Nina Simone

25:50However, events far beyond her control are about to set her on a new and extraordinary artistic path.

26:001963 is the year the civil rights movement reaches a new intensity. A thousand miles away from Carnegie Hall, down in Birmingham, Alabama, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. is spearheading a series of non-violent protests that lead to tense standoffs with the authorities. In the White House, John F. Kennedy addresses the nation in June to introduce new legislation designed to end segregation in public spaces and guaranteeing Black voting rights. Just hours later, Medgar Evers, a leading figure in the National Association for the Advancement of colored people is gunned down on his own driveway in Jackson, Mississippi.

26:41And there is more to come.

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27:52September the 15th, 1963, is a bright and clear Sunday morning in Birmingham, Alabama. 12-year-old Sarah Collins is with two of her sisters, Adi May and Janie. They're taking their time walking along the traffic-strewn roads in no particular rush to get to Sunday school. They throw Janie's purse between themselves in a game of catch until their destination rears into view. The 16th Street Baptist Church is an impressive red brick edifice with domed towers and a cupola. The girls skip up the wide staircase that leads to the main entrance, as worshippers spill into the main sanctuary area, abuzz with chatter.

28:40Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a regular preacher here, although not today. It is just three weeks since he gave his I Have a Dream speech in Washington in front of a quarter of a million marchers, adding wind to the sails of the activists within the local community. When Janie goes off to her class, Sarah sticks with Addy, two years her senior. They don't much like their Sunday school teacher, who has a habit of embarrassing them for their family's poverty. The pair sneak downstairs to the washrooms. Sarah turns on the taps of the sink, while Addy sits on a couch underneath a window. It is just up to 20 past 10.

29:25Soon, the door creaks open, and three more girls join them. Two 14-year-olds, Carol and Cynthia, and 11-year-old Denise. They are chatting happily. Denise helping Addy to retie the sash on her dress, when suddenly, the room shudders, the windows implode.

29:47When Sarah opens her eyes, it is as if she's been transported to a war zone. A seven-foot hole has been blasted into the external wall. Bewildered and breathless with shock, the 12-year-old looks for the others. Somehow she is still on her feet, but glass shards rain down on her, cutting her face and eyes. She hears a man outside shouting that the church has been bombed, and then is vaguely aware of being lifted up and out into the fresh air. An ambulance arrives on the scene and rushes her to hospital, its sirens blaring. As she is about to be taken to theater for an operation on her eyes, she hears her sister, Janie, who tells her that Adi has injured her back but will come to visit just as soon as she can.

30:35Sarah wants to believe her, but there is no mistaking the choke of tears in her big sister's voice.

30:49When Sarah returns from surgery, efforts to save her right eye having failed, she learns the truth. She is the only one of the five girls to survive the blast. A bomb consisting of a box of perhaps 19 sticks of dynamite had been set behind the wall of the washrooms. Just the latest in a series of bombings the city has suffered at the hands of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan. Along with the four dead girls, there are a further 20 casualties from among the congregation upstairs. In New York, Simone switches on the radio, and hears the news. Furious, she initially wants revenge, but will later explain that her husband suggests a different approach to channeling her anger.

31:35Nina, Andrew says to her, you can't kill anyone. You are a musician. Do what you do. Nina heard this story and says she sat down and she wrote the song Mississippi Goddamn in 20 minutes, having never written a song before. Obviously, she knew how songs worked. She had been singing them in lots of different ones and was inside of them. But the spark that that tragedy provided, that she responded to instantly, first draft, sat down and wrote this song. That was a landmark protest song that just, that came up in her and she could not resist, could not refuse. Pulling no punches, the song rages about the agonizing sluggishness of change and includes lines such as, this whole country is full of lies.

32:26No longer simply a brilliant interpreter of the words and music of others, she is becoming a vital voice in her own right. Mississippi Goddamn is very different from the protest songs that Dylan was writing. And he was writing, you know, these sort of metaphorical, poetic kinds of songs, and they had the impact that they did. She wrote down and named names and places with a title and a chorus that, you know, nobody would play on the radio. Nobody was going to circulate a song with Goddamn in the title. But she said, I don't care about that. This is what I feel like and what I have to say. It's absolutely unfiltered.

33:01It's absolutely direct.

