Nina’s appearance in Summit, New Jersey, on January 22 to headline a benefit for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) further confirmed that Andy was right. She did have her music. “I played on stage for a reason, and when I walked off stage those reasons still existed,” she said, long outlasting the applause. In an odd juxtaposition beyond Nina’s control, the Hoot-enanny show she taped in Clarksburg was broadcast on television just four days before the Summit concert. Perhaps to piggyback on the event, Andy had taken out a two-column, four-inch-high ad in Variety that featured a new, appealing headshot of Nina and proclaimed her “star of the Ford CARavan of Music for 1964.” He had even hired promotion man Paul Brown to help, and his name was featured along with Andy’s as a contact. But the ad ran in Variety’s Vaudeville section, hardly prime space in the weekly.
Although only one of Nina’s Colpix albums had touched the charts, that didn’t deter Willem Langenberg, the voluble head of Philips Records, a division of the giant electronics firm, from wanting to sign her. Philips had initially concentrated on classical music but now branched out into other genres as it looked for ways to distribute its product in the United States. When Langenberg, a native of the Netherlands, came across “Mississippi Goddam,” he was smitten. He listened to the record nonstop, as Nina told it, and got on a plane to New York determined to make a deal. He found her at the Village Gate and waited in her dressing room until she came off the stage. An imposing man of nearly three hundred pounds, he wasted no time. “I’ve come to take you back to Holland,” he said in his booming voice, “so you can be on the Philips label.”
“There was no question I was going to sign,” Nina recalled, finding “Big Willy,” as she nicknamed him, irresistible. Despite the conflicts she often felt about her music, when she took stock, she knew it was another step forward to be embraced by a label that wanted her so much. She didn’t actually have to leave the country to make the switch, but “Big Willy” did set things in motion. Andy worked out the details for her to leave Colpix, and on February 22 an announcement appeared in Cash Box that Nina was now recording exclusively for Philips. The label had acquired Mercury Records, the Chicago-based company that once was home to Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan, among other notable singers. Mercury president Irving Green released the news. The announcement noted that Nina was going to appear at Carnegie Hall on March 21 in another concert sponsored by Felix Gerstman, and plans were already under way to record the evening for a new live album, this time under the auspices of Philips. But Variety suggested that Colpix wanted to piggyback on pre-concert publicity, noting in a short item that the Carnegie event was “in conjunction with Colpix Records promotion for her eight LPs.”
Phil Orlando had left the group, never able to conquer his nerves onstage with Nina. “There were times before he would go on that he would go in the men’s room and throw up,” Lisle said. “So obviously he didn’t play his best.” This time Bobby recommended a successor, Rudy Stevenson, a multitalented musician who not only played the guitar but also played the flute, clarinet, and saxophone. He was a composer-arranger, too. With a weekend back at the Village Gate in February and then another Ford CARavan performance March 12 at Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology, Nina had plenty of time to get comfortable with him. He had made an immediate contribution when they rehearsed, fleshing out the arrangement for “SeeLine Woman,” a new song Nina had incorporated into her live dates at Langston’s suggestion. “I think See-Line Woman is particularly suited for you,” Langston had told her in one of his regular notes, “custom-made.” He said it was adapted from an old island folk tune by his secretary, George Bass, who had a musical bent and was studying the arts at New York University.
In this arrangement Rudy’s distinctive flute solo alternated with the vaguely calypso beat from Bobby and Montego Joe. There was no piano, so Nina performed the song—even on March 21 at Carnegie Hall—standing up, dancing as the spirit moved, which was fitting given the lyrics about the vixenish “See-Line Woman dressed in red/Make a man lose his head.” For this night at Carnegie, though, Nina wore white, a full-length halter-top dress with the unusual accessory of two silver bands on her upper left arm.
A high point of the opening set was her ferocious reworking of “Pirate Jenny,” the Kurt Weill-Bertolt Brecht song from The Threepenny Opera. This play with music had been revived in the United States a decade earlier, and Nina captured the bitter pessimism that underlay the work’s surface amusement. Assisted by a few well-placed drumbeats from Bobby, Nina shouted, hissed, whispered, and threatened, never more so than when she sang about being “in this crummy Southern town in this crummy old hotel.” The audience sat transfixed when she growled that “there’s nobody gonna sleep here, honey. Nobody …Nobody!” She displayed her softer side in an extended version of “Plain Gold Ring.” Bobby thought he gave one of his best performances because the drums were tuned so well and blended in with the piano. “It was almost like playing the timpani,” he recalled.
