|
Nina
Simone CDs
Forever
Young, Gifted & Black: Songs of Freedom and Spirit (2006)
/
Anthology (2003)
Nina: The Essential Nina Simone
(2000, 2003)
The Very Best Of Nina Simone, 1967-1972 : Sugar
In My Bowl (1998) /
The Blues (1968, 1991) /
Compact Jazz: Nina Simone
(1989-1991)
*
* * * *
Nina Remembers in
I Put a
Spell on You
A Review by Rudolph Lewis
Here it is three years after Nina
Simone's death (2003) and ten years after the
publication of I Put a Spell on You (1993) and I
am only now taking a serious look at her life, and a
fascinating one it was, indeed—from
a backwoods child prodigy to a beloved national and
international star.
Nina's
memoir, I Put a Spell on You,
is excellent in construction. It is called an
autobiography. Well, it's not. It is indeed a memoir.
There is no intention to tell all. So many details that
could have been included were, I suspect, excluded for
literary effect. It
is a dense drama intended to represent certain aspects
of her character and her vision of the world. It is
short on reflection and self-analysis Though I
have finished the book, I cannot pretend that I know
her any better. But I love what she has achieved in
this book and its possible implications.
Clearly,
she as an adult on her own was a wild woman, a free
spirit, frightening to a degree, and, in some ways, to
be pitied for her naiveté and trust of others she barely
knows. There remains
a mystery about her. In fear and awe, men are attracted
to such mysteries as Nina. Maybe the evangelism of her
early childhood days went deeper, much deeper than she
understood herself.
Nina's father before the Depression
was the leading breadwinner of the family. This reversed
during the Depression and the mother, an itinerant
Methodist minister, along with the children, provided
much more than the father who lost all his businesses
and became ill and unable to rise to his former economic
status. The mother because of her work, her ideals, and
her religious blindness did not provide the girl
children, specifically Nina, the affection they needed
and desired.
In her piano teacher "Miz Mazzy," Nina
found the motherly affection she needed. In some sense
her appraisal, love, and respect of her father declined
in that he gave into the power and influence of the
mother. One of the sons also became estranged from his
father, I suspect, also because his father did not meet
the manly standards of the larger society.
Two loving parents do not guarantee a
set outcome, as Nina exposes. Loving people in your life
are indeed important. Nina had her mother's white
employer, Mrs. Miller, who provided the initial money
for piano training. Nina had her English music trainer,
Muriel Massinovitch (Miz Mazzy) who was a
substitute mother, her "white momma." She had the entire
local town (Tryon), including churches, that raised
money for her education.
There was a great deal of repression
of sexual energies achieved by Nina to get to Juilliard,
including her sacrifice of Edney the Cherokee. She was
16 and he 18 when she for New York. She went back 28 years later to rekindle a
romance that had long been dead. He had married Nina's
best girl friend soon after Nina left Tyron and
had by Nina's final return five children; and
Nina had two marriages and a daughter. For her to return to
her hometown expecting that Edney after all those years
would be ready to leave and go off with her was indeed
the work of an extraordinary imagination. Edney's mother
calls her and tells her that she cannot come again to
the house for Edney. That it was now too late.
Spitefully, Nina demands a return of her high school
graduation photo that had set on the family piano for 28
years. Edney's mother hands it to Nina through her
limousine window.
Away in New York frees Nina of some
of the sexual restrictions that bound her in the North
Carolina mountains. As a result, I suspect, of the
mother-daughter conflict, her first best friend became a
stylish prostitute. From her she learned a bit about men
and their unusual desires.
In response to the apparent weakness
of her father, Nina makes a hasty marriage to a white
beatnik, Don Ross, a marriage which was a means of
dealing with her loneliness. But the marriage didn't
work long because her beatnik husband did not possess
the work ethic, the drive for success, in which she was
instilled. She ended up taking care of him and being as
lonely as before. Moreover, the relationship lacked the
desired passion. Then she marries a Harlem cop,
Andy Stroud, who was
rumored to have thrown a man off the roof. Before she
marries him, he beats the living daylights out of her;
ties her hands behind her back and puts a gun to her
head and forces her to interpret the letters of Edney
she had kept over the years. Before they married, soon
after, Shroud
claims he did not remember the incident.
After her marriage Andy takes over
managing her career, which eventually leads to problems
with the IRS. According to Nina, she signed no contracts
and allowed him to deal with setting up the businesses
and handling her money. She says she did not know how
much money she had: "Ask Andy." As the story is being
told there is a suggestion that this relationship, this
marriage, will end tragically with many recriminations.
