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Inspired by the Academy Award-nominated Netflix documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?, an intimate and vivid look at the legendary life of Nina Simone, the classically trained pianist who evolved into a chart-topping chanteuse and committed civil rights activist.
From music journalist and former Spin and Vibe editor-in-chief Alan Light comes a biography of incandescent soul singer and Black Power icon Nina Simone, one of the most influential, provocative, and least understood artists of our time. Drawn from a trove of rare archival footage, audio recordings and interviews (including Simone's remarkable private diaries), this nuanced examination of Nina Simone’s life highlights her musical inventiveness and unwavering quest for equality, while laying bare the personal demons that plagued her from the time of her Jim Crow childhood in North Carolina to her self-imposed exile in Liberia and Paris later in life.
Harnessing the singular voice of Miss Simone herself and incorporating candid reflections from those who knew her best, including her only daughter, Light brings us face to face with a legend, examining the very public persona and very private struggles of one of our greatest artists.
- Sales Rank: #152493 in Books
- Published on: 2016-02-09
- Released on: 2016-02-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x 1.10" w x 5.70" l, 1.25 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 320 pages
Review
Praise for What Happened, Miss Simone? and Nina Simone
“Alan Light has written an electrifying, humane, and dimensional biography of one of my favorite artists in the entire world. I learned so much about a woman I admire, the woman whose fiery piano and voice is a powerful reminder of what artists are meant to do! What Happened, Miss Simone? captures how unique and real she was on every page.”
–Alicia Keys
“A spellbinding portrait of a musical genius, a woman both ahead of her time and of it. In What Happened Miss Simone?, Alan Light resurrects the High Priestess of Soul with profound sympathy and masterful storytelling.”
–Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson, author of Mo’ Meta Blues and Something to Food About
“Nina Simone was an overwhelming artist, piano player, and singer—the kind of artist that I loved and admired.”
–Bob Dylan
“Nina Simone’s music helped us to navigate the contradictions that propelled the black struggle forward… Her phenomenal voice beckoned us toward the battle to come.”
–Angela Davis
“What Happened, Miss Simone? is the engaging biography of the troubled soul heroine... As Light shows, her intensity fueled music that reflected and transformed the volatile America of her times.”
–Rolling Stone
“[Nina Simone's] willingness to speak her mind shines out of every page of Alan Light's biography.”
–The Times (UK)
“A probing account of Simone’s inner struggles...Far from detracting from her civil rights heroism, it makes that achievement all the more astonishing.”
–The New York Review of Books
“Simone was a genius. Her triumphs and troubles share the stage in Light's pitch-perfect biography, What Happened, Miss Simone?.”
–Elle
“Cleareyed and well-balanced, respectful rather than worshipful.”
–Columbus Dispatch
About the Author
A veteran music journalist, ALAN LIGHT is the author of The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley and the Unlikely Ascent of "Hallelujah" and Let's Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain. Light was previously the editor-in-chief of Vibe and Spin and a senior writer for Rolling Stone. He is also a frequent contributor to the New York Times.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER 10
People seem to think that when she went out onstage, that was when she became Nina Simone. My mother was Nina Simone 24/7. . . . She couldn’t be herself, and she wasn’t loved for who she was when she was not at the piano and not singing.
— LISA SIMONE KELLY
The summer of 1969 saw perhaps the most rigorous tour schedule Nina Simone ever faced. With plans put in place by Andy and spurred by her recent chart success, she played a full slate
of shows in the United States (including the Harlem Cultural Festival appearance) and also made a quick trip that took her to France for a festival in Antibes and then to Algeria for the first Pan-African Festival.
As the “folk-rock” boom had given way to psychedelia and then the first stirrings of the singer-songwriter movement, pop songs had an increasing sense of gravity and ambition that seemed to appeal to Simone. She followed her hit from Hair with another single from a current pop source, covering the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody” and reaching number 5 on the UK charts. The song also became the title track for Simone’s next album, which had the most contemporary song selection she ever attempted: three songs written by Bob Dylan (she was one of the few truly great Dylan interpreters), Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne,” the folk song “Turn! Turn! Turn!” (with lyrics taken from the Bible and credited to Pete Seeger, the song had of course been a huge hit for the Byrds a few years earlier).