Central to the evening was a trio of songs that reflected Nina’s newfound interest in civil rights, although she presented them more as crowd-pleasers than efforts to rally the troops. “Mississippi Goddam” had its same angry lyrics, but when Nina introduced it as “a show tune—only the show hasn’t been written yet,” it brought a collective laugh that had the effect of letting the audience off the hook. “Old Jim Crow,” which she co-authored, was standard blues, but “Old Jim Crow” wasn’t a man. The name, of course, was slang for the “separate but equal” laws that had governed Southern segregation for so long. “Old Jim Crow. It ain’t your name. It’s the thing you do,” Nina sang, but her presentation was entirely without bitterness. “Go Limp,” in the vein of “Little Liza Jane,” was a sing-along folk song and a benign if mischievous tribute to the young protesters. It told of a mother’s concerns as her daughter prepares to march with the NAACP. Nina asked the audience to join her at each chorus between verses. “All right now, hootenanny time,” she joked.
The song’s title was a play on one of the lines that counseled protestors to “go perfectly limp” when the authorities came. Nina turned suggestive when she sang of the protester who told the young girl she should be kissed and how this young girl obeyed “and did not resist.” The audience let out an appreciative chuckle. Nina’s sly finish alluded to romance and ultimate victory so that if there was later a baby, he wouldn’t have to march “like his da-da and me.”
A sense of occasion surrounded the entire evening. Irving Green came in from Chicago, a gesture no doubt intended to let Nina know that her new label was serious about promoting her. They held court backstage while she relaxed with Max Cohen, still her lawyer, and Charles Aznavour, the French star, who had come to say hello. Ever attentive, Langston sent a telegram ahead of time even though he was at the concert compliments of Andy. At the post-concert celebration, Langston traded jokes with comedian Godfrey Cambridge, Nina happily sandwiched between them, sharing the laughter.
Lisle had mixed feelings about the concert. It wasn’t his place, or any sideman’s for that matter, to argue about what was being played. If he did, the solution was obvious: he could find another job. Lisle didn’t say anything and didn’t discuss his views with Bobby and Rudy, but “Mississippi Goddam” and the other civil-rights-related material made him uncomfortable. For one thing, he didn’t think much of “Mississippi Goddam” musically. “It wasn’t very challenging at all,” he said. He chafed because he felt that his training—and Nina’s too—was going to waste. “Here’s a brilliant woman—why are you sitting down and composing something like this when you can compose something?” Beyond that Lisle wrestled with the propriety of using his talent to make political statements from the stage. “Not that I was against the civil rights movement,” he explained, “because everybody knew that things had to be straightened out—or at least an attempt had to be made. But I personally didn’t feel the stage was the place for me to make the statement—not through any music I’m going to play. If we’re up there to play beautiful music, that’s what we should do… I didn’t study all my life to protest when I’m playing my instrument, not with a bass in my hand.”
But Lisle kept quiet. “If she called the tune,” he said, “that was part of the job.”
PHILIPS WANTED TO GET Nina into the studio, and assigned veteran Mercury producer Hal Mooney, well known for his big orchestral arrangements, to a couple of spring sessions. Just like Colpix, the label hoped to get Nina into the mainstream, and while the aim was both laudable and understandable, the results were mixed. Surrounding Nina with the same kind of sound used for, say, Dinah Washington in her final sessions on the Roulette label had the effect of undercutting her distinctiveness. The lush orchestrations, though, did highlight the singular edge in Nina’s voice every time she cut through the swooning violins.
One especially notable track did emerge from the session. Mooney was fond of the writer Bennie Benjamin, whose “Wheel of Fortune” had been a hit for Kay Starr but had also done well for other singers, white and black. They had already settled on several of Benjamin’s songs; the rest would be show tunes, which were still a part of Nina’s repertoire. Although Mooney would be in charge of the eventual album, at Benjamin’s suggestion he brought in Horace Ott, a young composer-arranger who had made a name for himself in New York doing demo and session work.
Benjamin and his writing partner, Sol Marcus, wanted one more song for Nina but hadn’t come up with anything. Ott told them he had been playing around with a verse he liked, and had found a few chords and the hint of a melody. He confessed that it came to him after a tiff with his wife when he went to the piano to work out his frustration. Although he hadn’t turned the inspiration into a fullblown song, he was pleased with the hook: “Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.” Ott suggested that Benjamin and Marcus finish the song, and they’d share the writing credit.
