This article contains affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if a reader clicks through and Cohodas is particularly good at explaining what plagued Simone during her turbulent final decades, when her foes often included her own audiences. The best of the biographies fills in the gaps. Simone’s slim 1991 memoir I Put a Spell on You left out a great deal. Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone by Nadine Cohodas
The talking heads are so-so but the archive footage is unmissable. “As the 60s progressed, the feelings she displayed – pain, lacerating anger, the desire to burn down whole cities in revenge – made her seem at times emotionally disturbed and at other times simply the most honest black woman in America.”įortuitously released during the rise of Black Lives Matter, Liz Garbus’ taut 2015 Netflix documentary puts Simone’s radicalism into context. Prompted by the controversial biopic Nina, this superb 2014 New Yorker article focuses on Simone’s role in the civil rights movement and the roots of her rage. “The times are desperate and America is one big emergency ward with everybody in the hospital,” Simone explained, not long before leaving “the United Snakes of America” for good. Running to almost 19 minutes, the medley is the most staggering spiritual crisis you will ever hear, whipped towards a chilling climax that brings the two strands together: “Today, who are you Lord? You are a killer!” Not yet done with Harrison, she spins Isn’t It a Pity out over 11 stark, disillusioned minutes, like a last call for humanity. George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord is a warm breeze but she whips it into a gospel hurricane and merges it with the Last Poets’ David Nelson’s biting poem Today Is a Killer, so that hope battles with despair on a cosmic scale.
Her last heavyweight artistic statement began at a show near Fort Dix, New Jersey, for Jane Fonda’s anti-war Free the Army tour in November 1971. It is practically a seance: each mistreated woman is sketched in just a few short lines but she lives and breathes and cries out for justice.Īround this time, Maya Angelou called Simone “an extremist, extremely realised”. Simone’s own Four Women, a quadripartite study of black womanhood so unflinching in its pain and outrage that some black radio stations banned it, epitomises her talent for inhabiting characters with her voice. Likewise, it was Simone who showed David Bowie that Johnny Mathis’s Wild is the Wind could be a shattering tour de force. When Jeff Buckley covered the gloomy torch song Lilac Wine, he was really covering Simone’s version, which also happens to be one of Thom Yorke’s Desert Island Discs. Despite being largely pieced together from leftover sessions by producer Hal Mooney, Wild Is the Wind is the strongest illustration of her uncanny ability to find the song within a song, revealing the secret tunnels and caverns that previous singers didn’t know existed and future interpreters couldn’t ignore. Starting with I Put a Spell on You in 1965, you can’t go wrong with Simone’s final five albums for Philips Records. Simone is fully aware of the power she wields: “Betcha thought I was kidding, didn’t you?” The final standing ovation is an explosion of awe and relief. The laughter carries into her own Mississippi Goddam – written in a frenzy hours after the 1963 Alabama church bombing – until the show-tune irony is burned away by a mounting rage that consumes the hall and you can hear in real time the realisation that they are listening to a protest song like none they’ve ever heard, owing more to cabaret than folk, and more to Malcolm X than Martin Luther King. During Go Limp, a kind of protester’s sex comedy written by CND campaigner Alex “The Joy of Sex” Comfort, the spectators chortle at the jokes, join in the goofy chorus and keep Simone airborne when she forgets the lyrics. Summoning the vengeful ghost of Brecht and Weill’s Pirate Jenny into the age of Medgar Evers and George Wallace, she stuns the room into a silence punctuated only by nervous coughs. Unlike most live albums, In Concert leaves the audience in the mix throughout and illustrates how deftly Simone could snap between tension and release. It’s this nightcrawling version of Jack Hammer’s Plain Gold Ring that explains why Nick Cave later covered it, while Don’t Smoke in Bed is so stark that you can hear audience members shifting in their seats. She performs three songs from her jazzy 1959 debut Little Girl Blue with a newfound depth, drawn from painful personal experience and her recent political awakening at the hands of new friends in the civil rights movement, notably Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin. That said, In Concert, recorded at three Carnegie Hall shows during March and April 1964, represents her great leap forward as both a performer and activist: her escape from the “nothing world” of pop.