She also cut two more Bee Gees compositions and a modi- fied version of the Beatles’ “Revolution,” later praised by John Lennon himself. Such a track list broadened her audience and inevitably interested young, white rock fans, which led to her first booking into Bill Graham’s famous venue, the Fillmore East.
A review in the Village Voice indicates that Simone was at the peak of her power in the East Village rock mecca. “She now pos- sesses an absolute mastery of her material,” wrote Don Heck- man. “Like all great singers, she has passed the point of sheer technique and takes for granted nuances of performance that other singers would have to make strenuous and conscious ef- forts to achieve.”
In August, she also recorded the song that would be her final contribution to the protest repertoire—though it was one of inspiration and uplift rather than fury. Lorraine Hansberry’s ex-husband and estate executor, Robert Nemiroff, had adapted some of her writings into a new off-Broadway play titled To Be Young, Gifted and Black. One Sunday morning, Simone opened the New York Times and saw a story about the production, with a photo of her old friend Hansberry.
“This picture caught hold of me,” she said. “In her eyes, she kept trying to tell me something, and the memory of being with her many times kept flooding back. I sat down at the piano at that moment and made up a tune. I knew what I wanted it to say, but I couldn’t get the words together. So I called up my mu- sical director, Weldon Irving, Junior, and I said, ‘Hey, Weldon, I got a song, and I want you to finish writing it.’ I hummed it over the phone, told him what was on my mind, explained to him a little bit about Lorraine Hansberry. And he captured the mood, and it was finished on Tuesday, forty-eight hours later.”
Like all great anthems, the lyrics to “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” are simple and clear, the melody forceful and memo- rable but not cloying.
To be young, gifted and black,
Oh, what a lovely precious dream
To be young, gifted and black,
Open your heart to what I mean
In the whole world you know
There are a billion boys and girls
Who are young, gifted and black,
And that’s a fact!
Young, gifted and black
We must begin to tell our young
There’s a world waiting for you
This is a quest that’s just begun
When you feel really low
Yeah, there’s a great truth you should know
When you’re young, gifted and black
Your soul’s intact!
Young, gifted and black
How I long to know the truth
There are times when I look back
And I am haunted by my youth
Oh, but my joy of today
Is that we can all be proud to say
To be young, gifted and black
Is where it’s at!
Speaking about the song at the time of its release, Simone revealed a true sense of purpose, a look beyond the historical outrage of “Mississippi Goddam” and “Four Women” to a mis- sion for the future. “To me, we are the most beautiful creatures in the whole world, black people,” she said. “I mean that in every sense, outside and inside. We have a culture that’s surpassed by no other civilization, but don’t know anything about it. So my job is to somehow make them curious enough, or persuade them by hook or crook, to get more aware of themselves, and where they came from, and to bring it out. This is what compels me to compel them, and I will do it by whatever means necessary.
“As far as I’m concerned, my music is addressed to my people, especially to make them more curious about where they came from and their own identity and pride in that identity. We don’t know anything about ourselves. We don’t even have the pride and the dignity of African people. We can’t even talk about where we came from, we don’t know. It’s like a lost race, and my songs are deliberately to provoke this feeling of ‘Who am I? Where did I come from? Do I really like me, and why do I like me? And if I am black and beautiful, I really am and I know it, and I don’t care who says what.’ That’s what my songs are about, and it is addressed to black people. Though I hope that in their musical concept, and in their musical form and power, that they will also live on after I die, as much as they are universal songs, too.”
“To Be Young, Gifted and Black” was a Top 10 R&B hit and, peaking at number 76 on the pop charts, also Simone’s biggest crossover success since “I Loves You, Porgy.” The song would be covered by Aretha Franklin (who made it the title of a 1972 album) and the masterful soul singer Donny Hathaway; a few years later, Simone even performed the song sitting on a stoop on Sesame Street. The Congress of Racial Equality named it the “Black National Anthem,” and the themes articulated by the song would be explored by such artists as Stevie Wonder and the
Staple Singers.
