When Nina returned to the studio early in the new year, Andy asked Bernard Gotfryd, the Newsweek photographer, to shoot the session. He found an engaged performer talking over arrangements with Horace Ott, chatting with the backup singers, and studying the music. In one moment, between takes, Gotfryd caught Nina in silhouette, standing against the wall, her head bowed in deep contemplation. Resonant with possible interpretations, the photo offered the kind of intriguing shot to illuminate a future release.
This session featured more varied songs than the previous spring, including two rhythm-and-blues tunes from Andy with provocative titles: “Gimme Some” and “Take Care of Business.” The most unusual song, though, was Nina’s remake of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s wildly entertaining “I Put a Spell on You,” an original full of hollers, moans, and a rat-a-tat sax that in live performances featured Hawkins emerging from a coffin amid swirls of fake smoke like some voodoo prince. Hal Mooney set Nina amid his trademark strings but also added an evocative sax solo from Jerome Richardson that played off Nina’s vocals. She interspersed the lyrics with her version of scat singing, as if Bach was a bluesman and Ella Fitzgerald had done her signature moves in slow motion. This strange musical stew took the menace and camp out of the Hawkins original and turned the song into a mood piece. It was nonetheless effective because Nina sang with such conviction. She did the same in another musical departure, Jacques Brel’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” a song that pleads, “don’t leave me.” Surrounded by strings again, Nina cast herself as a chanteuse.
Nina in the studio, c.1965
(Bernard Gotfryd)
Philips planned to package several tracks into an album called I Put a Spell on You, set for a spring release.
ANDY AND FELIX GERSTMAN had joined up again to present Nina in another solo concert at Carnegie Hall January 15, their most ambitious outing yet. Nina would play the first half with her regular musicians—Lisle, Bobby, Rudy, and Al Schackman, who had temporarily rejoined the group. In the second half she would perform with a thirty-five-piece orchestra conducted by Mooney. Not only that, her parents, Kate and J.D., would be there, and also Miss Mazzy, her beloved first piano teacher. Determined to have a look that matched the evening, Nina enlisted Dorothea Towles to be her fashion consultant. Towles had been the first successful black model in Paris, a regular on the runways of top-tier designers Christian Dior and Elsa Schiaparelli. Having parlayed her success in Europe to help black models in the United States, Towles now found ways to combine her talents with support of civil rights causes. One of her more notable events, “Fashions for Freedom,” combined a fashion show that featured Towles and her models showing off their outfits to the music of Count Basie and his orchestra. According to the Amsterdam News, Nina snapped up sixty tickets.
Reflecting Towles’s influence even before she stepped on the Carnegie stage, Nina arrived at the theater swathed in a luxuriant full-length mink coat with the eye-catching accessory of a silver buckle just below the waist. She had acquired a hairdresser for the evening, a man named Frenchie Casimir, and he had pulled Nina’s own hair off her forehead and affixed a three-section circular hairpiece at the back of her head like an elaborate ponytail. Nina had chosen the same evening gown she had worn on The Steve Allen Show four months earlier; it had a white sheath skirt, and a top and removable train that were dark but with white appliqued flowers. Backstage Towles applied sequins strategically on her eyebrows and eyelids that only accentuated the false eyelashes she had already put on. Though not as dramatic as Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and his smoke-shrouded coffin, Nina’s ensemble sent the message that she, too, could cast a spell.
At her mood-setting best in the first set, Nina took the audience through ballads, folk material, and songs that even when secular in nature seemed like hymns. She might start by idly fingering the piano keys to no apparent purpose, humming a little and then singing a lyric until it all unfolded into a song. The four sidemen, picking up the cue, comfortably molded their parts into a satisfying whole. Nina prefaced “Mississippi Goddam” with a note of optimism, announcing that it was “not quite as urgent as it used to be.” She was referring to the morning’s news that a federal grand jury had indicted several individuals in connection with the deaths of the three civil rights workers the previous summer.