We are kept in suspense until near the end of the book.
And again there are few details. Maybe it was the intent
to protect her daughter, Lisa Celeste.
In the
memoir, there certainly is an extraordinary reversal,
that is, from an alienation from the mother (a seeming
hatred) to a fierce hatred of a father she adored,
coming immediately after her break with her 2nd husband
(Andy Stroud). It was like a lightning storm, seemingly
provoked by the smallest of things.
 |
Being a
star made her fiercely alone. No one seemed to
have prepared her for that. Maybe there is no
preparation to soothe the ills of genius, especially
when it desires full freedom. The politics of the book
and the relationship she had with political activists
seem a minor note, though she was indeed a political
activist, of sorts, and deeply sympathetic to the civil
rights movement and toward SNCC's black power activists,
like Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown. But her
expressions comes off as a kind of ranting. Certainly,
she was not a nationalist, though some of her songs,
like "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black," were
nationalistic. "Four Women" might be the first black
feminist song. |
Maybe she was disturbed. With genius
and privilege we enter a new realm of being, a different
way of existing in the world. Surely, according to her
memoir, this is the case with Nina. I wonder whether the
"disturbed" or the "lost of mind" aspects people note
are not tinged with moral judgments. For instance, she
had a proclivity in certain settings of pulling off her
clothes, and dancing naked in public. How much of this
was influenced by her revolt against early childhood
evangelism, her mother's puritan morality, and her
father's lack of manliness (seemingly) is anyone's
guess.
These acts might have been influenced
by her attraction to white bohemianism (on two
continents). Then she had a tendency towards excessive
drinking, gin and champagne. In some sense, she has a lot in common with
the LeRoi Jones of Greenwich Village portrayed by Amiri
Baraka. Then there are probably her notions of the
privileges of stardom and fame, and her notions of what
personal freedom means, and her desire for and to be
associated with “black power,” all of which she
relished, seemingly as a result of her desires for
security and self worth. At our best, I suspect we can
say, that was Nina, and leave it at that. There
are a number of episodes that seem quite revealing but
then seem no more than good healthy fun, that is, in the
telling.
There is her attempt to seduce Louis
Farrakhan. She notes his small feet—the
smallest she had ever seen on a man. He wanted to talk
politics and she continued to watch his feet and drink
gin. Finally she asks him to go with her upstairs. He
continued to talk politics—so
she sent him home. There is also her relationship with
Wilhelm Langenberg (Big Willy), through whom she became
"a Philips artist." Nina writes, "Andy got angry with me
over something and Big Willy stepped in and said, 'Andy,
look at you, you have no deep sense of your colour
—
you don't really know who you are. Nina has colour and
she has the weight of forty million people on her back.
You know you should be gentle with her'. I don't know
who was more shocked, Andy or me."
Later, after splitting with Andy, she
goes to Holland, has dinner with Big Willy, returns to
her hotel room, and Nina writes, "I got to my knees and
bared my breasts, took my dress down and said, 'I've
come to marry you, because you always said that you
should marry me if I wasn't married to Andy'." After
getting down on his knees with her, Big Willy declines
and walks out of the room. Big Willy was invested in
apartheid. He died a few months later.
There's also an interesting episode
in I Put a Spell on You between Nina Simone and
C.C. Dennis, a Liberian plantation owner, which occurs
after an episode with a Liberian witch doctor, which
helps her to sort out her relationship with her father.
Dennis was 70 and she in her mid-30s. C.C. was, Nina
writes, "more exciting and attractive than any man I had
ever met half his age." This interchange goes on for
several pages.
She continues, "out in the forest in
this huge mansion I wasn't the same woman I was in my
house by the ocean." Though a liberated woman, Nina
liked commanding men. C.C. told her, "In Africa men are
the boss." (You may recall she married a
Harlem cop who she feared.) C.C. promised her (this was
in the mid-70s) $25,000 a year to spend as she liked and
marriage, a role as his wife, if she could bring him to
life. "It was not a success. I crept back to my own room
sore, physically sore, and confused." She did not
provide details.
During the military coup in 1980,
Nina writes, "C.C. Dennis died two weeks later, his
heart broken. Before he died he burnt his mansion to the ground
so Samuel Doe's men couldn't take it. They say C.C. and
Martha Prout [the younger woman C.C. married] were among
those people paraded naked through the streets. It could
have been me." During the late 70s and early 80s Nina
did indeed go through some tough times even threats of
arrest as a result of tax problems. But she recovered.