“I’m born of the young, gifted, and black affirmation,” said Attallah Shabazz. “It wasn’t that we didn’t know it. It was daring to proclaim it, and then share it joyously. It’s stated in a way that you know your African-ness without apology, without explana- tion, and it’s put into a contemporary, hip song, which means you get to hum it in public. And you didn’t have to be black to sing it, because it was just a truth.”
The studio version of “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” was released only as a single; Simone’s next album would be another live set, titled Black Gold and recorded at an October show at New York’s Philharmonic Hall. The closing number was a nine- and-a-half-minute version of the new hit, which she introduced 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.”
As the focus of her work increasingly shifted to singing about and for her black audience, Simone’s political thrust had moved from the drive for civil rights and racial equality to the priorities of independence and self-sufficiency that defined the Black Power agenda. “She made the transition from move- ments demanding the acknowledgment of our rights as citizens to insurgent movements calling for the economic and politi- cal restructuring of our society,” wrote Angela Davis. “With her, I moved from an assimilationist project to a revolutionary project.”
Black Gold would be Simone’s only gold-selling album with RCA Victor. It was nominated for a Grammy for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance (although she would once again lose to Aretha Franklin). A separate LP containing an interview with Simone was mailed to radio DJs for promotion; in this conversa- tion, she expressed her satisfaction with the record.
“There is a great deal of electricity in this album,” she said. “There is a great deal of rapport between the audience and myself, which has been missing in so many of the previous al- bums.”
Simone was finely attuned to her audiences, and to which nights she was truly on her game. If this meant that her perfor- mances could be uneven, it also resulted in her ability to maxi- mize her powers when she felt in command. “If I’m in a good mood, in very high spirits, I can tell how I’m going to move them,” she said. “But, on the other hand, if they are in a very different mood, they may be able to sway me their way. Usually I know as time goes on how it’s going. Sometimes I may know the minute I get onstage.”
Following the run of “Ain’t Got No / I Got Life,” “To Love Somebody,” and especially “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” the mainstream media began paying attention to Nina Simone in a way they hadn’t since the days of “I Loves You, Porgy.” In the fall of 1970 alone, there were features about the singer in LIFE magazine, the brand-new black women’s publication Es- sence, and Redbook, who had Maya Angelou—a cultural icon with the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings the previous year—pen an extensive, ambitious profile that was presented in an introduction as “the impressions of a poet.”
“Nina Simone is able to stand upon a shadowed stage, take in all light and then return that luminescence to her audience in opulent, pulsating rays,” Angelou wrote. “At other times and with no seeming reluctance she rejects the audience, rejects their physical fact, rejects their loyalty, rejects their devotion.”
But despite her sudden turn as a media darling, she was still plagued by the same issues. George Wein said that he booked her for a successful show at the historically black Hampton In- stitute but that when he put her on the bill at the Playboy Jazz Festival she was acting strangely. “You really could not grab ahold of this woman. You could not do it, much as you tried,”
he said.
Trouble seemed to follow her. Wein had a house in France near James Baldwin’s house, and the two men had become friendly. Simone came to visit Baldwin and got into some alter- cation. Whatever transpired, it was ugly enough that Simone was asked to leave. “I don’t know the details, but Jimmy could put up with anything,” said Wein. “Jimmy Baldwin was one of the most generous, sweetest, nicest people, but he couldn’t make it with Nina, and that was very bad.”
