A rchive Date
[ 08-05-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Biography ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/mansur_toronto.html
Remembering Nina Simone, Queen of the blues
By SALIM MANSUR -- For the Toronto Sun
May 8, 2003
Shakespeare wrote, "The man that hath no music in himself,/ Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,/ Is fit for treasons, strategems, and spoils ... Let no such man be trusted."
The advice remains admirable and instructive.
I was reminded of these words on hearing of Nina Simone's death at the age of 70 a couple of weeks ago.
The stories about the Iraq war and SARS pushed the notice of Nina Simone's death at her home in the south of France to the back pages of most newspapers.
Nina Simone had not been in the news for some time. Her music, a blend of soul, blues and jazz, was played infrequently on air in recent years.
She had seemingly become a relic from another time, and except for those who knew her music and her passion for the sort of politics for which Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X paid with their lives, her passing will not make many pause and recollect what she represented to so many who adored her talents.
She was born Eunice Waymon in Tryon, N.C., in 1933 to a poor black family. She learned to play piano by the age of 4, won a scholarship to the Juilliard School of Music in New York in 1950, and trained as a classical pianist. But barriers of race and gender stood in her way and, needing money, she left Juilliard to return to her family, which had by then moved to Philadelphia.
To support herself, and family, she played piano at bars and lounges in Atlantic City and took the name Nina Simone so her mother would not know she was indulging in popular music. Eventually, her musical gift was noticed, and she made it on the pop charts with her single, I Loves You, Porgy, in 1959.
Among the many great black female singers - Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan - Nina Simone arrived with a huge raw energy for making music that combined pain and defiance to produce an effect that immediately stood out as distinctly as the sounds of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis did in the rich stream of jazz.
The 1960s and '70s were the decades when America turned violent within. There were race riots, anti-Vietnam war protests, the assassination of a president and killings of civil rights leaders, the Watergate scandal and the resignation of a president. And Nina Simone was somehow in the thick of it.
She was blessed with prodigious talents, and she used the power of music to mobilize the spirit of suffering men and women in the black ghettos of American cities for equality and justice.
Her response to the murder of Medgar Evers, a black civil rights advocate, was the passionately angry lyrics of Mississippi Goddam, and her Young, Gifted and Black became an inspirational song for those angry youths who eventually altered the landscape of American society for the better.
She left the United States in 1973 and made her home in France. She became bigger than her music, as she came to symbolize on stage the struggle of women of colour in reclaiming their dignity.
I will never forget the first time I heard Nina Simone render Just In Time, accompanied by the hypnotic effects of her own piano playing. Her voice ached with pain and soared with joy.
She made the songs of others, such as George Harrison's Here Comes the Sun or Jerry Jeff Walker's Mr. Bojangles, her own. Her renditions of Leonard Cohen's Suzanne or some of Jacques Brel's lyrics as in Ne Me Quitte Pas were as memorable as her soulful interpretation of Bob Dylan's I Shall Be Released.
She published her memoir, I Put a Spell on You, in 1992. She wrote about a time in American history when Malcolm X's "talk of self-reliance and self-defence seemed to echo the distrust of white America that I was feeling."
Nina Simone was special in the way another great black American singer, Paul Robeson, was special. Her music will remain a stirring chapter in America's struggle for freedom.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Thursdays. He can be reached at smansurca@yahoo.ca. Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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