Her fans loved her and wanted her to be an unquenchable
star.
Nina also took on younger lovers in
Barbados and Liberia. But clearly she was attracted to
older men with power. By the time this book was written
Nina was about 60. She seemed to have sorted out her
personal life and her career. Ironically, she seemed to
have been guilty of the same maternal neglect of which
she accused her mother that caused her considerable
emotional turmoil. That conflict seemed, however, near
the end of her life resolved. It would indeed be of
interest to read Lisa Celeste and her memories of her
mother. One is left wondering, How
much of Nina's character is representative of all
American black women? As far as we can see through her
eyes, Nina's mother and father had a partnership
relationship. He was not the ornamentation that Nina
found in younger men. Seemingly, for her mother, he
played a vital role as husband and father. But he was
not "boss" in the C.C. (African) sense of the word. Her
father was no patriarchal (commander like Andy Shroud or
the PM of Barbados or C.C. or Big Willy) figure.
For Nina, it seems, because her
father was not boss, he was not fully man and when she
overheard him lying to his son that he was more than a
partner, but rather fully the boss of the family, Nina
concluded that not only was he not full man (carrying
the economic weight of the family and thus able to make
decisions beyond his wife) but he was also a liar and
someone that she could not trust at all. Thus the break
with her father. Is this the "natural" impulse of
American black women, namely, a rejection of black men
who only pretend to have a "big voice," when power
actually lies in other quarters? Clearly, Nina
throughout much of her life suffered from insecurity and
loneliness.
Her father, the most important man in
her life, to a point, could never save her from either
malady. Did she demand too much? Children always do. And
maybe too many American black women demand too much of
their men, or not enough of that which they can indeed
provide, namely, love and respect.
posted 3 July 2006
Ain't Got No...I've Got Life
(video) /
Four Women (video) / / Feelings (video)
Harlem Festival, Part 2 (video) /
Harlem Festival, Part 3 (video) /
Harlem festival, Part 4 (video)
* * *
* *
Eunice
Kathleen Waymon (February 21, 1933 – April 21,
2003), better known by her stage name Nina Simone,
was an American singer, songwriter, pianist,
arranger, and civil rights activist widely
associated with jazz music. Simone aspired to become
a classical pianist while working in a broad range
of styles including classical, jazz, blues, folk,
R&B, gospel, and pop.
Born the sixth
child of a preacher's family in North Carolina,
Simone aspired to be a concert pianist. Her musical
path changed direction after she was denied a
scholarship to the prestigious
Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia,
despite a well-received audition. Simone was later
told by someone working at Curtis that she was
rejected because she was black. When she began
playing in a small club in Philadelphia to fund her
continuing musical education and become a classical
pianist she was required to sing as well. She was
approached for a recording by Bethlehem Records, and
her rendering of "I
Loves You Porgy" was a hit in the United States
in 1958. Over the length of her career Simone
recorded more than 40 albums, mostly between
1958—when she made her debut with
Little Girl Blue—and 1974. Her musical style
arose from a fusion of gospel and pop songs with
classical music, in particular with influences from
her first inspiration,
Johann Sebastian Bach, and accompanied with her
expressive jazz-like singing in her characteristic
contralto. for equal rights in the US.— wikipedia
* * *
* *
Nina Simone—Kalamu
ya Salaam—Nina
is not her name. Nina is our name. Nina is how we
call ourselves remade into an uprising. Eunice
Waymon started out life as a precocious child
prodigy—amazingly gifted at piano. She went to
church, sang, prayed and absorbed all the sweat of
the saints: the sisters dropping like flies and
rising like angels all around her. Big bosoms clad
in white. Tambourine-playing, cotton-chopping,
tobacco-picking, corn-shucking, floor-mopping,
child-birthing, man-loving hands. The spray of sweat
and other body secretions falling on young Eunice's
face informing her music for decades to come with
the fluid fire of quintessential Black musicking.
|
But there was also the conservatory and
the proper way to approach the high art
of music. The curve of the hands above
the keyboard. The ear to hear and mind
to understand the modulations in and out
of various keys. The notes contained in
each chord. She aspired to be a concert
pianist. But at root she was an obeah
woman. With voice and drum she could
hold court for days, dazzle multitudes,
regale us with the splendor, enrapture
us with the serpentine serendipity of
her black magic womanistness articulated
in improvised, conjured incantations.