But Baldwin’s friendship ran deeper than one bad night, and he would return to save Nina during a dark moment at the Vil- lage Gate in New York. Tickets for the show were ten dollars (expensive for a nightclub), and the set started about ninety minutes late. “She had a certain kind of regality, mixed up with a kind of pretentious arrogance,” said Stanley Crouch, who was covering the show. “She was really a very frightened person; she wasn’t as arrogant as she seemed. She was definitely afraid of being rejected, but she was ready to go out and tell the audience, ‘I am here, I am Nina Simone, I don’t care.’ ”
Al Schackman remembered this particular set. “At the Vil- lage Gate, she wouldn’t have anybody play with her, just the two of us. We’re on, and somehow she gets this thing going about Jews, ‘That Jew, he owns this club, all these Jews,’ and I’m going to myself, ‘Oh, shit, Nina, most of your audience is Jewish.’ ”
Song after song collapsed midway through, with Simone complaining about the microphones and the lights, until even- tually Baldwin came out and sat with her onstage. He said, “Nina, I think you should sing,” and she replied, “James, yes, of course—I like you, I know you like me, so if you think I should sing, I will sing.” Schackman recalled, “Jimmy was an angel come to earth, he really truly was.”
“He was a little drunk, and you couldn’t tell if she was drunk,” said Crouch, of Baldwin and Simone that night. “She stopped and said, ‘I bet you all think I’m drunk—well, I am not, and you better remember that, because if you act as though you think I’m drunk and you abuse me, I will just stop and leave and you still have to pay and I am still going to get paid.’
“She had that kind of thing in her, that if you actually outdid her in a form of obnoxiousness, she could be more obnoxious than you could. And at a certain point, you would just surren- der, because you would realize that you were not going to win, because she was going to be more obnoxious than you could be.”
Still, when she turned it on, she could transport crowds to incomparable heights. If she and an audience could feed each other’s energy, the results were something beyond a concert ex- perience. A breathless review in the San Francisco Chronicle by John L. Wasserman offers an example of her still-incandescent potency.
“She is Priestess and she is Leader, mystic and political scien- tist, dancer, actress, play wright and chemist,” he wrote. “I have never, ever seen a singer exercise the kind of control, the kind of benign manipulation that Miss Simone did on Saturday night.” Wasserman described the show as “one hour 35 minutes of spiri- tual sex . . . if one talks about sex in singing, Tina Turner is a stripper, Nina is a woman.” She is, he concluded, “a person mak- ing the final merger of life and art.”
“If you’re striking at the heart of five thousand people, there’s more being plugged into you,” said Simone. “There’s more elec- tricity coming from you, because you’re getting it from them and they’re getting it from you. It’s like when lightning strikes a town, or a hurricane or a tornado, it builds. If it’s getting ready to capture or to hurt thousands of people, it comes stronger as it goes through the oceans and the waves get bigger—it gets stron- ger all the time, because it’s been building wave by wave by wave all that time. That’s the way I think of myself.”
If Simone saw herself as a force of nature, her young daughter was just becoming aware that hers was not a typical upbringing. “I didn’t know that my mother was famous, or that she sang for a living, until I was maybe ten,” said Lisa Simone. “I just knew that Mom was always traveling, and I never knew half the time that she was leaving or when she was coming back. I looked at her passport, and I saw the name ‘Eunice K. Stroud, aka Nina Simone.’ And I asked, ‘What’s aka?’ And she’s like, ‘It means “also known as,” ’ and then I started to really consciously realize that my mother had two different lives.”
But this awareness wouldn’t be something that Lisa would have much chance to work through with her mother. “By the time I started to put things together, and get a wider sense of our family and the roles taking place in our home, [my parents] divorced.”
She doesn’t remember Simone and Stroud ever telling her that they were splitting up. At this point, her parents didn’t seem to know what to do with her. She had already spent third grade in Rutherfordton, North Carolina, where she lived with her aunt Lucille for a year. But then one day her father was gone, and her mother was still touring. Lisa went to stay with the Sha- bazzes. Betty Shabazz couldn’t reach Simone, so eventually she enrolled Lisa in school with her own daughters.
It was confusing and painful for a nine-year-old girl to be abandoned by her parents, but Lisa still found something to be positive about. “They stayed together ten years,” she said. “That’s a long time, so there had to be something fantastic to balance out all the other stuff. Maybe that was me.”