33:06The song is banned in several states. But to those who agree with her, that only adds to its appeal. From out of nowhere, she has produced what many regard as perhaps the first great civil rights anthem. After Mississippi Goddamn, more extraordinary songs pour from her, like Four Women, which uses archetypes of African-American womanhood to explore sex, race, class, and oppression Her music becomes an unofficial soundtrack to the civil rights movement Andrew Young is one of the central figures, went on to become the United States Ambassador to the United Nations Later in his life, you know, important figure He said we would go door to door trying to find people to sign petitions or come on marches or donate money.

33:50And you heard Nina Simone Records playing behind every one of the doors that we knocked on. She was always there. Her music was always there. She plays benefit concerts for organizations, including the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Then, on the evening of Wednesday, March 24, 1965, Simone is at the City of St. Jude campus in Montgomery, Alabama.

34:16On a makeshift stage constructed from empty coffin crates from a local funeral home, she performs a breathtaking rendition of Mississippi Goddamn as part of a concert marking the landmark civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. The following day, tens of thousands complete the march, a demonstration of non-violent mass action. But it's only been a month since the assassination of prominent black nationalist and former Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X And just like he was, Simone is skeptical about how far non-violence will take the cause As she tells the story, or as he tells the story She meets Martin Luther King and says to him Dr.

35:00King, it's an honor to meet you, but I just want you to know I am not non-violent But she, from the beginning, presents herself with a sensibility that is different from the philosophy that Dr. King is advocating. Then, on the 4th of April 1968, the world learns that King has been assassinated as he stood on a hotel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee.

35:26Three days later, at New York's Westbury Music Fair, she debuts a new song, Why the King of Love is Dead. As well as a tribute to King, it serves as a characteristic challenge to consider what needs to be done next. I choose to reflect the times and the situations in which I find myself. That to me is my duty. And at this crucial time in our lives, when everything is so desperate, when every day is a matter of survival, I don't think you can help but be involved. The tragedy of King's death increases her sense that the forward march of the civil rights movement is dwindling. Others in her close New York circle are also gone.

36:11Lorraine Hansberry dead from cancer at just 34, and Langston Hughes from medical complications while in surgery.

36:21Simone co-writes To Be Young, Gifted, and Black in tribute to Hansberry, the title referencing one of her old friend's own plays. It becomes another of the keynote songs for those immersed in the civil rights fight. Yet, for all her importance to America's black society, mainstream success is still elusive. Several of her songs are a fused airplay, while TV bookers often run scared of this political figure with a reputation for being difficult to handle. There are stories, too, of her abuse of alcohol and narcotics, although where truth and exaggeration lie in this regard is often hard to reckon.

37:02More certain is that she is, often deliberately, an uncomfortable act for audiences and venue owners alike. Her shows gain a reputation for being sometimes unbearably raw and chaotic, notable for long improvisations and sporadic rants. The truth is, her mood changes from day to day and moment to moment, and no one ever knows quite what to expect from her. Her refusal to fit herself neatly into artistic pigeonholes can also work against her. What Nina Simone was doing really was unclassifiable. She was playing folk songs. She was playing children's songs. She was playing blues. She was playing, eventually, songs by pop writers.

37:46She was playing Leonard Cohen songs and Bob Dylan and Beatles songs. And then she would turn around and do Southern children's ring game song. And then she would do something from Broadway and musical theater. And it was never clear what you would call the music that Nina Simone made. And that's a real challenge in the music industry. With her commercial success stagnating, strains in her marriage come to the fore. By the autumn of 1969, she is ready for a change of scene. She flies to Barbados, leaving her wedding ring on the kitchen table, and when she returns a few weeks later, she finds the home deserted.

38:27Stroud has left her and taken Lisa with him. Their marriage is over, and so too their professional relationship.

38:39The following year, she returns to Barbados, this time for a longer stint, embarking on a series of short-term romantic dalliances, including one with Errol Barrow, the country's married prime minister. But she cannot outrun her problems back home. For several years, she has withheld tax payments as a protest against continued American involvement in the Vietnam War, and now the IRS are after her. With her finances in disarray, she is forced to sell her home in Mount Vernon. Reunited with Lisa, she takes a rented apartment in Manhattan But when a warrant is issued for her arrest, she flees once more to the Caribbean Her friend, Miriam Macaba, helps her formulate a new plan Effectively a political exile from her native South Africa Macaba has taken to spending prolonged spells in Liberia in West Africa Now she persuades Nina to come and visit It offers her the chance of a fresh start.

