What Happened, Miss Simone? - Alan Light

 WHAT HAPPENED, MISS SIMONE? - ALAN LIGHT

The things you learn. Nina Simone wasn't her real name. She was actually born Eunice Kathleen Waymon and only changed her name to prevent her mother who was a devout preacher finding out her daughter had taken up playing 'the devil's music' in a nightclub. Apparently, 'Nina' was taken from a nickname given to her by an ex-boyfriend and 'Simone' was taken from the French actress Simone Signoret. The things you learn.

When thinking of Nina Simone you tend to think of three things: her voice, her piano playing, and her politics; sometimes you think of all these three things at once and it's at these times that her stature as an artist morphs from the beautiful to the sublime. Her rich contralto, her classically-trained piano playing and her black liberation politics made for a heady brew that to this day echoes down the ages attracting generation upon generation of new listeners.

According to Alan Light in his Nina Simone biography What Happened, Miss Simone? the first time Simone met Martin Luther King Jnr she said to him "I'm not nonviolent" to which King replied "Okay, I'm glad to meet you." She then extended her hand and said "I'm so glad to meet you too."

Growing up as a black woman in America at that time Simone of course was aware of discrimination and segregation but it was the killing of four young black girls by a bomb exploding while they were attending bible class at a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 that for her put into full glare the evil and injustice of American racism. "When they killed the little girls in Alabama," she's quoted as saying "that's when I changed."

The first thing Simone did was to write a song with the title 'Mississippi Goddam' that for its lyrical directness and undisguised anger is somewhat startling even to this day. This song, according to Light, marked a dividing line in Simone's career and when she premiered it at the Carnegie Hall in 1964, introduced a level of outrage and immediacy unlike anything else in the black civil rights protest movement. Come the summer of 1969 Simone was on stage asking her audience "Are you ready, black people? Are you ready to smash white things? Burn buildings? Are you ready? Are you ready to build black things?"

Nina Simone was an inspiration to black people everywhere, no more acutely realised than in such songs as her 'Ain't Got No/I Got Life' medley and 'To Be Young, Gifted And Black'; the latter of which when playing live would introduce it by saying "It is not addressed to white people primarily. Though it doesn't put you down in any way... it simply ignores you. For my people need all the inspiration and love that they can get." The flipside of this, however, was that Nina Simone needed all the inspiration and love she could get also and though there were plenty who loved her dearly it seemed never to be enough and she would always end up hurting those who loved her the most.

Alan Light's book depicts Simone as an extremely formidable woman who could clearly be more than a handful, not suffering fools for a moment yet suffering from her own personal demons. Interestingly, some of Simone's behaviour and antics are remindful of Adam Ant who was eventually diagnosed as being bipolar, subsequently explaining a lot of things about him and his career. It isn't, however, until near to the end of Light's book that the words 'manic depressive' and 'bipolar' are mentioned in regard to Simone and then from her daughter, Lisa, who in 1984 began hearing these words being mentioned although the terms stopped short of being an official diagnosis. For Lisa, a possible clinical explanation for her mother's behaviour meant reconsidering her mother's whole life and actions.

"Would you say you were an angry black woman?" Simone was once asked in an interview. "No," she shot back "I'm an intelligent black woman. I sing from intelligence. Anger has its place, anger has fire and fire moves things but I sing from intelligence." And therein lies a significant point. Attempts at defining Nina Simone and attempts at explaining her through a mental health condition/chemical imbalance are attempts at corralling and boxing her in. She would, however, have none of it, presenting herself instead as royalty - a Queen - who demanded respect and particularly in regard to money who demanded she be paid her dues. Her dignity, her demeanour, her belligerence and her behaviour frightened people; all backed-up by a gun she allegedly kept in her handbag and her willingness to even chase with a knife an audience member who'd annoyed her.

Come 1999 and at the age of sixty-six though her participation in civil rights activities had long ended ("Active in civil rights? Motherfucker, I am civil rights!") Nina Simone's formidability was still very much intact as evidenced by her backstage rider reportedly asked for at that year's Nick Cave-hosted Meltdown Festival in London - that rider consisting of champagne, sausages, and cocaine. A rider fit for a Queen.

Nina Simone passed away in 2003 at the age of seventy and with her death went the passing of a legend the like of which the world will probably never see again.

John Serpico