When Nina came out for the second half, she walked to center stage to introduce Mooney and the orchestra. She seemed tickled to have all these classically trained musicians behind her. “We went high class,” she said, showing off the elbow-length white gloves she had put on. Nina sang part of this set standing at the microphone. When she sat down at the piano for other numbers, the gloves now removed, Nina paused to reflect on the moment. “It was the kind of concert I would kill for when I was Eunice Waymon,” she thought to herself. She looked up to where Miss Mazzy was sitting, and even though Nina couldn’t see her face, she was sure Miss Mazzy, too, understood how much had happened since those first lessons back in Tryon.
But having to mesh with the orchestra made Nina much less comfortable than usual. In the middle of one song, she actually sang a warning to Mooney to slow down. She may have called this second half “high class,” but many preferred Nina low-down, Langston (who had also attended) among them. However, he said so with kind circumspection. “Your Carnegie Hall concert was terrific!” he wrote a few days later. “Except that you don’t need an orchestra. You YOURSELF are enough for anybody’s money.”
At the post-concert celebration Nina couldn’t wait to see her parents. J. D. Waymon was bursting with pride, but Kate said nothing. Nina was hurt, her disappointment compounded when Miss Mazzy later told her that Kate expressed her pride when Nina wasn’t around. “I longed for her to say it just once,” Nina confided in her memoir.
IT MUST HAVE BEEN sheer willpower that enabled Nina to pull off the Carnegie Hall concert even with her parents and Miss Mazzy in attendance. Those closest to her knew that she had walked onstage with a heavy heart. Lorraine had died on January 12. Her last days had been difficult. For a time as cancer spread through her body, she had even lost her sight. But by some miracle it had returned, enough so that she could see the gold and amber necklace her ex-husband, Robert Nemiroff, had given her as a Christmas present. (Though they had divorced, they remained close.) He was at the hospital as much as he could be while tending to business with Lorraine’s most recent play, The Sign in Sidney Brusteins Window. Decidedly mixed reviews and the resulting poor box office were imperiling its run. Lorraine’s sister, Mamie, had come from California in October and remained in her room full-time.
Early in January Lorraine had asked for Nina. She went to the hospital with a record player and put on a recording of “In the Evening by the Moonlight.” She never forgot her friend’s reaction. “They say I’m not going to get better, but I must get well,” Lorraine told Nina. “I must go down to the South. I’ve been a revolutionary all my life, but I’ve got to go down there to find out what kind of revolutionary I am.” All Nina could do was listen and take Lorraine’s haunted words as a challenge.
Barely twelve hours after the final applause at Carnegie, Nina per-formed at Lorraine’s funeral at Harlem’s Church of the Master. Spent and, beyond tears, she played “In the Evening by the Moon-light” and an Israeli folk song that was one of Lorraine’s favorites. She nodded approvingly as Paul Robeson, making one of his rare public appearances, recited a verse from a black folk song he said reminded him of Lorraine. “Sometimes I feel like an eagle in the air, an eagle in the air … As Lorraine says farewell,” Robeson went on, “she bids us keep our heads high and to hold onto our strength and powers, to soar like an eagle.” Nina understood exactly what Shelley Winters meant when through her sobs she told the packed sanctuary, “I am unreconciled to her death… .”
Lorraine had mentioned that she was working on a new play, tentatively titled “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” Nina stored that title away, determined to use it in some way to honor her friend’s memory.
ANDY AND NINA HAD BOOKED a ten-day Caribbean cruise for January. The timing turned out to be fortuitous; the emotional highs and lows of the last two weeks had drained them. They managed smiles and good cheer at a bon voyage party with friends who toasted them with champagne before the ship set sail, though Nina could hardly wait to relax the minute she got to their room. Her plan for uninterrupted rest went awry on the very first day at sea because of a lifeboat drill. “Some shit!” she grumbled, as she, Andy, and Lisa donned their life jackets and hurried to the deck to await further instruction along with the other passengers.