39:44When she arrives in the country, she quickly feels at home. Monrovia, the capital, is going through something of a golden age, and she hits its nightlife hard. She has only been in town a few days when she ends up in a small private nightclub maze on the city's main party drag. Around 50 members of Monrovia's elite are crammed inside. beautiful people sharply dressed, shimmering under the lights of a disco ball. It's around midnight when Nina makes her entrance, fizzing like the champagne she has been knocking back. The dance floor is alive with the sound of Motown and soul grooves. The music takes her over, and with her head thrown back, she undoes the buttons on her dress and proceeds to dance the night away semi-naked.

40:32Whether it's a demonstration of the liberation she feels out here or indicative of someone struggling to keep herself under control is up for debate. When she wakes the following day, it is to the news that word of her antics has made it to the president himself. She is nervous of the repercussions, but she doesn't need to be. He turns up at the club himself the following night to join in the fun. And she will immortalize her dance at May's in a song, Liberian Calypso.

41:05For a while, she lives the dream, mixing with the social elite and living in a house on the beach, listening to the lapping of the sea and watching the sunsets. She has a cook, a driver, a gardener, and a place for Lisa in the local American school. It's enough to make her consider staying forever, finding that sense of belonging she has craved for so long. But as the months roll into years Old frustrations emerge She goes to Africa And has this sort of epiphany Of being in a country on a continent That is so visibly black And would theoretically allow her the freedom To do the things that she wants And she's given this residency in a nightclub A place to be able to perform And, you know, it seems idyllic It seems perfect for her But of course, she sort of rapidly grows bored and frustrated in Africa as well.

42:02Because she's used to New York. She's surrounded by this vital community. She's surrounded by the political community, by the activist community. It's a difficult and a frustrating place, but she has a place. She feels so isolated when she is in Africa. She's still working. She still makes some records, but there's really not a lot of ways to promote those. Her relationship with her daughter reaches breaking point too. Now a teenager, Lisa reports being the victim of physical abuse and emotional neglect at the hands of her mother, and eventually returns to the US to live with her father. For the next few years, she and Simone are effectively estranged, and by 1977, the musician is ready to leave Liberia too.

42:49This time, it is Europe that calls. Simone lives variously in the UK, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and France. But it is a time of ongoing instability, of short-term relationships to match short-term record deals, and a creative output that is a mix of hit and miss more than ever before. She is restless, she is confused, she is disappointed by ultimately the hands that the world has dealt her, and things get very, very difficult and very dark. She was so driven by artistic purpose, creative purpose through the 60s and into the 70s, that even if she couldn't be the classical artist that she had dreamed of, there was still a sense of mission and a sense of experimentation and exploration in her music.

43:36Merely to keep herself on the rails, she is reliant on the kindness of a small circle of friends who endeavor to keep her housed, fed, working, and out of trouble as much as possible. She finds supportive audiences in a string of jazz clubs across the continent, perhaps most notably at London's Ronnie Scott's Club. Many of her shows are dynamic, but there are times when her performances falter and she is plagued by bouts of stage fright, interspersed with tense showdowns with those who have paid to watch her. Any given night might either be a delight or a letdown, such as her capriciousness. The days of taking Carnegie Hall by storm seem a long way off.

44:20By this time, her emotional state, her mental state, again, not diagnosed, but what we certainly in retrospect think of as her bipolar condition. It's a ticking time bomb. There were sort of limited treatments that people tried, such as the state of the psychological pharmaceutical research was at the time, but nowhere near where we are now in terms of understanding these things. And so, sooner or later, something was going to go wrong, something was going to go bad. In 1985, her increasingly erratic behavior reaches a crescendo when, angered over unpaid royalties, she pursues a record label boss into a Swiss restaurant where she pulls out a gun and shoots at him.

45:07Though fortunately failing to hit him and thus managing to avoid any legal consequences, it seems to encapsulate her spiraling decline. Then, in 1987, she enjoys an unexpected renaissance, in Europe at least. Chanel launches a high-profile advertising campaign in the region with Simone's My Baby Just Cares For Me as its theme tune.

45:35Thirty years after she recorded it, the track reaches number five in the UK charts and is a top ten hit across the continent. Though it brings limited financial reward as she signed away her rights to the recording decades ago, it introduces her to a new generation. The following year, she moves to the Netherlands, where she at last receives a formal diagnosis of bipolar disorder. In 1992, she appears at Carnegie Hall for the first time since 1971. It's a triumph that rolls back the years and results in a major new record deal. An album, her last, follows in 1993 when she settles in France.