Her love for her daughter may have been strong, but left to her own devices, Nina Simone wasn’t always able to meet even the basic requirements of responsible parenting. “I went to the camp where we all went and I saw the director,” said Ilyasah Shabazz, recalling research she had done for her own book. The camp director reminded her that one year, at the end of the camp season, all the kids were gone, but Lisa was left there alone—her mother hadn’t come to pick her up.
“When he mentioned it, I started to understand why she was with us,” said Shabazz. “And it was never anything that my mother ever talked about, we never even addressed it. She was with us for about six years, from when we were six to twelve or thirteen, on and off. I had no idea that her parents had split up. I had no idea.”
“The breakup was really sad,” said Al Schackman. “There was so much that they offered each other in the relationship, and Nina was always fighting it. Nina was just against Andy pro- moting her and making her work. He would say, ‘Nina, you’re making money. We’ve got a career here, and that’s not gonna continue if you don’t nurture it.’ And she couldn’t care less, and she could get violent, she could get really physical. She came to resent Andy, and he represented a part of her giving of herself that she only wanted to give when she wanted to give it.”
For the rest of her life, Simone would blame Stroud’s role as her manager for their breakup. She resented how hard he pushed her and hated what she perceived as the grueling pace of work he insisted upon. “He treated me like a horse, a nonstop workaholic horse,” she said in 1999.
Stroud maintained that even if he had wanted to drive her harder, there was only so much he had control over. “All con- tracts were with her approval,” he said. “She had to approve ev- erything. I could never push her or make her do anything.
“But I took her out of the big booking agencies, because they were taking 15 percent of the expense money. I took her out of the clubs and put her in concerts where she made twice the amount in one night that she made in the clubs for one week, two shows a night. I made her have hit records. That’s all that I did.”
The people who surrounded Nina later in life would take a more nuanced view of Andrew Stroud and his ultimate impact on her career and her attitude. According to Gerrit De Bruin, Stroud was “the best husband for Nina that she could have had. Andy was a good guy, and I know he loved Nina very much.”
Others agreed that Stroud was one of the rare people who could motivate Nina. “He was a strong guy who could control her, who could take care of her and her career,” said Roger Nupie. “And up to the very last years, she kept on calling him, and deep inside I think she still loved him.”
The most immediate need upon Andy’s departure was to de- cide on a new manager. Simone again opted to keep things close to home, asking her brother and sometime band member Sam Waymon to take over the job. Having toured and recorded with her in the last few years, he was in the unique position of being close at hand and being someone Nina trusted. And Sam, not surprisingly, had a less generous opinion of Stroud.
“Andy was a son of a bitch,” said Sam. “I think he realized he had a good thing, a workhorse. I think he realized that she was not as knowledgeable about contracts, about the business end of the music industry.”
When Simone first offered the job to Sam, he talked it over with their mother and indicated that he was aware of how severe her issues were becoming. “Mom, she’s my blood,” he told her, “and nobody is going to hurt her as long as I’m around. If I can be of some good to her, if I can keep those bastards away from her, if I can show her that things are not like she’s been used to, if I can show her that ‘if you keep hanging in there, Sis, day after day, you’ll see some improvement, things will get better’—the paranoia, the voices that she hears.”
Al Schackman was not convinced. “I always had a problem with Sam. . . . It was like a push-pull relationship, and I really didn’t want any part of it. When Sam was around, I was not.”
In addition to the change in her business structure, the di- vorce also meant a new chapter in Nina’s romantic life. In fact, she told Stephen Cleary that after splitting from Stroud she had the one real same-sex affair of her life. “I’ve had sexual relation- ships with one woman that I loved very much,” she said. “And it’s just one. I’m not bisexual. I prefer men. I’m essentially a het- erosexual person, and when I left Andy is when I had this rela- tionship with this girl. But I loved that girl.”
Simone said that she was “stupid” to break off the relation- ship. “I wouldn’t dance with her in public,” she said. “I was more hung up about music than I was about her.”
As she navigated this uncertainty in her love life, Simone had moved, along with Lisa, to a Manhattan apartment near Lin- coln Center. It was a different existence than they had in quiet Mount Vernon, but, at least for the time being, mother and daughter were together—even during Nina’s frequent travels.
