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Nina Simone
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The Biography


The Biography

This riveting new biography of Nina Simone reveals the extraordinary life-story of one the world’s most unique and inspired performers who was also a committed civil rights activist.

 

A good summer holiday read? Depends what you’re looking for. Personally, I was riveted to this incredible, if at times torturous, story that begins in post-slavery North Carolina and traces the life of one Eunice Waymon from classical child prodigy to global acclaim as Nina Simone - one the world’s most unique and inspired but volatile and tempestuous performers. It’s a remarkable journey and it’s one which her French biographer David Brun-Lambert has clearly been at pains to unravel.

 

I was amazed to read that in 1943, at her first piano recital, 10 year old Eunice refused to play if her parents were forced to vacate their seats in the front row to make way for a white couple. There was clearly a fire burning against injustice inside of this woman from day one and it was a fire that fuelled her ambition to become America’s first Black classical concert pianist and win a place at the prestigious Juilliard School in Philadelphia. She immersed herself in the music of Bach and the classical greats but despite the gruelling practice sessions the Juilliard exam result was a letter of rejection. It was a bitter blow tinged with the shadow of racism from which she never recovered.

 

Rejected but resilient, an angry and pragmatic Eunice Waylon sidestepped her strict Christian upbringing and took a job playing in a bar in Atlantic City. It was there that she was transformed from Eunice Waymon into Nina Simone. Word spread about this cultured young woman who confronted her audience with a collision of classical, pop tunes of the day and gospel. She drew in a student and bohemian crowd in search of something different. In essence the name she chose was exotic, sensuous and mysterious. It attracted the curious and, of course the rapacious attention of a music industry dedicated to dodgy deals. Nina Simone was no different to hundreds of other African American artists who signed away their lives in the 1950s and throughout this book Brun-Lambert sheds light on a succession of record deals that despite more than respectable sales did little but fuel the angst, anger and frustration that resided within her.

 

This biography illuminates Nina Simone’s move to New York in 1959 and the impact of her Town Hall Concert. Basically a star was born there. Nina took her place in the midst of a fantastic creative firmament that included emerging jazz giants like John Coltrane, folk artists like Bob Dylan and Odetta and Black intellectuals like James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry and Leroi Jones.

 

James Baldwin and Langston Hughes became Nina’s mentors. When she touched down on African soil in Nigeria in December 1961 she was flanked by these two heavyweight and internationally celebrated authors. That first visit to Africa was a wake-up call and as her political awareness evolved so did her commitment to change in America. Following the murders of Dr King, Malcolm X and the persecution of Stokely Carmichael her political views progressed from Civil Rights to Black Power and the armed struggle. Brun-Lambert paints a poignant picture of that era - the radicalism, the optimism, but constantly homes in on the disconnection between her evolution as an artist and a political activist and a demanding career schedule managed by a husband who battered and raped her on their wedding night.

 

Over 330 pages we are taken on a bizarre and painful journey that touches down on 1960s pop stardom, bankruptcy, Black Power and FBI pressure, a sojourn in the bizarre and ill-fated capital of Liberia, the seduction of the Barbadian Prime Minister, isolation and mental health issues, a succession of attempts to resuscitate a flagging career. It’s also a journey built around her music and this book had me chasing down a stack of recordings, like the powerful 1973 Emergency Ward! live album, that I simply had to listen to in order to put her jaw-dropping story into context.

 

From this book it was clear that as a performing artist the late great Nina Simone demanded a great deal from her audience. In later life this diva thought nothing of taking someone to task for trying to slip out of the hall during her set. She demanded respect for her music, for her art, and with that knowledge in mind it’s a shameful irony that in 2010 the troubled genius that was Nina Simone is beamed into our lives via a TV ad that endorses yogurt!

 

Nina Simone: The Biography by David Brun-Lambert (paperback) is published by Aurum

 


Nina Simone - Mississippi Goddam



Paul Bradshaw / Straight No Chaser


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