Eventually settled in, Nina slept most of the first few days, finally emerging for a shore trip to Guadalupe. Andy snapped a photo of her and Lisa holding hands as they disembarked, mother and daughter wearing matching sundresses and headbands, though Lisa’s was adorned with a little bow. The family returned to New York January 28. As if to bookend the trip, Andy snapped another photo of mother and daughter as they got off the ship in the cold Manhattan air. Perhaps still inspired by Dorothea Towles’s fashion instruction, Nina had put on an animal print double-breasted coat and knee-high boots. Lisa, no less fashionable, wore a jacket with a fur-lined hood that framed her face.
Nina had scribbled some notes to herself during the cruise, and on the last day she committed a confession to writing: “I stole a book about psychic power, which could be of tremendous help if I’d use it seriously. Perhaps I shall.” The book might have been on her mind when she gave an interview right after the cruise and mused on the mysteries of her talent. “Music chose me,” Nina told a reporter for the Newspaper Enterprise Association, which syndicated feature stories. “I’m learning to control this gift, but I hate it too. It’s a tremendous responsibility, and I find myself wondering why I was given something other people don’t have. Sometimes it makes me feel guilty.”
But only sometimes. At other moments Nina was both proud and protective of her art, the lawsuit against Premier and Macy’s serving as ample evidence. Max Cohen greeted her on her return with good news. He had settled the suit for a substantial sum—rumored to be $25,ooo—plus 5 percent of the total amount from sales of the unauthorized Starring Nina Simone release. Cohen told the Amsterdam News that the settlement would help protect the rights of other artists against unauthorized release of their early works without their permission.
THE HARLEM BRANCH of the YMCA of Greater New York honored Nina February 28. The Amsterdam News billed the benefit evening as “the first time she will be presented in concert in the Harlem community,” but Jesse H. Walker, the News “Theatricals” columnist, used the event to needle Andy. He was miffed that Andy or one of his representatives had ignored the black press before Nina’s Carnegie event—they “decided they didn’t need the Negro press to cover her concert …’We have sufficient coverage’ we were told.” Walker said he would mention the YMCA benefit only once and provide no further publicity.
When Andy learned of the columnist’s barb, he hurried to smooth things over. Popular as Nina might be, he didn’t want to antagonize the News, least of all its influential entertainment writer. “We had no intention of demeaning the name of pianist Nina Simone in the civil rights struggle, an apparently mollified Walker wrote in a subsequent column, “since the North Carolina born entertainer has always—not just lately—been in the forefront of those fighting for the Negro’s cause. Our concern was with the manner in which we were handled when we made inquiry in the office which handles Miss Simone.” He noted that the YMCA had netted $1,296.12 from Nina’s benefit.
BY THE TIME NINA RETURNED to the Village Gate in March, “Alabama’s got me so upset,” the opening line of “Mississippi Goddam,” was both descriptive and prophetic. The civil rights front had recently moved in full force to a voter registration drive in tiny Selma, roughly forty miles west of Montgomery, the state capital. Despite extensive work by SNCC in surrounding Dallas County, only 353 blacks—barely 2 percent of those eligible—had been able to register at the courthouse in Selma. White officials restricted office hours and employed a highly dubious literacy test to thwart the registration effort. Dr. King, who had just received the Nobel Peace Prize, came to Selma, adding immeasurable heft to the effort.
When an order from a federal judge to speed up the registration process proved ineffective, movement leaders prepared for decisive action: a march from Selma to Montgomery to confront Governor George Wallace, the region’s most vocal segregationist. On Sunday, March 7, the 525 demonstrators, arms linked as they headed through Selma, were confronted by state troopers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which spans the Alabama River. As they started to cross, Major John Cloud told the marchers their protest was “not conducive to public safety.” He gave them two minutes to disperse. Hosea Williams, one of King’s lieutenants, asked for “a word with you.”
“There is no word to be had,” Cloud replied.