Perhaps not surprisingly given all the upheaval in her life, she released only one album in 1971, the mostly indifferent Here Comes the Sun, which again focused on recent rock songs (more Beatles, more Dylan) and was most notable for a radical up-tempo reworking of “My Way.” In Rolling Stone, Timothy Crouse wrote that “unfortunately, neither Nina’s grande dame intensity nor her old musical bravado find their way onto her new album.” He felt that her signature eclecticism had become a distraction, noting that “except on her very first LPs, Nina has seldom found more than two or three really good songs to put on each album.”
Her biggest priority at this time seemed to be spending time in Barbados, where she continued her affair with Paul, the hotel porter with the motorcycle, and where the actor Geoffrey Holder was showing her the sights of the island. Though she was blissfully happy there—“All I saw was its beauty”—she felt that Paul, who refused to come visit her in New York, didn’t fully appreciate her celebrity and was taking their relationship for granted.
“One day I got mad,” she said, “put my clothes on, took my daughter, and said, ‘Okay, I’m gonna show you who I am, Paul, you dirty rat.’ I said, ‘Take me to the prime minister.’ Went, walked in, said, ‘My name is Nina Simone, this is my daughter,’ and before I said scat—a southern term there—there were re- porters all around us. We were on the TV news that night.”
The prime minister—the first in the island’s history, in fact— was named Errol Barrow. A member of the Royal Air Force during World War II, he had helped lead his country to inde- pendence from Great Britain as a founder of the Democratic Labour Party and would later be named one of ten official Na- tional Heroes of Barbados by the country’s parliament. When he met Simone, he was approximately fifty years old and had held the top position in Barbados since 1966.
Barrow was immediately taken with the island’s larger-than- life new celebrity, and he invited Nina and Lisa to live in one of the cottages on his beach estate. A servant named Mrs. Drake was delegated to take care of them. He would come to the cot- tage every night about one o’clock, when he finished the day’s work. In light of this luxury and the attention from the island nation’s most powerful man, Paul the hotel porter was soon left in the dust; Simone and Barrow began an affair.
Simone returned to the island every few months, breezing past customs and being picked up in a waiting Mercedes. She begged Barrow to divorce his wife, which he refused to do, but when he came to visit her in New York—showing the respect that Paul refused to grant—she decided that she would officially move to Barbados and live there full-time.
“I moved everything down to Barbados—my piano, the rugs, the furniture, everything—and didn’t tell him I was moving,” she said. “I took the stuff to [luxury resort] Sam Lord’s Castle, and I didn’t see hide nor hair of him. Someone came to the Cas- tle and said I had to post a bond to live there, that the Queen didn’t want any foreigners there. I somehow got the bond, but I was surprised that Errol Barrow didn’t come to my aid at that time. To my surprise, he wasn’t particularly happy that I had moved down to Barbados. So I rented a cottage on the estate of Sam Lord’s Castle and moved into that.”
Barrow moved her into another house, but she became frus- trated with the limits of their relationship. Though he treated her with genuine affection and tenderness, she hated that he wouldn’t say that he loved her. She sought his constant atten- tion in dramatic ways. One day, she stripped naked in a meadow, just to get him to run after her. “He was chasing me all over,” she said, “the prime minister chasing this naked woman, and he cooked for me that night and made Chinese food, and sang a song called ‘The Folks Who Live on the Hill.’ ”
“Out of all her boyfriends, Prime Minister Errol Barrow was the only one I liked,” said Lisa. “He was very sweet, very kind, and he was different from my dad. His energy was different. I remember when he would come around, I always felt good, he was very nice to me, and that wasn’t something that happened a lot with people at that time.”
“I think [the Errol affair] was all theater,” said Schackman. “I think he was infatuated with a star. And she was very mag- netic, but it wasn’t this wild love affair. She was having fun with it, she was having a good time. We went dancing at night, swim- ming in the sea, and it was good, it was good for her.”