"My daughter said, mama, sometimes I
don't understand these people. I told
her I don't understand them either but
I'm born of them, and I like it." Nina
picked up Moses' writhing rod, swallowed
it and now hisses back into us the
stories of our souls on fire. Hear me
now, on fire.
My first memory of Nina is twofold. One
that music critics considered her ugly
and openly said so. And two that she was
on the Tonight show back in the late
fifties/very early sixties singing "I
Love You Porgy." Both those memories go
hand in hand. Both those memories speak
volumes about what a Black woman could
and could not do in the Eisenhower era.
They called her ugly because she was
Black. Literally. Dark skinned. In the
late fifties, somewhat like it is now,
only a tad more adamant, couldn't no
dark skinned woman be pretty. In
commercial terms, the darker the uglier.
Nina was dark.
|
 |
My first memory
of Nina is twofold. One that music critics
considered her ugly and openly said so. And two that
she was on the Tonight show back in the late
fifties/very early sixties singing "I Love You
Porgy." Both those memories go hand in hand. Both
those memories speak volumes about what a Black
woman could and could not do in the Eisenhower era.
They called her ugly because she was Black.
Literally. Dark skinned. In the late fifties,
somewhat like it is now, only a tad more adamant,
couldn't no dark skinned woman be pretty. In
commercial terms, the darker the uglier. Nina was
dark.
She sang
"Porgy" darkly. Made you know that the love she sang
about was the real sound of music, and that Julie
Andrews didn't have a clue. Was something so deep,
so strong that I as a teenager intuitively realized
that Nina's sound was both way over my head and was
also the water within which my soul was baptized.
Which is probably why I liked it, and is certainly
why my then just developing moth wings sent me
shooting toward the brilliant flashes of diamond
bright lightening which shot sparking cobalt blue
and ferrous red out of the black well of her mouth.
This was some elemental love. Some of the kind of
stuff I would first read about in James Baldwin's
Another Country, a book that America is still not
ready to understand. Love like that is what Nina's
sound is.
Her piano was
always percussive. It hit you. Moved you. Socked it
to you. She could hit one note and make you sit up
straight. Do things to your anatomy. That was Nina.
Made a lot of men wish their name was Porgy. That's
the way she sang that song. I wanted to grow up and
be Porgy. Really. Wanted to grow up and get loved
like Nina was loving Porgy. For a long time, I never
knew nobody else sang that song. Who else could
possibly invest that song with such a serious
message, serious meaning? Porgy was Nina's man.
Nina's song. She loved him. And he was well loved.
In my youth, I
didn't think she was ugly. Nor did I didn't think
she was beautiful. She just looked like a dark Black
woman. With a bunch of make-up on in the early days.
Later, I realized what she really looked like was an
African mask. Something to shock you into a
realization that no matter how hard you tried, you
would never ever master white beauty because that is
not what you were. Fundamental Blackness. Severe
lines. Severe, you hear me. I mean, you hear Nina.
Dogonic, chiseled features. Bold eyes. Ancient eyes.
Done seen and survived slavery eyes. A countenance
so serious that only hand carved mahogany or ebony
could convey the features. . . .— wordup
* * *
* *
* * * * *
 |
Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.”
|
Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this
simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk
sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually
just metaphor for metaphor’s sake.
She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost
* * * * *
|
Ancient, Ancient: Short Fiction
By Kiini Ibura Salaam
Ancient, Ancient collects the short fiction by Kiini Ibura Salaam, of which acclaimed author and critic Nalo Hopkinson writes, ''Salaam treats words like the seductive weapons they are. She wields them to weave fierce, gorgeous stories that stroke your sensibilities, challenge your preconceptions, and leave you breathless with their beauty.'' Indeed, Ms. Salaam's stories are so permeated with sensuality that in her introduction to
Ancient, Ancient, Nisi Shawl, author of the award-winning Filter House, writes, ''Sexuality-cum-sensuality is the experiential link between mind and matter, the vivid and eternal refutation of the alleged dichotomy between them. This understanding is the foundation of my 2004 pronouncement on the burgeoning sexuality implicit in sf's Afro-diasporization. It is the core of many African-based philosophies. And it is the throbbing, glistening heart of Kiini's body of work. This book is alive. Be not afraid.''