Two more brief exchanges followed, and when the protesters remained in place, Cloud broke the silence: “Troopers advance.” Roy Reed of The New York Times, among the reporters gathered to cover the protest, provided a vivid account of the action in the next day’s paper, chronicling what citizens across the country had seen on their television sets: “The mounted possemen spurred their horses and rode at a run into the retreating mass. The Negroes cried out as they crowded together for protection and the whites on the sidelines whooped and cheered. The Negroes paused in their retreat for perhaps a minute,” Reed went on, “still screaming and huddling together. Suddenly there was a report like a gunshot, and a gray cloud spewed over the troopers and the Negroes.”
It was tear gas.
“The cloud began covering the highway,” Reed continued. “But before the cloud finally hid it all there were several seconds of unobstructed views. Fifteen or twenty nightsticks could be seen through the gas flailing at the heads of the marchers.”
President Johnson had deliberately withheld a strong show of federal force before the march, fearing it would only inflame the situation. But after “Bloody Sunday,” as the day became known, he faced enormous pressure to act, particularly because King promised to lead another March to Montgomery right away. After intense negotiations among movement leaders and federal and state authorities, however, King agreed to a delay, though he led a symbolic protest on the ninth. On March 15 the president made a nationally televised address to a joint session of Congress laying out his plans for new voting rights legislation. The signal moment in the House chamber came when Johnson, a Southerner himself, embraced the civil rights anthem as his own, promising the country, “And we shall overcome.”
That same day fifteen thousand individuals marched through Harlem to protest what had happened in Selma and to support the voting rights drive. Similar demonstrations were taking place in cities and towns across the country, all of them a backdrop to high-wire negotiations between the president and Governor Wallace to guarantee a peaceful march. Finally on March 21 the last legal hurdles were cleared, and the activists set off on their three-day journey to Montgomery.
The news accounts coming out of Alabama consumed Nina, and when she and Art D’Lugoff, still the Gate’s impresario, learned that a concert for the marchers was planned for Montgomery, they knew they had to participate. Art immediately canceled the rest of the week’s shows, but he didn’t just post a notice at the Gate’s door. He took out an ad in the March 24 edition of the Times to declare that “Miss Nina Simone will not perform TONIGHT. Instead she will be in MONTGOMERY, ALA helping to make a little history (along with her husband Andy Stroud, musician Al Schackman and Art D’Lugoff).”
Art arranged to fly them to Montgomery, but because they couldn’t find a direct flight, they had to stop in Atlanta and hire a private plane for the rest of the journey. “We had a real cracker,” Art recalled of the pilot. His plane was so small that it took several tries to spread the weight properly so the plane could get airborne. “We arrived safely,” Art said, the unsympathetic pilot notwithstanding.
Alabama’s white legislators probably didn’t know of Nina’s “Go Limp,” but the song foreshadowed their claims of inappropriate and lascivious behavior during the march. The day before the concert the legislature passed a resolution declaring “evidence of much fornication” among the demonstrators and asserting that “young women are returning to their respective states apparently as unwed expectant mothers.”
The concert was held at a muddy ball field on the grounds of the City of St. Jude, a Roman Catholic parochial school and hospital complex near Montgomery’s city limits. The constant rain and wind had blown down a tent intended to provide cover, so a stage was hastily erected from coffin crates donated by Selma undertakers and overlaid with sheets of plywood. Harry Belafonte had coordinated the entire concert and pulled together a stellar cast: Sammy Davis Jr. had canceled performances of Golden Boy on Broadway to attend; Peter, Paul and Mary, the popular folk trio, were on hand. Leonard Bernstein came because “I just wanted to be with you.” He had wanted to bring the entire New York Philharmonic “but there just wasn’t room.” Tony Bennett, Tony Perkins, Shelley Winters, Billy Eckstine, Odetta, and comedians Nipsey Russell, Dick Gregory, and Alan King were also on hand. Belafonte told The New York Times another 150 performers couldn’t get flights.