46:20Yet if life has taken an upturn as she hits her 60s, it is not without its moments of high drama still.

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47:26Rated PG-13.

47:33In July 1995, Nina Simone is sitting in the garden of her unkempt home in the town of Buc-Bel-Air, the song of magpies and jackdaws in the air. Situated to the north of Marseille, it can feel remote out here. Not the sort of picture postcard place people imagine when they think of the south of France. The electricity and water have both been cut off because Nina hasn't been paying the bills. And she regularly skips the medication meant to keep her mood stable. Today, she sits at a table outside, chatting away on the telephone. The teenage son of the family next door also happens to be out, along with a friend, noisy and high-spirited as they splash around in their family swimming pool.

48:23Nina talks animatedly on the phone, her characteristically deep tones carrying on the summer breeze. As she listens to the person on the other end of the line, she becomes increasingly aware of another voice in earshot, a baritone that sounds strained. She tenses. It is coming from over the fence, one of the boys mocking her own voice. She has not struggled to this stage of life to sit back and let a 15-year-old ridicule her. She lifts the receiver away from her ear and bellows towards the neighbor to cut it out. But her demand is met not with respectful silence, but a renewed round of mimicry.

49:09She gets up from her chair and goes in search of an air rifle she keeps on the property. Striding towards the fence, she raises the weapon in both hands and fires off a series of shots. The frivolous uproar from next door gives way to a moment of stunned silence. Nina just has time to be pleased they're no longer insulting her before both the boys begin hollering in pain.

49:43The youths both recover, but the incident sparks a crisis in her life. A month after the assault, she is brought before the courts, where she receives an eight-month suspended jail sentence and an order for psychiatric counseling. only a couple of years later in 1997 she receives a breast cancer diagnosis but as old age looms she seems to find a semblance of the peace that has so long eluded her there is a degree of reconciliation with her daughter Lisa and she is once again playing prestigious venues in 2002 there is one last concert at Carnegie Hall the venue that perhaps best maps the ups and downs of her extraordinary career, where she plays alongside Elton John to rapturous acclaim.

50:31The following year, now aged 70, she is awarded an honorary doctorate by the Curtis Institute, the Philadelphia establishment that rejected her all those years before. It feels as if a lingering injustice has at last been righted. So you can't really say that there's a happy ending, but I think that by the later years there was a sense that she had certainly gotten out of the darkest places and the most desperate places of where her life had been during the years that preceded that.

51:07On April the 21st, 2003, Nina has some phone calls with old friends, then dies peacefully in her sleep at home in France. Over 70 years, she lived a life of extraordinary highs and lows, The epitome, perhaps, of the tortured genius who never followed the career path she dreamed of as a child, but who soundtracked a vital, vibrant, and troubled period of American history. She was an artist who never quite found her place in the world during her own lifetime, but whose importance has arguably become more apparent in death. The way that Nina was discovered, adopted, translated by more activist artists in the hip-hop world, the fact that she was the icon that Lauryn Hill would talk about, the fact that her music was featured so prominently in Kanye's work before the Kanye meltdown and everything else, when he was as important a figure in music as there was, and that she symbolized a merger of activism and music in this pure way, in this uncompromising way, in a genuinely artistic way.

52:17But she was such a paragon of that sense of independence, that sense of absolute commitment, that sense of not being limited by expectation or by genre or by race or anything that, you know, an artist is there to create and to speak truth. and that means absolutely, that doesn't mean any other version of that. That closed a lot of doors, that capped a lot of ceilings, that ultimately led to an incredibly difficult life. But she's there as an example of what that commitment and that dedication mean. But it is surely right to leave the last word to the woman herself. My thing, what I hope to do all the time, is to be so completely myself, which that's what I hope I am, to be so much myself that my audiences and even people who meet me are confronted with what I am inside and out, as honest as I can be.

53:14And this way they have to see things about themselves.

53:29Next time on Short History Up, we'll bring you a short history of 9-11. I don't think the United States has ever recovered from 9-11. I think it fundamentally rewrote the DNA of our country and our society. It turned the United States into a country that is much more fearful. You know, that innocence of 8.46 a.m. on Tuesday, September the 11th, is, I think at this point, probably gone forever. That's next time. You can listen to the next two episodes of Short History Of right now without waiting and without adverts by subscribing to Noiser Plus. Just hit the link in the episode description or head to www.noiser.com forward slash subscriptions to unlock more episodes today.

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