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‘I play black classical music’
So insisted, with confident certainty, an honorary doctor of humanities and doctor of music, known world-wide as Nina Simone, in an interview in January 1997. Born in 1933 as Eunice Kathleen Wayman to black parents in North Carolina, she was a child prodigy and played piano to classical perfection at the age of six. She received her first applause — and had her first brush with racism — when at age ten, she gave her first piano recital. Her parents had accompanied her to the local library hall and were seated in the front row, but during the recital, they were pushed to a side room on the stage. Blacks could not sit in the first row!
Recently, in an interview with Hardtalk master Tim Sebastian of the BBC, she repeatedly referred to this incident. Probably, it sowed the seeds of revolt against discrimination and segregation and the resolve to fight for freedom and civil rights. Ultimately, she sang protest songs and became the voice of the black revolution.
Her graduation from the Juilliard School of Music, New York, did not help open the door of the Curtis Institute of Philadelphia, where she had applied for a scholarship. Her colour was the barrier.
She continued to be an activist performer, and a rebel with a cause. Her own composition, ‘To be Young, Gifted and Black’ was an inspiration to millions, and was declared by the Congress of Racial Equality to be the black national anthem
She started to work as a singer in East Coast clubs and changed her name to Nina Simone, to hide her identity from her mother, a Methodist priest. ‘Nina’ (girl in Spanish) was the name given to her by a boyfriend, and she picked up ‘Simone’ from the name of a French actress, Simone Signoret.
The singing job brought out a successful song, I Loves You Porgy. It became a major hit, climbing all the way to the top in 1959, selling more than a million copies and becoming Nina’s signature song. She developed her own style incorporating pop, elements of Baroque composer Bach, jazz, folk and Christmas carols. She applied the art of classical piano and music to traditional and popular forms. That was her great innovation. It was something profound. Not for nothing, she came to be known as “The High Priestess of Soul.”
But she could not remain immune to her surroundings. There was the black rage against racism — racism which Nina felt in the American air she breathed. She found racism in the very fabric of the American society. “Slavery has never been abolished from America’s way of thinking,” she said, in her powerful voice, some years ago in an interview. She started singing political songs and marched miles with Martin Luther King, involving herself in the civil rights movement.
And then came 1963. The civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, was killed in June in Mississippi, followed by the killing of four black school-children in September in Alabama. Her bitter denunciation was reflected in her song, Mississippi Goddam, which, as she told an interviewer “is a prophetic tune.” Continuing, she emphatically said, “I believe that America is going to die, die like flies, just like the song says.”
Her reputation as a black classical pianist was firmly established. She shocked any interviewer with her unexpected and astonishingly unorthodox opinions. She berated the audience, when, during a concert, she found their behaviour was not proper.
She told Tim Sebastian that after John and Robert Kennedy, Medgar Evers, the four school children, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, she knew “they” were coming for her. Undaunted, she continued to be an activist performer, and a rebel with a cause. Her own composition, To be Young, Gifted and Black was an inspiration to millions, and was declared by the Congress of Racial Equality to be the black national anthem. She was at the forefront of the anti-Vietnam war agitation in the US and as a protest (knowing fully well that she would be arrested), she did not pay her income tax for three years from 1971 to 1973.
Unhappy with the recording industry — she was never paid all the royalties on her 500 songs — and dismayed by racism, she left America (“I don’t like America, I never did”) and lived in different countries like Liberia, Barbados, Trinidad, Switzerland, the Netherlands etc. Ultimately, she settled down in a small town of Bouc-Bel-Air in southern France.
A majority of critics agree that there has never been anyone like Simone before and there never will be again. Some say that she is one of the most unique artists the world has ever seen, and she cannot be compared to anybody.
She never liked to be called a jazz singer. She said, “To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt.” She proudly claimed, “That’s not what I play. I play black classical music. That’s why I don’t like the term ‘jazz’ — it’s a term that is simply used to identify black people...” Insulted by being compared, by some people, to Billie Holiday, she burst out, “...They only compare me to her because we’re both black — they never compare me to Maria Callas, and I’m more of a diva like her than anybody else...”
In Pakistan, anyone who knows something about Nina Simone would consider her a ‘jazz singer’; most of the music shops have not heard her name and even some Pakistani newspapers, in their issue of April 23, described her as a jazz singer. If Nina Simone had read those newspapers, a loud protest in her deep voice would have come from Bouc-Bel-Air. But that was not to be. She had died two days earlier.
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