By the time Nina, Andy, Al, and Art got to the grounds, the music had already started and the atmosphere was surreal. A big army searchlight fastened to the back of a truck lighted the area, picking up the tiny outlines of children perched in trees near the stage. More than fifty individuals already had been treated for exhaustion, worn out by the combination of heat, humidity, and the crush of bodies jammed together in the muddy field. Peter, Paul and Mary had played “If I Had a Hammer,” which thrilled the crowd, and then moved into the equally apt “The Times They Are A’Changin’.” Tony Bennett’s sweetly sung “Just in Time” took on special meaning, too. When Nina’s turn came, Al looked for a place to plug in his amplifier and asked Belafonte’s drummer, Ralph MacDonald, what to do. MacDonald told him to pull up a canvas sheet that had been laid over the plywood, and he would find an outlet. “Oh, my God!” Al exclaimed when he saw the coffin crates holding up the stage.
MacDonald just laughed: “Welcome to Montgomery.”
Nina knew exactly what to play even if in this outing “Mississippi Goddam” had only Al’s accompaniment. Her enthusiasm made it work, a moment of revelation as she faced the tired but hopeful protesters. “Those kids out in the backwoods knew I was part of their fight before I knew it myself,” she recalled, admiring their courage because they didn’t have the comfort and protection of fame as she did and risked harm every day. Nina was convinced she had to join them, finding no other word for it than “destiny.”
Not surprisingly the crowd gave its biggest cheer to her improvised line: “Selma made me lose my rest.” An otherwise exhilarating moment had only one off-kilter element, the mismatch between Nina’s message and what she wore. Dressed in a plaid skirt, white blouse, and dark vest, she looked more like a college coed on her way to class than a civil rights protester.
BILLBOARD’S “JAZZ BEAT” COLUMNIST Del Shields devoted his May 29 installment to Nina, praising her for a “fierce integrity that she will not abandon. She does not try to hide behind the show business fagade to keep ‘the image.’” Her performance a few weeks earlier at Hunter College illustrated his point. Aggravated by a balky microphone, Nina prowled around the stage herself, looking to fix the problem. When it was finally taken care of, she sat back down and announced, “I’m sick of this concert already; too many difficulties!” But she didn’t stop. Instead she wove her aggravation into an extemporaneous lyric. Shields declined to criticize her, trying instead to give perspective to her behavior. “A high degree of honesty can sometimes produce explosive consequences,” he wrote. “People who know Nina well realize that her occasional outbursts stem more from pain than anger.” Not only had her good friend Lorraine died, but Malcolm X, the Black Muslim leader, had been gunned down in Harlem February 21. Nina was especially close to his widow, Betty Shabazz, and their children because Malcolm had moved them to Mount Vernon for safety after his split with Elijah Muhammad, the head of the Black Muslim movement. The loss of these two individuals only deepened Nina’s convictions and heightened her awareness of how race was shaping her own place in the world.
Shields had tied his column to the release of I Put a Spell on You, which went on the magazine’s Top 200 June 26. It stayed there for two months, rising to number ninety-nine, which made it somewhat more successful than the in concert album, but once again not a hit. The single of the title track, however, was more successful, going on the Billboard R&B chart July 23 and rising to number twenty-three. It was Nina’s best showing on the singles chart since the fall of 1959 with “I Love You, Porgy.”
WHEN NINA RETURNED to the studio in May, Philips, as Colpix had, looked for different strategies that might increase her sales. But Nina’s best songs still turned out to be those that moved her and took advantage of her own arrangements. Though in later years she would chafe at comparisons to Billie Holiday, right now she paid homage, first with “Tell Me More and More and Then Some,” which Holiday wrote, and then with “Strange Fruit,” Abel Meeropol’s anti-lynching masterpiece, forever associated with Holiday. Unlike the original, Nina’s had no introduction. She jumped right into “Southern trees bearing strange fruit.” She employed the same dramatics used to such good effect in “Pirate Jenny” so that in her hands “Strange Fruit” became an indictment, not a lament.