Whether the relationship was ultimately impossible to sus- tain, as much fantasy as reality, Al Schackman captures the good humor of this era in a story from his first visit to Barbados, which he arranged as a time to rehearse with Simone. Upon his arrival, she had asked him, with little explanation, if he could change the locks on her doors because someone had been com- ing around the house and scaring her, so he went into town and got a new tumbler and new keys. When he got back, Simone was gone and he set to work alone. As he was fiddling with the lock, a Town Car drove up to the house and a black man got out. He walked over to Schack- man and asked, in a British accent, if Miss Simone was home. Schackman replied that she was out, prompting the man to ask who Schackman was. “I’m her guitarist. I’m a friend of hers,” he said, adding with some suspicion, “Who are you?” The stranger said casually to tell her that Errol came by; then the stranger returned to his car, and left.
A few nights later, Simone and Schackman were invited to a dinner reception at the prime minister’s mansion. They ar- rived and went through the reception line, mingling with well- dressed guests.
“I meet this ambassador, I meet this minister and stuff like that,” recalled Schackman. “I meet the prime minister’s wife, a lovely woman, and then the prime minister. I go up to shake hands and look at him. He looks at me and grins. And I said,
‘Oh, no.’ And he says, ‘That’s all right, my friend.’ I said, ‘I’m so sorry. I had no . . . how could I know?’
“He said, ‘That’s right. What can any of us know with Nina Simone?’ ”
Most helpful customer reviews
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
A Mesmerizing Read About An Amazing Woman
By Meg
Happy International Women's Day! We make up more than 50% of the planet's population, so it stands to reason that we get one day out of 365, right? I've got a suspicion Nina Simone would've had something to say about that.... But, anyhow, I requested a copy of What Happened, Miss Simone? by Alan Light for review from Blogging For Books because I've been curious about Nina Simone for a while (ever since I discovered her recording of Feeling Good on the Six Feet Under soundtrack and fell in love with the song), so this book peaked my interest. Apparently, there are several other biographies of Nina Simone, as well as one autobiography which, Alan Light concludes, is partially fictionalized. Usually if I'm reviewing a biography of a famous person and it is one of several that have been published, I make it my goal to have read at least one of the other biographies out there as a basis for comparison. However, all of my sources indicate that this particular biography sets the bar, so I didn't follow my usual rule in this case.
What happened, Miss Simone? is well researched, to be sure. Additionally, Light does a great job of pointing out the many inconsistencies wherein Simone contradicted herself, even about important people and events. In one interview, she both renounces Billie Holliday and also claims to admire her. Writing an accurate biography of a woman famous for her mental illness and the resultant unreliable narration of her own life is an unimaginably difficult task, which Light conquered with aplomb. As I cracked open this volume and started reading about Simone's early childhood as the daughter of a female preacher, I was both mesmerized and glad that I came to the table with no preconceived notions of who Simone was or what her life was about. In this case, my total ignorance was an asset, allowing me to fill in a clean mental slate with verified information about Simone, rather than rumor or directly opposing "fact," often flowing from Simone's own mouth.
Simone's career as a vocal artist was groundbreaking because she was black and female and unwilling to apologize for either. But, what set her apart from others who shared those traits was her immense talent and formidable background in music, which allowed her to bridge the gaps not just between black and white people, women and men, but classical and jazz, Broadway and folk, pop and spiritual, and more. Cherry picking songs to cover, she reinterpreted many old standards in new ways that spoke to her audiences far beyond what the original versions accomplished. Every note Simone sang was imbued with passion and emotion, which made her personal discovery of the Civil Rights movement of much more impact on her identity as a musician. With the ability to turn a beloved song into a powerful protest anthem, Simone's music captivated many.
In addition to her composition and performance, Nina Simone had a noteworthy life, rubbing shoulders with many big players of the day. She met Martin Luther King Jr. and famously told him she wasn't nonviolent (an understatement, coming from Simone). Her family was close with that of Malcolm X. She befriended David Bowie, who grew to idolize her. Elton John invited her to record with him. ...but all of that was overshadowed by her personal instability, her exhaustion from the work of performing, her unpredictable emotions, and the severe mental imbalances she experienced. One wonders how her life might have been different, had she lived today, with all of the current advances in the treatment of mental illnesses, but that is impossible to speculate, because Nina Simone was nothing if not a representation of her own time.
