Nina Simone (Ebony 2008)

Soul Influencer: Nina Simone (Ebony February 15, 2008)

There are two recordings by Nina Simone that seem to define her personal politics. The first, "Mississipi Goddamn" was a rage filled response to the murder of Medgar Evers and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where four Black girls were murdered. When she learned of the bombing, her first response was irrational. "I tried to make myself a gun! I gathered some materials. I was going to take one of them out, I didn't care who it was." She told Lashonda Barret, author of I Got Thunder, decades later, it was her husband who talked her off the ledge.

Instead the lyrics for "Mississipi Goddamn" poured from her. She recorded the song live, before an adoring, and ultimately stunned audience at Carnegie Hall in March of 1964. Simone was fed up. Fed up with the high price of civil rights, fed up with what some, like Stokley Charmichael and Malcolm X, were coming to regard as the impotent response of the Southern based Civil Rights movement. "You keep on saying/Go Slow," she roared, as much to President Johnson as to the leaders she'd come to love and respect. As much as she supported Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (she'd donated many performances to fundraisers for the movement), by the end of Mississipi Goddamn her impatience with his Ghandi inspired, passive, non-violence had erupted. "This whole country is full of lies / You all gonna die, die like flies."

The second song is of course, the revenge fantasy "Pirate Jenny," co-authored by the radical Socialist playwright and theorist, Bertol Brecht. In his hands the lyrics signify the uprising of the silent, servant and working classes. In Nina Simone's hands the maid with a secret who scrubs the floor, is closer to the women in Battle of Algiers who smuggles bombs to the town square beneath her burqua. "You gentlemen can wipe off that smile off your face/Cause every building in town is a flat one/This whole frickin' place will be down to the ground."

The Black Power Movement had yet to be fully formed, but with her recording of "Pirate Jenny," Nina seemed to give them permission to bear arms, encouraged them to abandon the picketing and marching for something more covert, more underground, to respond to violence with violence. Ultimately, the confrontation exhausted her, the assassination of King in 1968 seemed to crush her hope of real resistance , of a full restoration of rights and humanity to Blacks in America. She made her way to West Africa, where she was welcomed like royalty, where she says, she felt no pressure to perform, no pressure to struggle. She ended up, like a few other important Black
artists from her generation, in France, though even there she didn't suffer fools lightly.

"How can anyone expect me to live in a country where our leaders are shot dead. I couldn't live here if I wanted to, because I have to stand up for my rights and those rights of Black people everywhere."

She didn't grow more optimistic about America with age, nor did her passion to struggle against injustice soften with age. "I don't like this country; I never did. America will sell her soul for money." Thanks to a set of reissues and compilations in late eighties, a new, American audience rediscovered her.

She inspired a new generation of singers and rappers like Lauryn Hill and Talib Kweli. In many ways she is the godmother to the fearlessness that the hip-hop generation considers its birthright. She's always been dismissive of the form, call it "not music at all," but it is her uncompromising and bold example that made Chuck D., Nas and Mos Def possible.

In the mid-90s she made headlines for shooting, through her window, two of her disruptive neighbors, with her bb gun. They were disturbing her peace. The current presidential election has exposed a long-existing generational divide; the old, Civil Rights guard dismissing Obama because he's "not ready." It doesn't take much to imagine Nina dressing her peers down for their backstepping, "you keep on saying/go slow!" Nina Simone, the indignant, the unpacified, the unrepentant, the unbowed.

Until her 2003 death in the South of France she was a symbol of defiance, a regal woman whose retreat from America was less defeat than a declaration that the country itself wasn't salvageable.