The tour de force of the sessions, however, was a ten-minute version of “Sinnerman,” a traditional song taken from a Bible verse and arranged by Nina as a frantic plea for absolution. Live versions went on even longer, according to Bobby, who was responsible for keeping the steady beat and recognizing rhythm changes when Nina “would just swing out.” The end result once again evoked those St. Luke revival meetings decades earlier, and somewhere in this charged performance, even though she was in the studio with only her musicians and the technicians, Nina had “come through” again and taken the music to another plane.
In an inverview with Doug McClelland, the editor of Record World, a new addition to the music trades, Nina reveled in her intensity. “I feel emotion is dying, what we feel is dying, everything is so orderly,” she told him. “Raising your voice has become a crime! I want to evoke joy, sadness, pain….”
ON JUNE 26, Nina, Andy, Lisa, and a nanny, along with Lisle, Bobby, and Rudy, left for a six-country tour that started in England the first week of July. The Amsterdam News published a photograph of Nina at the New York airport just before she was getting ready to leave. A variation on the theme of the booklet Andy had prepared a few months earlier, the picture showed a sweet family moment of a mother reading to her daughter. Nina wore a stylish gray dress with a capelike jacket and a turban on her head. Lisa had on a checked dress and shiny patent leather shoes, her white anklets matching her little hat.
Arriving ahead of the first opening night, everyone went sight seeing. Nina and Andy rented bicycles with a little seat for Lisa on one of them and “pedaled around town like a couple of kids.” A photo of Nina and Lisa on a bike made it back to the United States, where The Philadelphia Tribune gave it prominent play on the entertainment page.
Nina was booked into Annie’s Room, a club named for the singer Annie Ross, who had been part of the groundbreaking vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. She left the group in 1962 and moved to London. Friends suggested she open a club—they would put up the money if she would be the hostess. By the time of Nina’s two-week stint, Annie’s Room had established itself as one of London’s livelier nightspots, known not only for the acts it brought but also for the celebrities in the audience. The actor Peter O’Toole often came by. So did Jimmy Baldwin when he was in town, and occasionally they could be persuaded to join in an impromptu group number onstage. Ross remembered one particularly boozy version of the blues that left everyone in stitches.
The last time Ross had crossed paths with Nina—in Pittsburgh while Ross was still with her singing trio—Nina had been frosty. “She would only talk to Jon Hendricks,” Ross recalled. And nobody knew why. Nina was all smiles now and ready to meet an entirely new audience. David Nathan, a young fan who attended opening night with his father and uncle, remembered that Nina stayed away from her more controversial material—no “Mississippi Goddam”—and instead sang such favorites as “Zungo.”
The crowd gave her a “rapturous reception,” according to Melody Maker, though the reviewer found Nina “better on record,” as the headline on his story read. “Her music is fine, her piano playing tremendous,” he wrote. “But her tortured facial expressions and cabaret-style histrionics don’t fit the picture. It’s all a bit too ‘showbiz’ for comfort.”
Nina didn’t care. She drank in the loud applause and London’s cosmopolitan atmosphere. “This place is something,” she wrote her younger brother, Sam. “I’ve done lots of traveling in the states but London doesn’t seem to have anything in common with the states.” Although everyone spoke English, it was a different kind of English. She got a kick out of “jolly good” or “splendid,” or “swiftly” as a compliment for doing something fast, she wrote. “All the music is Negro!” she added. “All the music, mind you.”
She went further in an interview with the Evening Star. “The nice thing is that they give credit and respect where it is due, something they don’t do too much at home,” she said. By this time the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were all over the U.S. record charts, and they always acknowledged their debt to the American rhythm-and-blues artists who had influenced them. Two of the Beatles, who had just returned to London from a European tour, had even dropped in one night, Bobby said, though years later, he couldn’t recall which two.
Nina, Andy, and Lisa were staying in the Mayfair section of London, just off the city’s famous Park Lane. Nina took time in her room one evening to write Langston a letter—long overdue, she admitted—reflecting not only on the trip but also on how much his autobiographical The Big Sea had affected her. She was sorting so many things out in her mind now, and deprived of Lorraine’s counsel when it would have meant so much, she turned to Langston to fill the void.