I learned many interesting things about Nina Simone from Alan Light's biography, What Happened, Miss Simone? and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in information about Nina Simone or just looking for a compelling biography of an equally compelling person.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
High Priestess of Soul
By Suzanne R. Costner
"I was born a child prodigy, darling. I was born a genius." Humility was something that Nina Simone never worried about. From the time she began playing for her mother's church services, she had an instinctive grasp of what it took to sway a crowd. She started with the piano at home, but the community soon became involved and that led to more opportunities as she found instructors and supporters. After being passed over for a scholarship to study at Curtis as a classical pianist, she found her way into giving private lessons and then to playing in clubs. Year by year her fan base grew and she moved to bigger venues, record contracts, and tours. Sadly, she was never really happy. Despite her renown and recognition, she had poor taste in men and a volatile temperament that only grew worse as she aged. When she died at age 70, she had still never truly connected with her mother or her own daughter.
The author has put together the story of a remarkable woman. By using song lyrics, journals, letters, and interviews (with Simone and with family and friends), Light has pieced together a detailed account of Simone's rise to stardom and her complicated life. She could perform any kind of music, and the accounts tell of her mastery in musical genres as diverse as classical piano, jazz, blues, gospel, show tunes, and protest music. The activity behind the scenes is nearly as mesmerizing as her music. Readers learn of her tempestuous relationship with her second husband, Andrew Stroud (whom she married even after he had beaten her severely), along with her later relationships with political leaders in other countries. There are details about her struggle with mental issues - psychiatrists, hospital stays, drug & alcohol use, possible diagnosis of bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, etc. And there are the heart-wrenching observations of her inability to be happy, some written out in her journals and others from those who knew her.
At times readers can only shake their heads in amazement at all her accomplishments, while at others they may grow teary-eyed at her self-destructive actions. Her involvement in the civil rights movement is reflected in her friend Andrew Young's statement, "There were two things that people in the movement would fight over One was if you took their books. The other was if you took their Nina Simone albums." Songs like "Mississippi Goddam," "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black," or "Four Women" put the truth out there for everyone around the world to hear. Her friendships with notables like Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, and the family of Malcolm X are also included in this biography.
Whether you are a fan of Simone's from her start back in the 1950s, learned about her from protest music in the '60s, or perhaps found her through the inclusion of her songs in commercials or movies such as the 1992 "Point of No Return," you will come away from this book with a much clearer understanding of the woman behind the music.
I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
What Happened...
By G. Branch
Nina Simone. For some nothing more needs to be said. For others, like me, this biography opens the way to the part of life we missed somewhere along the way. If you came of age in the 1960’s you might have missed a significant person of interest, Eunice Kathleen Waymon, otherwise known as Nina Simone.
Light follows her life from her humble beginnings to her final moments in his biography which the cover says was inspired by “the acclaimed Netflix documentary.” The quote from Maya Angelou that opens this book sums up what happened throughout Simone’s life. Angleou sees Simone’s “loneliness…, so little tenderness…, and …a commitment to the battle of Life…”. That says it all. Light fills in the details.
After about the third repeat of Simone’s cyclic life pattern I gave up on a majority of the text and skipped to the final chapter. Her life like so many others before and after her shows the down side of fame, wealth, and the unfulfilled desire for lasting intimacy or love. Her personal habits and attitudes fluctuate and finally make her nearly unapproachable for a large portion of her life. A very sad story, but one that seems to surround so many of the very talented people in many fields.
Do I recommend this book? Yes, and no. It is well written, but the life he chose to cover while important in many ways is so difficult to watch unfold that I quit reading it. If it could serve to help those today that are so involved in human rights issues to find a different path it’d be great. I suspect given the history of many, that it will not serve as any kind of warning. So read it if you like, but don’t expect a happy story.
I received this book from the publisher in return for a review.
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