August 12, 2015 • 47 mins
Nina Simone was a musical prodigy and civil rights activist whose iconic voice and style shaped the sound of modern jazz and soul. Cristen and Caroline explore the tempestuous woman behind the artistic legend and how racism compelled and complicated her career.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff Mom Never told you. From house Supports
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline, and today we're talking about the late
great Nina Simone and Caroline. What would be the podcast
version of a biopic? A biopod? Oh? Yeah, which which
(00:26):
is a biocast? A biocast which sounds like some kind
of medical equipment. Yeah, probably is. Actually it probably already is.
We're probably getting sued right now. So many trademark violations
happening already. Um. Yeah, so we're talking about Nina Simone
and Caroline. I gotta confess to you that I did
not grow up listening to Nina Simone. I mean I
(00:48):
would hear her songs every now and then, but I
wasn't a hardcore Nina Simone fan, although like probably everyone
who was born in the midnight between eighties can attest um,
the first time I heard her name was in Lauren
Hill rapping with the Fuji's on Ready or Not, where
(01:10):
she was like ebbi a capone and I'll be Nina
Simone and defecating on your microphone because I was like
homeschoold and white and like rapping in Suburbia. Yeah, I
think we were doing that at the same time. Probably
I was in I was in Marietta doing that, which
now I'm picturing like one of those American Tale moments,
you know, where they're both looking at the moon from
(01:31):
and a little Christen and little Caroline, where we're singing
and dancing along with the fujis listening to our discman,
our disc women at the same time. Right, um, But recently, Caroline,
my eyes have been opened, or my ears, I guess
I should say, have been opened to the genius of
Nina Simone. Because for a long time, you know, I
(01:53):
knew who she was, and I knew that she's saying
all these standards and was this iconic figure in jazz history,
but I really didn't know that much about the breadth
of her catalog and her genius and also her role
as a civil rights activist. And I learned a lot
of this on the Netflix documentary What Happened Miss Simone,
(02:17):
directed by Liz Garbas Yeah, what Happened Miss Simone? Which
is a line from a piece by Maya Angelou about her,
which was really fascinating to read because my Angelo was
obviously a great writer. But the way that she profiles
Nina Simone is is also very fascinating, and but it's
also very warm. She obviously loves the person that she's
(02:38):
talking about. Yeah, and it's interesting to characterize it as
a as a warm piece, because Nina Simone wouldn't be
called warm by everyone in her life. She was. Um.
Liz Garbas was actually talking to NPR about Nina Simone
and the documentary and she was saying, how, Um, she
could easily be characterized as a difficult woman, but how
(03:01):
a lot of times, Um, that is often a sexist
portrayal because there were plenty of men in music who
were geniuses and we're also very difficult men, but they
were just geniuses. Yeah, it's tough, full stop, stopped there. Um. Yeah,
I I watched the documentary just on the edge of
(03:23):
my seat. I thought it was fascinating and like you,
I mean, I had a general awareness of Nina Simone
and um, and a lot of controversy was stirred up
a couple of years ago, not too long ago, when
news first hit that they were going to make that
biopick about her, and it was sort of up in
the air for a while. Who would portray her. I mean,
there's a million great actresses out there who uh, you know,
(03:44):
could potentially look like Nina Simone, which is actually a
big deal that we'll talk about in a little bit, um,
But they went with Zoe Saldana, who's cast and created
so much controversy. And so I had been more and
more aware for the last couple of years, and then
watching this documentary was just fast sinating. Yeah, and her
bio touches on so many things too that we've talked
(04:05):
about in the podcast before. And um, we also want
to note that there is some tragically relevant timing for
the release of that Netflix documentary. Um that attracted a
ton of press just on its own, um, but it
came out on Netflix the same day President Obama delivered
the eulogy for slain South Carolina Senator Clementa C. Pinckney,
(04:29):
who was murdered, um, along with those seven others at
Charleston's Emmanuel Methodist Episcopal Church. And it would be a
similar church horror and an act of racist murder that
would alter the trajectory of Nina Simone's life and career. Yeah, exactly.
