Thursday 9 March 2017

Miss Simone

For the last few days I've been listening to BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week, an abridgement of Alan Light's biography of singer and pianist Nina Simone, What Happened, Miss Simone?

Nina Simone is notable not just for spanning multiple genres in her musical output - blues, jazz, gospel, soul, R&B and pop as well as the classical music she had been trained to perform as a child in North Carolina - but also for being a political figures whose songs Mississippi Goddam and The Backlash Blues (the latter penned by her friend the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes) exemplified the harder-edged, more militant tone the black civil rights movement took on in the sixties in the face of racist intransigence from the Southern states and the Federal government's sluggishness in enforcing freedoms legally won by African-American activists.

Simone acquired a reputation for being "difficult", a trait often ascribed to her having some sort of personality disorder, but given the racism she experienced throughout her life (she refused to play at her first public piano recital until her parents were moved forwards from the back of the concert hall where they had been placed and put onto the front row and later had a place at a music college denied to her on the grounds of her colour before becoming a cabaret act at the bar in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where she adopted her stage name) it was surely either a case of her standing up for herself, or, if it did indeed stem from mental illness, was a reaction to those injustices.





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