The men agreed, and when all three were satisfied, they took it to Nina, waiting for her backstage until she finished up one of her April nights at the Village Gate. Ott made the presentation “with all the humility I could find.” “Don’t you know no one alive can always be an angel,” he sang. “When everything goes wrong, you see some bad.” And then he delivered the hook.
The men could see that Nina was intrigued. “My goodness,” she said when Ott finished. “A person would really have to be hurt to sing this song.”
“You want us to hurt you?” the men blurted out almost at once, laughing at their obvious joke. Nina was sold.
Though Ott had created an elaborate arrangement, with strings, woodwinds, the Malcolm Dodds singers, and the well-regarded organist Ernie Hayes on the celeste, Nina found her way to the heart of the song, raw but completely without melodrama. The much more spare live versions that came later, with only her piano and two or three sidemen, still packed the same emotional punch.
NINA’S FRIEND LORRAINE HANSBERRY had not been feeling well for some time, and like others close to her, Nina was concerned that she was seriously ill. If she couldn’t do anything directly to help Lorraine, at least she could show her that she had taken her entreaties seriously. She willingly returned to Carnegie Hall April 23 for an impromptu performance to benefit SNCC, joining host Dick Gregory, the outspoken comedian, to fill out a program that featured the SNCC Freedom Singers. “Pirate Jenny” this night seemed to elicit a particularly strong response. “As Bertolt Brecht expressed the turmoil of Germany, so do your songs express the terrible ramifications of our oppression,” Julia Prettyman, SNCC’s executive secretary, wrote in an effusive thank-you note. Not only had Nina agreed to appear on short notice, she also apparently didn’t charge anything for the performance. Nina felt most at home with SNCC because she liked the organization’s pragmatic attitude: “There was more than one way to skin a cat and whatever means worked to get what you wanted was the right one to use.”
Six weeks later Nina performed again for the organization, this time headlining a benefit at the Westbury Music Fair in Long Island. Fund-raising efforts were in such high gear because SNCC, along with other organizations, had just begun a major civil rights campaign in Mississippi dubbed “Freedom Summer.” SNCC gave Nina $200 to cover her expenses, and in her thank-you letter, Prettyman apologized for being tardy because of “the incredible amount of work our limited staff has to handle. Right now we are operating as much as possible on getting federal protection promised for the Mississippi people.” Prettyman’s letter was dated June 17. Four days later the first reports surfaced that three civil rights workers were missing. They would be found two months later, shot to death and buried in an earthen dam several miles outside of tiny Philadelphia, Mississippi, in Neshoba County.
Nothing so grim was on Nina’s mind as she prepared for a relaxing summer: a live date here and there in New York scheduled around nearly three weeks at Cape Cod with Andy, Lisa, and Andy’s boys. She seemed to be in an especially good mood before they left, and it showed in her pre-vacation stint at the Gate. So much so that the Amsterdam News was moved to write about a “new” Nina. “The singer-pianist, who often has been criticized for her surly manner, is in a happy period and has never played better in her life,” the News declared. “A former press agent who couldn’t get along with Nina”—probably Paul Brown—“rushed to her the other night after a performance and kissed her hand,” the paper reported. Later, he told the News, “She’s finally come to a point where she’s happy.” (The “surly” Nina, though, had been on display a few weeks earlier in Washington. John Pagones, a Washington Post reviewer, called her a “benevolent dictator” for her response to fans who shouted requests—which she ignored—during a job at the Shadows, an upscale club in Georgetown.)
Jimmy Baldwin had come to one of the Gate performances, and by coincidence, Bernard Gotfryd, a Newsweek photographer and now a family friend, was also there. He rarely went anyplace without his camera, and backstage later he snapped the two of them joyously conversing. “This is one of my friends,” she told Jimmy, “the best photographer in the world.” “She looked up to Baldwin,” Gotfryd remembered. “She was always looking up to people who accomplished something.”
Nina particularly enjoyed the Cape Cod vacation because she and Andy had brought along a nanny. It allowed her free time to stroll on the beach, binoculars in hand, and take in the vast seascape or play in the sand with the children. “It’s such a change from New York,” she wrote Langston in one postcard. “I wish we could stay all summer.” But of course they couldn’t. Nina was booked at Basin Street East at the end of July and at “John Terrell’s Music Circus,” a folk and concert series, in Lambertville, New Jersey, on August 9.
