a real estate developer and politician, was the wealthiest African-American in Los Angeles at one time.
but today with us all liberated.
The most famous black woman is known for what?
certainly nothing as good as the oppressed women..
care to hear their poetry, their writings and quotes?
here.. read yourself
the coochie snorcher that could
http://www.sacerdoti.com/jonathan/vaginas/coochie.html
[the above is the new sanatized one in which being drugged and raped by a lesbian adult while underage is a ‘good rape’]
I’m a Simone fan and enjoyed the videos. NS always puts “a little sugar in my bowl”.
My favorite Nina Simone album is “Little Girl Blue – jazz as played in an exclusive Side Street Club.” My aunt and uncle had the original vinyl album of this name; I listened to it over and over again when I babysat their wee ones in the early 60’s. I was 16 and bowled over by her voice and piano technique. No one else I knew had ever heard of her.
Nina was a relative of Dionne Warwick. I don’t remember the details of their relationship. Dionne was a particular favorite of the powerhouse songwriting team of Burt Bacharach and Hal Davis. They wrote many of Warwicks’s best songs.
Susanamantha: are you sure about the Nina Simone Dionne Warwick connection? I’d never heard that—but it is the case that Whitney Houston is a cousin of Dionne Warwick.
I discovered Nina Simone when I was in high school. My high school boyfriend was a fan, and he played her records a lot. I loved her; she was so unique and wonderful! But the first time I heard the record (before I knew her name), for a few seconds I thought it was a man singing.
Once again I appreciate Artfldgr’s scholarship.
Nina was a perpetually self-pitying woman; nothing was ever her fault or her deficiency, apparently. Always the Other, in her case, Whitey.
That’s why my 40-year old Simone favorite for the past 30-plus years starts, “You can have him, I don’t want him…” A song about lying to herself…I’ve not found it on CD, and don’t play the vinyl anymore.
Don Carlos: It was sometimes whitey, but it was by no means just whitey or always whitey. Nina Simone was bipolar and was angry at just about everyone, including many of the people who worked with her. She was pretty much an equal-opportunity blamer, as far as I can tell.
The life may have been a wreck a lot of the time, but she was a great artist. The song you mention is one of her standards, and although you can find other renditions (for example, Shirley Bassey, Nancy Wilson) on YouTube, to my way of thinking Simone’s version is by far the best. The song was written by Irving Berlin, by the way.
I don’t see it as a song about lying to oneself at all, though. It’s a song that starts with bravado in the face of rejection by a lover, and soon turns to a plaintive admission of how much the lover actually meant to the woman. It’s in the same genre as Hoagy Carmichael’s “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” in which the title is belied by most of the words. It’s someone whistling in the dark.
I couldn’t find a video of Simone doing the Irving Berlin song. But here she is singing the Carmichael tune (I think the photo is of someone else; perhaps her daughter?):
“.. except when soft rains fall and drip from leaves I recall, the thrill of being sheltered in your arms. Of course I do, but I get along without you very well.”
This phrase is heartbreaking. Her delivery is bittersweet, wounded, defiant, and in the end futile. “That should surely break my heart in two.” Egads, I’m too old to be so swept up in such melodrama, but NS pulls me into her realm as if I am an asteroid destined to orbit her gas giant.
Thanks Neo for a distraction from the bigger, more deadly drama of our own days ahead.
Obviously an artist in the realm of aquired taste. I’ll just say i couldn’t aquire it in the 3 or 4 minutes i gave her.
The first Nina Simone song I was exposed to was My Baby Just Cares for Me. It was played a lot on the jukebox of the greasy spoon hippie hangout where I worked the counter while I was in high school. So, that song brings back memories.
Nna Simone is not the only vocalist who was also a skilled pianist. Nat King Cole and Sarah Vaughan were also pianists.
I was plum tuckered when I posted re Nina last night, and took short cuts-“lying”, and didn’t edit “40” out. Indeed it is bravado, not lying.
Neo:
Yes, it’s Whitney who’s Dionne’s cousin. I knew that and got it wrong. Thanks for reminding me.
Too bad Whitney let bad choices derail her career. She could have been one of the voices of the century. Her mother was Cissy Huston, one of the Sweet Inspirations.
Nina Simone was such a great musician. I am enthralled by her talent. What a fantastic stylist, and in this day of particularly uninteresting singers, she seems even more special. The really fine classical piano chops with her low rumbly voice and exquisite phrasing just leave me in awe. Her troubled vibe has made it hard for me to listen to her though. Sometimes it’s best to not know much about an artist, so one can just appreciate their music. Which is probably the best part of them anyway.
Julia in NYC: yes, her piano playing just seems so effortless, doesn’t it? The product of intense work, no doubt.
I had stopped going to her performances after that one I mentioned, because she was so hostile and it was so uncomfortable being in the audience. But I never stopped listening to her; she was that good.