|
 |
* *
* * *
 |
Karma’s Footsteps
By Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie
Somebody has to tell the truth sometime, whatever that truth may be. In this, her début full collection, Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie offers up a body of work that bears its scars proudly, firm in the knowledge that each is evidence of a wound survived. These are songs of life in all its violent difficulty and beauty; songs of fury, songs of love. 'Karma's Footsteps' brims with things that must be said and turns the volume up, loud, giving silence its last rites. "Ekere Tallie's new work 'Karma's Footsteps' is as fierce with fight songs as it is with love songs. Searing with truths from the modern day world she is unafraid of the twelve foot waves that such honesties always manifest. A poet who "refuses to tiptoe" she enters and exits the page sometimes with short concise imagery, sometimes in the arms of delicate memoir. Her words pull the forgotten among us back into the lightning of our eyes.—Nikky Finney /
Ekere Tallie Table
|
Her Voice /
Mother Nature: Thoughts on Nourishing Your
Body, Mind, and Spirit During Pregnancy and Beyond www.ekeretallie.com
* *
* * *
Life on Mars
By Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith, author of Life on Mars has been selected as the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In its review of the book, Publishers Weekly noted the collection's "lyric brilliance" and "political impulses [that] never falter." A New York Times review stated, "Smith is quick to suggest that the important thing is not to discover whether or not we're alone in the universe; it's to accept—or at least endure—the universe's mystery. . . . Religion, science, art: we turn to them for answers, but the questions persist, especially in times of grief. Smith's pairing of the philosophically minded poems in the book’s first section with the long elegy for her father in the second is brilliant." Life on Mars follows Smith's 2007 collection, Duende, which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the only award for poetry in the United States given to support a poet's second book, and the first Essence Literary Award for poetry, which recognizes the literary achievements of African Americans.
|
 |
The Body’s Question (2003) was her first published collection. Smith said Life on Mars, published by small Minnesota press Graywolf, was inspired in part by her father, who was an engineer on the Hubble space telescope and died in 2008.
* * * *
*
 |
The Last Holiday: A Memoir
By Gil Scott Heron
Shortly after we republished The Vulture and The Nigger Factory, Gil started to tell me about The Last Holiday, an account he was writing of a multi-city tour that he ended up doing with Stevie Wonder in late 1980 and early 1981. Originally Bob Marley was meant to be playing the tour that Stevie Wonder had conceived as a way of trying to force legislation to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. At the time, Marley was dying of cancer, so Gil was asked to do the first six dates. He ended up doing all 41. And Dr King's birthday ended up becoming a national holiday ("The Last Holiday because America can't afford to have another national holiday"), but Gil always felt that Stevie never got the recognition he deserved and that his story needed to be told. The first chapters of this book were given to me in New York when Gil was living in the Chelsea Hotel. Among the pages was a chapter called Deadline that recounts the night they played Oakland, California, 8 December; it was also the night that John Lennon was murdered. |
Gil uses
Lennon's violent end as a brilliant parallel to Dr
King's assassination and as a biting commentary on the
constraints that sometimes lead to newspapers getting
things wrong.
— Jamie Byng, Guardian
/ Gil_reads_"Deadline" (audio) / Gil Scott-Heron
& His Music Gil Scott
Heron Blue Collar
Remember Gil Scott- Heron
* * * * *
|
The Warmth of Other Suns
The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
By Isabel Wilkerson
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's
wife, left Mississippi for Milwaukee in
1937, after her cousin was falsely accused
of stealing a white man's turkeys and was
almost beaten to death. In 1945, George
Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, fled
Florida for Harlem after learning of the
grove owners' plans to give him a "necktie
party" (a lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing
Foster made his trek from Louisiana to
California in 1953, embittered by "the
absurdity that he was doing surgery for the
United States Army and couldn't operate in
his own home town." Anchored to these three
stories is Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist
Wilkerson's magnificent, extensively
researched study of the "great migration,"
the exodus of six million black Southerners
out of the terror of Jim Crow to an
"uncertain existence" in the North and
Midwest. |
 |
Wilkerson deftly incorporates sociological
and historical studies into the novelistic narratives of Gladney, Starling,
and Pershing settling in new lands, building
anew, and often finding that they have not
left racism behind. The drama, poignancy,
and romance of a classic immigrant saga
pervade this book, hold the reader in its
grasp, and resonate long after the reading
is done.
* *
* * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
* *
* * *
ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update 11 April 2012
|