(04:50):
But speaking of that trajectory, we have to talk about
how she even came to music in the first place.
She was born in nine thirty three as Eunice Wayman
in try On, North Carolina, and she was the sixth
of eight kids. Her mom was a Methodist preacher and
her dad was an entertainer and handyman. And here it
(05:11):
comes little Eunice, who's basically a musical prodigy. I mean
she took to the organ at two and a half
years old and started playing at her mother's church services. Yeah,
so here we go, touching on our episode a while
back on child prodigies. Um, she absolutely was one of them.
And in addition to her mom being a Methodist preacher,
(05:33):
she's also a housekeeper and um, a white woman. Her
mother cleaned houses for notice little Unie's talent and offered
to pay for lessons with a local British piano teacher
named Muriel Mazan Novik a k a. Ms Mazzi, whom
Nina Stamon would later describe as my white mama. And
(05:54):
she started playing you know, like you said, at her
mother's church services and really developed a reputation in Tryon,
which is a tiny, tiny down um which you can
almost miss if you blink. Um. So she developed this
reputation for being like the town prodigy, and so she
started taking these lessons and would have regular recitals because
(06:15):
people would want to come see her play. And she
later cited a recital when she was eleven, although I've
also seen twelve m but regardless, and when she was young,
this recital was her first time experiencing real anger at
racial discrimination because her parents were asked to move from
the front row to the back so that a white
(06:38):
couple could take their place, and at eleven or twelve
years old, she stopped her recital and refused to play
until her parents were allowed to resume their seats in
the front row. Yeah, and she talks about in the
documentary how she's not even sure that she was aware
of the time that it was what what that meant,
(06:59):
and sincearily she just knew that it was wrong and
that she wanted her parents back in the front row.
But that was definitely sort of a critical moment for
her in her development um And she went on to
study at Juilliard for a summer, with her sights set
on getting into the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia,
which ended up declining her application, and she was convinced
(07:21):
at the time that it was based on her race.
It was not until later that she found out that
other African American students had been accepted. But again, this
was another turning point. She had been offered a scholarship
at Oberlin, but she turned it down she thought it
was beneath her. But all along, this desire to become
a classical musician, to be taken seriously, for her music
(07:43):
to really perform, to get to Carnegie Hall, it really
haunted her. Yeah, I mean, she talks about how she
fell in love with Bach and that was her primary obsession.
And it was worth noting too that she had so
much of a stake in getting into her artists because
it would have offered her free tuition. And before she
(08:04):
had been ultimately rejected from the school, her family had
even moved to Philadelphia, and her even being able to
study at Juilliard had been partially funded by townspeople in
try And who raised money for her to go. So
this is like old school kickstarter essentially, and that money
(08:25):
had run out and all of a sudden, her families
in Philadelphia and she's not accepted into Curtis and what
is she going to do? She has to do something.
She has to make some money somehow, and she has
this incredible gift as a pianist. So in n she
starts playing at a cocktail piano bar in Atlantic City
(08:46):
and makes her stage name Nina Simone so that her
mom wouldn't find out, because keep in mind, this woman
is a Methodist preacher. She has no nonsense. They grew
up in the Bible Belt, and you know that hang
out in cocktail bars and playing standards is probably not
acceptable behavior. So after a couple of years of playing
in these cocktail bars, uh, and she's been asked to sing,
(09:10):
and so she's been singing and playing and honing her craft.