IN MID-JULY Philips had released its first Nina LP, from the Carnegie event, titled simply nina simone in concert. It took a few weeks to find an audience, but on September 16 the record went on Billboard’s Top 200 album chart. Though it stayed on the chart for nearly three months, it didn’t rise above number 102. The statistics suggested that Nina had a loyal cadre of fans and a certain staying power, but the album was well short of a hit. Philips also released a single, pairing “Mississippi Goddam” with “See-Line Woman.” Though Nina had left Colpix in February, the label, still eager to mine her catalog and capitalize on any publicity from Philips, issued a new compilation just days after in concert hit the stores. Folksy Nina received modest notices from a few music writers but didn’t do much commercially.
The new records coincided with Nina’s trip to Los Angeles the first week in September. She and the trio were set to play a big jazz show on the fourth at the Hollywood Bowl. But the date seemed like an afterthought because it came in the middle of two appearances on Steve Allen’s nationally televised variety show. For the September 3 installment, Allen had reconfigured the studio to create a more intimate atmosphere. The lights were dimmed, and instead of sitting behind his desk, Allen was at a small table, ashtray and coffee cups visible, as if he were at a club. The audience was also seated, club style, around him. Allen introduced Nina as “one of the most original talents in our business—a young lady who has a style all her own.” She had chosen “See-Line Woman” for her first number, and like the Carnegie Hall version, it opened with Rudy’s flute solo. Perhaps to improve the sightlines for television, he was standing on a small foot-high platform behind her, with Lisle and Bobby just to her left. Nina showed off her dance moves, doing little shuffle steps and twisting her hips as she clapped to the beat, constrained only by her floor-length sheath dress.
When Nina sat down with Allen between songs, he immediately gave a plug to the new Philips record, holding it up for a straight-on camera shot. Noticing “Pirate Jenny,” he wanted her to do it, but Nina explained that the song was too long for her time slot. Instead she chose “For All We Know,” “but we do it in kind of a hymn-Bachlike way. I think you’ll like it.”
“Hymn and Bach?” Allen asked.
“Yeah, like a Bach chorale, you know?”
Nina started slowly, playing single notes in her right hand before she sang the opening verse—”For all we know we may never meet again”—and then the piano work got increasingly intricate as she continued. Rudy came in on guitar, playing the same kind of counterpoint that Al Schackman had done so effortlessly when he and Nina first improvised “Little Girl Blue.” Then it was Lisle and Bobby’s turn. Just before the end they backed off for a few bars, and Nina used her voice to create one of those Bach embellishments she usually played at the keyboard. By the time the song reached its final crescendo, the audience had witnessed the building of a song note by note, layer by layer. When it was over, they erupted with applause and whistles. Clearly pleased, Nina bowed in all directions and whispered “thank you.”
Allen returned to his usual format, sitting behind a desk, when Nina came back for the September 10 show. Brought on in the middle, she opened with one of her favorites, “Zungo.” As the song wound down, she slowed the tempo and tossed in a lyric she appeared to make up on the spot, confident that her sidemen would recognize a transition: “That’s what I tell my old man—every day I tell him that I love him…” Bobby had never heard that before, and just as Nina expected, he, like Rudy and Lisle, fastened his eyes on her, waiting for what would come next. She struck a familiar chord and segued into “Porgy.”
When Nina joined Allen at the desk before her next song, he told her he wanted her to sing “Mississippi Goddam” because he knew it would provoke a lively discussion about censorship.
“This is kind of an awkward song to talk about,” Allen said.
“I memorized what I’m supposed to say,” Nina assured him, revealing that they had planned this ahead of time. “So can I say it?”
Allen told her to go ahead.
“This is a song I wrote during the time the four little kids were bombed in Alabama,” Nina said, giving perhaps her fullest explanation of its origins, “and it was conceived, though, during the time when James Meredith was finally getting into the University of Mississipppi. And I was beginning to get angry then. First you get depressed, then you get mad. And when these kids got bombed, I just sat down and wrote this song. And it’s a very moving, violent song ‘cause that’s how I feel about the whole thing. It’s called ‘Mississippi Blank-Blank.’ I have to explain that,” Nina went on before Allen could say a word, “and this is where the memorization comes in. It’s a two-part expression, Steve, ending with the word damn. In other words it’s ‘Mississippi’ “—and then there was a high-pitched bleep that the networks used when they wanted to block out curse words or anything else deemed offensive.