“I read chapters over and over again—’cause certain ones paint complete pictures for me and I get completely absorbed: then, too, if I’m in a negative mood and want to get more negative (about the racial problem, I mean) if I want to get downright mean and violent I go straight to this book and there is also material for that,” Nina wrote. “Amazing. I use the book—what I mean is I underline all meaningful sentences to me—I make comments in pencil about certain paragraphs. Etc. And as I said there is a wealth of knowledge concerning the negro problem, especially if one wants to trace the many many areas that we’ve had it rough in all these years—sometimes when I’m with white ‘liberals’ who want to know why we’re so bitter—I forget (I don’t forget—I just get tongue-tied) how complete has been the white race’s rejection of us all these years. And then when this happens, I go get your book.”
Despite two successful weeks at Annie’s Room and a performance on the popular television show Ready Steady Go!, Nina closed her letter on a strangely down note. Her melancholy overwhelmed any excitement about playing for the first time in France and Belgium. “No pleasure,” she told Langston, “just work.”
NINA GOT STAR BILLING at the big jazz festival held in the ancient port town of Antibes Juan-les-Pins on France’s Mediterranean coast. Nervous the first night, she quickly found her stride after she sized up the crowd. “I needed the audience to get to know me,” she told a reporter later. “The second the audience knew that it could listen to me I had nothing more to prove, and I was more relaxed.”
Nina and the trio also played a private party for a wealthy family in Monaco, followed by a dazzling meal on a docked ship that had been turned into a restaurant. Andy was both manager and maestro, coordinating Nina and the band and doing his best to keep her on an even keel. The French jazz press treated her like the toast of the town, and ever mindful of her need to relax—by shopping or chatting poolside at the hotel with friends—Andy orchestrated who could talk to her and when. He put off one persistent reporter, Philippe Carles of Jazz, for almost half a day before finally telling Carles he could accompany Nina in a taxi to a late-night job in the nearby village of Valbonne.
Carles found Nina “haughty but courteous.” Andy instructed him not to be timid: “Get close to her, and don’t be afraid …get acquainted.” Nina, however, did little to put Carles at ease. “Journalists!” she roared when he tossed her what he considered an innocent question. “But I’ve met tons of them since I arrived in France! You must be at least the fifteenth.” Carles tried to draw her out about her live performances. “I never sing the same way in a cabaret, in a concert hall, or at a festival,” she told him. “I change my repertoire according to setting. I know when I need to sing something sweet, sentimental, fast or violent.”
Nina was irritated when Carles asked if she worried too much about the kind of piano she played. How well could he get his information with a substandard tape recorder? she snapped. “Of course the quality of the piano is the most important thing. I am first a pianist. When the piano is lousy, I leave.” By this time they were at the club, and Nina immediately went over to the piano and struck a few keys. “No,” she said, “it’s not the worst.” Then she played a chord lower down on the keyboard. “But it’s not the best either.” It would do. The piano bench was another matter; it wasn’t a bench at all but rather a wicker chair with extra cushions that matched the club decor. Carles translated Andy’s request to the manager to get a real bench. But he waved off the suggestion. On this night neither Nina nor Andy chose to argue.
Nina was more philosophical when she talked with a reporter from Jazz Hot, picking up on some of the things she had written to Langston. “I feel my origins very deeply,” she said. “My art is anchored in the culture of my people, and I am immensely proud … Because of a lack of respect that endures even after hundreds of years, each time I go to a new country, I feel obliged, proudly, to assert my race, and don’t fool yourself,” she went on, “no matter what I sing, whether it’s a ballad or a lament, it’s all the same thing—I want people to know who I am.”
Pressed about the way she put songs together, Nina could only say, “I make a concentrated effort, even though people have told me that it comes to me naturally. It’s the atmosphere of the moment. I’m convinced it has to be that way. Time passes no matter what we do, and it’s time that matters, not action. When I sing, there’s a moment in my life that passes by.”