She arrives in New York City in n gets her
first top first and only Top forty hit with I
Loves You Porgy and briefly Mary's white beatnik Don Ross. Yeah,
and there was that point in the documentary where they
show her um performing I Loves You Porgy Um in
(09:35):
the what was it the Playboy Show? Like play by
Penthouse the Playboy Penthouse Show. So there's like old school
black and white Hugh Hefner introducing this new sensation Nina
Simone and she's you know, playing at this piano surrounded
by these you know, wealthy white men with attractive white
(09:55):
women draped across them. Um, which was just such a
such a snapshot of that time. And and you can
see from the beginning to how I mean, even though
her voice becomes so iconic, she was kind of a
reluctant singer. I mean it was something that she kind
of had to do, almost singing for her supper. Otherwise
(10:16):
she wouldn't have been able to perform starting out at
those earlier piano bars. But and like you said, she
finds success. She's in New York, her career is really
taking off, and she she has a singular drive for success,
but really more financial stability. I mean, Nina Sman wants
to become rich and she has since you know, divorced
(10:41):
Don Ross. They were married I think maybe less than
a year in nineteen sixty one, she ends up marrying
Andrew Stroud, who is a former New York City police
officer who ends up becoming her manager. Yeah, because as
much as Ninasman wanted to make money herself and become rich,
Drought definitely saw dollar signs in his eyes. I take
(11:02):
it when he looked at her because obviously she's like
overwhelmingly talented, she's so good at what she does, and
so he sees this as an opportunity to take her
her wild creativity and her amazing skill with the piano
and her amazing vocal skills and sort of point them
(11:24):
in the direction. And that direction is becoming basically what
we have the way we think of Aretha Franklin today.
That's what he sort of wanted for his wife to be,
that cash cow who was on top forty radio making
so much money. Yeah, I mean because also by this time,
Nina Simone had developed a reputation for being a very
(11:45):
difficult performer. There were a number of clubs that did
not care to book her because, as we'll talk about more, um,
if you were not there to see Nina Simone do
Nina Simone, then she was not going to have it.
So Stroud steps in and is like, Okay, we're gonna
put together a plan. And the thing that he promises
(12:07):
her is Carnegie Hall, where all of those childhood dreams
of back and being respected as a classical musician would
finally come to fruition. And in fact, on April twelfth,
ninety three, she plays Carnegie Hall. Yeah, and and Stratt,
I think how to put up it was his entire
(12:28):
police pension right to sort of pay for the promotion,
to even draw attention to the fact that here's this
amazing performer at Carnegie Hall comes here. But in the
same way that so many events in her life with
sort of parallel things going on in the civil rights movement.
Her performance was the same day that Martin Luther King
was locked up in Birmingham. Yeah, and so you start
(12:49):
to see, like you said, like this, these parallel things happening,
and it sort of pits Nina Simone against herself. On
the one hand, Um, as she once told Rogue Magazine,
all my life, I felt the terrible pressure of having
to survive. So she has this almost primal need to
amass as much wealth as possible, and she is starting
(13:13):
to do that through Stroud's management. But too, you have
this civil rights movement picking up, and her personal passion
for that also really coming to life. Um And before
we get more into her as a civil rights activists,
let's talk a little bit about her voice and music,
(13:34):
because in a lot of ways it's undefinable. People call
her the high process of soul, and she defies genres
in a lot of ways. NPR music writer David brent
Johnson notes how she incorporated jazz, blues, folk, pop, show tunes, gospel,
and R and B into these performances and albums. Yeah,
(13:56):
it's sort of amazing to see the product of her
creating out of necessity because here's this amazingly classically trained musician.
She's so good at what she does. She's a prodigy.
She's so just like it's just intuitive when she sits
down at the piano, but performing early on in her
career at those piano bars in those cocktail clubs and
(14:18):
having to, like you said, sing for her supper. You know,
people don't want to hear Bach at the bar and
so speak yourself, Caroline, I'm speaking for those jerks in
New York or Atlantic City or wherever. Um. Yeah, you know,
they didn't want to hear just like classical music played
for an entire set, Which that was another thing that
(14:40):
Nina Simon said that she had to get used to
the idea of a set. She's like, well, all right,
you want me to play play for forty five minutes,
that's fine. I've been playing for eight hours a day
for basically my whole life. So that's cool, um, But
being sort of in that position of being an entertainer
having to do this out of necessity to make money
and live and get by to try to she her dreams,
(15:01):
it meant she had to incorporate a lot of popular
stuff at the time, and so what came out of
that was some really amazing and interesting music. Yeah, so
you have recognizable tunes like I Put a Spell on
You that she reinvented and made so growlly and intense.