“If I may speak of this entirely without passion,” Allen interjected. “The first word is God and the second word is damn, and I think everyone up this late at night who can afford to pay for a television set is adult enough to recognize that one not only hears that expression but most of you say it when you hit your thumb with a hammer.”
That made Nina chuckle.
“I figure I might as well lay it on the line so I won’t get nine thousand letters.” Nina interrupted to assure Allen that she and the trio would only be mouthing the words.
Allen had another idea: “So everybody at home when you get to the words scream them.”
“Yes,” Nina agreed, “that’ll work. Let me tell you something,” she added, “since I recorded this song we have had several letters from them—this show doesn’t go down South does it?”
In a few cities, Allen told her.
“They’re gonna cut you off tonight,” Nina warned.
“That’s all right.”
But Nina had more to say. She wanted Allen to appreciate how strong the reaction had been in some quarters. “We got several letters from Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama. Well I know about nine of the letters where they had actually broken up this recording and sent it back to the recording company, really, telling them it was in bad taste. How could I stoop to this? They missed the whole point. We also got a letter from the Ku Klux Klan,” though Nina admitted she hadn’t actually seen the letter. “I heard about it. I’m glad I didn’t see it. What astounds me,” she continued, “if the song were sung about some other state they wouldn’t care.”
“You mean Rhode Island?” Allen wondered.
“Yeah,” Nina said. “It’s when it touches you personally that you have some violent reaction”—and she hit the table for emphasis before getting up and going over to the piano.
Two lines into the song the network censor was activated: “Everybody knows about Mississippi BLEEP BLEEP” though when the camera panned Nina’s face, it was clear what she was saying. She improvised the second verse apparently to reflect the latest from the civil rights front: “Alabama’s got me so upset/St. Augustine’s made me lose my rest”—a reference to the recent arrests in that Florida city during civil rights protests.
The network bleeped the chorus all through the song, but it was obvious from Nina’s expression that she was anything but amused. She looked positively angry when she sang, “Don’t tell me—I’ll tell you,” and one could imagine viewers at home flinching on the sofa. Nina did soften one verse, if only slightly. She usually sang, “Oh but this country is full of lies/You’re all gonna die and die like flies.” Tonight she was more inclusive: “We’re gonna die and die like flies.” After the final “Mississippi bleep bleep,” Nina jumped up from the piano.
“That’s it!” she yelled, and took her bow.
NINA GOT BACK to New York in time to perform at a CORE benefit September 12 on Long Island with popular folksinger Pete Seeger. Fortunately the concert was in the evening and didn’t interfere with celebrating Lisa’s second birthday. Nina loved watching her daughter blow out the candles, marvelling that this adorable little girl was hers. “And Lisa,” she mused to a friend not long after the party. “I always wanted to be physically, naturally acceptably beautiful. (I have to work at it.) Hers is all natural, a physically perfect girl.” Lisa was light-skinned like Andy and had his delicate features rather than the broad, distinctive nose and lips that all the Waymon siblings shared. Though Lisa could barely reach the keyboard, she wanted to play the piano, too, and it must have tickled Nina to watch Lisa plunk her little fingers over the keys.
By this time Andy had moved Stroud Productions and Enterprises Inc. to Manhattan, taking space on lower Fifth Avenue. He also established an affiliation with the International Talent Association, which would help with bookings and publicity. The timing was good, coming just as Philips released Nina’s second album on the label, Broadway-Blues-Ballads, which had been recorded at those spring sessions. (Compound-genre titles seemed to be a trend. Harry Belafonte had just released Ballads, Blues & Boasters and Johnny Mathis’s latest was Ballads of Broadway.) The first track, the evocative “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” fit either the “blues” or the “ballads” referred to in the title. Such an unusual and powerful mix of sound and sentiment could have brought Nina her biggest hit. But four months later the British group the Animals took it away from her. Nina never forgot either. When Eric Burdon, the Animals’ lead singer, introduced himself after one of her concerts, she let him know it.
Nina celebrating her daughter Lisa’s second birthday in Mount Vernon
(Bernard Gotfryd)
“So you’re the honky motherfucker who stole my song and got a hit out of it?” Taken aback, Burdon quickly recovered. “I’ll admit that your rendition inspired us to record the song. Besides, the Animals having a hit with it has paved the way for you in Europe. They’re waiting for you.” Nina took in the comment and then extended her hand. “My name is Nina Simone,” she said. “Sit down.”