Asked about her musical influences, Nina’s penchant for recasting the past surfaced again. “I know, as people have often told me, that I’m similar to Billie Holiday,” she said. “I suppose that’s because we have identical lives. In one or two ways I have gone through things that she went through, both musically and personally; always pushed down, rejected. That’s the way it is. When you are at such a point, you sing with a sort of resigned, disillusioned air about you.” That the actual particulars of their lives, from childhood on, differed greatly was immaterial. In this telling it didn’t matter to Nina that she was never in the grip of a well-chronicled drug addiction like Holiday’s or the legal and health problems that came with it. Emotionally, at least, Nina felt as though she struggled just as much, and the feeling spoke to the melancholy that could cloud her life.
The European tour ended in Coblenz, Germany, on August 1, a slice of the performance preserved in a photo of Nina and the trio onstage that was published a week later in the Pittsburgh Courier as a kind of welcome home.
OVER THE SUMMER CORE asked Nina to join an “Artists Evening for CORE” to raise money. Andy sent regrets, but he did offer Nina’s services for benefit concerts in various cities at a reduced cost: $1,000 for weekdays, $1,500 for a Saturday or Sunday. Normally, Nina received $2,500 or $3,000 per concert, he explained. “I am doing this because it will help the civil rights cause, give Miss Simone a chance to do more for the cause and at the same time provide her with enough compensation to prevent her losing money,” Andy added.
Nina relaxing at the Fire Island, New York, home of Art and Avital D’Lugoff
(Courtesy of the DLugoffs)
Right away CORE sent out notices to its California chapters letting them know that Nina was going to be in Los Angeles in October and in San Francisco the first week of November. The Stockton chapter responded immediately, but national CORE officials worried that the local group couldn’t cover the expenses. However, East Coast chapters had expressed interest, convinced that Nina would draw well, and discussions with Andy continued about later concerts in the region.
Her latest album, Pastel Blues, was released in late summer and showed up on the Billboard charts October 16. As measured by the music trade, it was the least successful of Nina’s Philips albums thus far, rising only to number 139. The views of The Washington Post’s Byron Roberts reflected the Billboard tally. He found the album “done with aplomb but with a modicum of Miss Simone’s great talent.” Except for “Strange Fruit.” “Miss Simone,” he wrote, “could well be a Pied Piper of Freedom marchers on this one.”
At least this reviewer had recognized the passionate intensity that now informed Nina’s work. “The first thing I saw in the morning when I woke up was my black face in the bathroom mirror,” she wrote later, reflecting on the moment, “and that fixed the way I felt about myself for the rest of the day, that I was a black-skinned woman in a country where you could be killed because of that one fact.”
All of this internal turbulence fueled Nina’s latest composition. She put it down on vinyl in the next session with Horace Ott. Simply titled “Four Women,” it compressed two centuries of black history into four compact verses, as if she was turning in a final class paper in song, the end point of a highly personal course of study and a synthesis of her gifts and her identity, one fueling the other. Each verse described a woman who was an archetype of an era: Aunt Sarah, the mammy; Sephronia, the light-skinned mulatto; Sweet Thing, the young prostitute; and Peaches, a surly street tough. The opening line declared a truth: “My skin is black.” And the muscular lyrics talked of slavery, rape, prostitution, and the threat of wanting “to kill the first mother I see.”
If “Mississippi Goddam,” its biting lyrics aside, had undeniable bounce, no one would confuse “Four Women” with a “show tune.” Nina played simple chords and an occasional single-note pattern. Rudy’s restrained guitar and few measures of flute counterpoint matched the quiet strokes from Lisle and Bobby, as if all three were whispering, not wanting to interrupt as Nina spun out her story. It made the final two lines, about the street tough, all the more compelling when Nina shouted, “My name is PEACHES!” Up to that moment “Four Women” had been in a minor key. In a musical exclamation point, Nina ended with a triumphant chord in A major.