But then also you have this children's song that she
(15:23):
wrote in the wake of Lorraine Handsbury's death, called Young,
Gifted and Black, that she wanted to have this song
so that black children everywhere could feel proud of themselves.
And then of course she ended up writing protests songs
like Mississippi Goddamn, which we're going to talk about more
in just a minute. And then for instance, President Obama's
(15:45):
favorite Nina Simon song Centerman, which I was listening to
Caroline before we came into this podcast, and it is
going on loop in the back of my head, so
that I'm talking to Nina saman tune you cannot hear it,
and sting, it's got it's very up tempo. I'm glad
you're having a good time. You know I'm having a
great time too. Excellent. Um. But yeah, but the song
(16:07):
is a traditional spiritual about a sinner trying to hide
on judgment Day. So there we see, we've got great
examples of how she incorporates all of these different musical
traditions to really create her own place in music. And
she even did the song Don't let Me Be Misunderstood,
which was covered by the Animals, which I had to
(16:27):
have a misconception in my head corrected, Oh, did you
think it was slip flop? I thought it was the
other way around. I thought Nina s mom and got ignorant.
Caroline Irven, the podcaster, Uh, totally thought that that was
the animal song. But no, she performed this wonderful song
and the animals covered it. But it's interesting to read
(16:47):
too about her relationship with um people doing rock and
roll music, specifically in England and abroad. UM. She was
sort of fascinated by them, and she wrote her brother
basically saying, like all of these young white kids in
England and France and stuff are doing dances that you
and I used to do when we were kids, and
(17:09):
they're doing this black music in their own way, and
it's so fascinating. And she was so enthralled not only
by that idea and found it very interesting, but also
by the idea that she was just really loved people.
When she went abroad, people just really loved her, and
she didn't feel the same sort of edges of that
racial confinement that she's so often butted up against in America. Yeah,
(17:33):
she was definitely more comfortable abroad than in what she
would later call the United Snakes of America. And I
mean her her blackness was very much a part of
her art as well. Um in nineteen sixty six column
in the Philadelphia Tribune, m her singing was described as
(17:53):
being quote to be brought into a brace of contact
with the black heart and to feel the power and
beauty which for centuries have beat there. And at the
same time that that depth and expression of her voice
was sometimes criticized for being too masculine, because she does
(18:13):
have such a low register depending on what she's singing.
And then on top of that, as we mentioned earlier,
she demanded the full attention of her audience. I mean,
that's what she needed in order to perform, because she
wasn't just sitting there like playing little songs and ditties.
I mean it was You can tell if you watch
(18:35):
her perform that it is a full mind, body, emotional
performance for her. And so she was known to heckle
people or even leave the stage. If someone was talking,
she would stop and she would point. I mean, hope, oh,
Nina Simone. Thank goodness that she was not performing in
the era of cell phones and text messaging. I don't
(18:55):
think she would get through a single concert. Yeah. The
closest thing to that I've seen is going to a
Nico Case concert and seeing her stop everything for somebody
who has a cell phone out. Um. But yeah, you
can imagine that. Well, I would have loved it, like, yeah,
you tell them to shut up. Um. Not everybody, including promoters,
was as big a fan of that, and so that
(19:18):
was another kind of stumbling block to maintaining a mainstream status.
You know, her husband at this point, as we get
deeper and deeper into the sixties, her husband is getting
concerned with her interest in the civil rights movement, that
she's focusing too much on that rather than creating pop music.