Among the “Broadway” part of this new album were “Night Song” from Golden Boy and “Something Wonderful” from The King and I. The label also included the live version of “See-Line Woman” that had been performed March 21 at Carnegie Hall. It stood out from the rest of the heavily orchestrated tracks if for no other reason than the absence of strings. Once again Langston allowed the use of his tone poem to Nina, this time slightly revised and taking up most of the back cover.
Though Variety called the album a good illustration of Nina’s “arty inclinations,” and Cash Box praised Nina’s “rich soaring lyrical voice,” this album didn’t do very well either. But Nina’s record sales seemed to have little to do with her draw as a live performer. She was recruited to be part of a package tour with Harry James and his band that made stops at Carnegie Hall, Chicago’s Arie Crown Theater, and a few other Midwestern venues before ending in Nebraska. “Mississippi Goddam” was still proving to be controversial. The Chicago Defender would not print the title, and Nina told columnist Beatrice Watson that she adhered to a request not to perform the song in Chicago because it was “thought to be in poor taste and not good for occasions of this sort.” The suggestive “Go Limp” on the other hand got “quite a response,” Watson later reported.
SETTLED INTO HIS NEW Manhattan office, Andy devoted a good part of November to an ambitious project: a thirty-page booklet of photographs with narrative interspersed that presented Nina’s story as they wanted it told. While several of the photos featured Nina in performance, including the amusing shot of her in apron and kerchief performing “Pirate Jenny,” the most arresting were the family photos: Nina in the garden at Mount Vernon with Lisa, snuggling with her in a chair, Nina and Andy affectionately reclining in the yard, and a casual portrait of the three of them, probably taken in the fall. Nina and Andy are wearing jackets; Lisa, bundled in a thick sweater, is smiling, her head resting just under Nina’s chin. The pamphlet projects the picture-perfect world that Nina dreamt of in her loneliest moments, a woman with a thriving career and a happy family. The Christmas card Nina and Andy had chosen this year was distinctly religious. On the front “A Joyous Christmas” was written in Old English script, printed next to a picture of an open prayer book on a stand that rested in a small archway. A page marker with a small cross lay on the book’s right-hand page. The message inside in formal script read, “Sincerely wishing you all the blessings of the Christmas Season and a New Year filled with Happiness and Peace. NINA, LISA, AND ANDY STROUD.”
The holiday season, however, proved to be anything but peaceful. Right before Christmas, Nina instructed Max Cohen to file a lawsuit against Premier Records, a small independent label, and the R. H. Macy company for the unauthorized release and subsequent sale of an album Premier called Starring Nina Simone. When Nina listened to the disc, she realized it was a compilation of old demo tapes made in 1955-56, when Jerry Field had been representing her. Premier claimed Field had signed a contract with them allowing release of the music, a claim Nina found ridiculous. In a lengthy deposition Nina contended that Field had no such right to make a deal on her behalf and that she had never signed anything with Premier.
Though the lawyers clearly influenced Nina’s language, her statement nonetheless reflected the fierce pride she took in her work. One can only image the hauteur in her voice as she expressed her resentment that Macy’s would display this counterfeit record right next to her releases from Colpix and Philips, as though this album was as current as the others and recorded with the same kind of studio-level equipment. “My professional reputation depends upon the maintenance of a high standard of artistic and technical competence,” she declared. “In fact my recording contracts reserve for me the unique and exceptional right to oversee and pass upon the artistic and technical qualities of all records which embody my recording performances prior to the manufacture and distribution of any records.” The next sentence was underlined for emphasis in the written transcript: “I am one of the few top Artists granted this very unusual privilege by contract.” Nina asked for a million dollars in damages.
No one knew how many of these bootlegged albums had actually been sold, but those who heard the music could recognize the seeds of “Mississippi Goddam” in “Lovin’ Woman,” which had that same insistent two-beat rhythm.
Nina had agreed to play a jazz show at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles right after Christmas, but the event dissolved into a riot before she and a handful of other acts could take the stage. The promoter apparently had not raised enough money, and when Bobby “Blue” Bland told the audience, “Man, there isn’t enough bread to sing for. I’m getting out,” some of the fans stormed the box office and demanded their money back. Mirrors and windows were smashed and furniture was torn up before police could restore order.
Much more troubling than the Los Angeles fiasco was Lorraine’s poor health. As the new year dawned, Nina realized that her friend might not even make it through January.