Nina Simone - Tribute

Nina Simone

The Primer only saw Nina Simone live on one occasion, at the Bishopstock 2001 festival. A very strange affair, an artist clearly not in the best of health but still holding court and displaying the somewhat perverse and singular attitude for which she was renowned. Not the best way to remember her, perhaps, but better that than to have lost the opportunity to ever see her in concert at all.

She has been hailed as one of the last true divas of jazz and blues, although she never accepted the labelling, cuttingly remarking that "Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music". She had a point, musically and culturally, and in any case her style incorporated folk, gospel, classical, blues and soul.

Born into a family of seven children, Simone studied at the Julliard School of Music in New York, a rare event for a black woman in the 1950s. Her most enduring material includes her readings of 'I Loves You Porgy', 'Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood', her own 'Four Women', Mississippi Goddam', 'Sugar In My Bowl' and, of course, 'My Baby Just Cares For Me'. The latter song is the one most casually associated with Simone, something that didn't necessarily sit that well with the artist herself. She also released any number of well received albums throughout her recording career, including "Wild Is The Wind", "I Put A Spell On You" and "Nina Simone Sings The Blues".

She was also a prominent supporter of the civil rights movement - she always claimed the FBI had a file on her because of her activist links with civil rights leader Martin Luther King and her support for Malcolm X.
She was passionate about the power of protest in music, believing it could truly help to change the world, saying "As a political weapon it has helped me for 30 years defend the rights of American blacks and third world people all over the world, to defend them with protest songs".

Nina on stage

Sometimes she could channel the passion in less positive directions. She once threatened a record company executive over unpaid royalties and, in 1995, even more bizarrely, she shot and wounded her neighbour's son because the boy's laughter had interrupted her concentration.
She also had her fair share of personal misfortune, her second husband (acting as her personal manager) swindling her out of around £170k, before she finally divorced him. She also lost four children through miscarriages.

Simone died at home from natural causes after being unwell for some time. First and foremost, with her passing, the music world lost another truly unique voice, a passionate and sometimes difficult and complex personality; a sad loss made all the more poignant when set against a modern day music scene consisting largely of identikit artists and interchangeable recordings.

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