He's concerned that she's too you know, moody and abrasive
(19:41):
to the people around her in her career. Um, but
she does not let that stop her. She dove head
first into the civil rights movement. And we're going to
talk about Nina Simone civil rights activists. And when we
come right back from a quick break, So, as a
(20:06):
dark skinned black woman raised in the Jim Crow South,
Nina Simone continually experienced racism from the get go. I
mean we mentioned that incident with the recital when she
was eleven or twelve years old, but she was constantly
told that her skin was too dark and her nose
was too broad, essentially that she looked too African. And
(20:29):
she even once commented on how she never made the
cover of Jet or any magazines because they preferred wider
looking cover stars like Diana Ross. So her appearance it
was something that was often at the forefront of her
mind as she thought about her place not only in
(20:50):
the music industry, but also in American society more broadly
at this time of so much racial unrest. But I
mean that brings us back to when we talked earlier
about the biopic that's been made with with Zoe Saldana
and how if you're not aware of this backstory about
(21:12):
how there was so much focus from outside and from
within on her appearance, you might not understand why people
were up in arms about the casting choice, since Nina
Simone herself said, they're picking people who look like darker
skinned white people to appear on magazines rather than people
who look like me. Yeah. At one point, she writes
(21:33):
in her diary, I can't be white, and I'm the
kind of colored girl who looks like everything white people
despise or have been taught to despise. If I were
a boy, it wouldn't matter so much. But I'm a
girl and in front of the public all the time,
wide open for them to jeer and approve of or
disapprove of. So she gets it. I mean, she's been
(21:54):
she's been exposed to basically appearance shaming of every kind
her in entire life, and understands that women have it
way worse than guys do. Yeah. And and it's also
too in the early nineties sixties that she becomes more radicalized.
She's powering around with leading black activists and scholars of
(22:16):
the day, including James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Stokely Carmichael and others.
And we mentioned Lorraine Handsbury earlier, who inspired the song
young Gifted in Black and Um. She was a playwright
who wrote A Raisin in the Sun, who was incredibly successful,
brilliant and became extremely close friends with Nina Simone and
(22:40):
really provided her not just an education in black identity,
but also Black womanhood and feminism. Yeah, there's a great
quote where Simone says, it was always Marks Linen and
Revolution real girls talk, and I just love that that
she's finally getting this real relationship with someone who is
(23:02):
believing in her own her being Nina sam believing in
her own independence and intelligence and giving her the credit
to be able to talk about the stuff and understand
this stuff, whereas it seems like she had just been
surrounded by people, particularly her overbearing husband, who were just like,
I don't care, just stay on this career track, and
overbearing not only overbearing but also outright abusive, which we'll
(23:26):
talk about more in a little bit. Um. But in
terms of her relationship with Handsbury, she wrote in her
memoir much later on uh quote, I started to think
about myself as a black person in a country run
by white people, and a woman in a world run
by men. And I mean that relationship with Handsbury was
(23:48):
so so formative for her and unfortunately ended so quickly
because Handsbury died of cancer in nine which was a
tragic moment for Nina Simone. And so what really ended
up radicalizing Nina Simone in terms of the civil rights
movement was a couple of events that happened really close together.
(24:12):
One was the murder of civil rights organizer Medgar Evers.
The other was the bombing of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church,
which killed four young black girls who were leaving Bible class.
And so at this point Nina Simone is like, listen,
I cannot just sit here and just play music. I
I have to do something. Yeah, And the first thing
(24:34):
she tried to do was make a gun. I mean,
she wanted she wanted to kill. She was enraged by it,
and um, she tried to make a gun and was
quickly like, I can't make a gun. And I think
also her husband Andrew was like, oh, Nina, please don't
try to make a gun. This is not the answer.
And so she ends up writing in an afternoon this
(24:55):
protest song Mississippi Goddamn and not to Risingly. Because of
the title, the song was banned on some radio stations,
and crates of records were sent back broken in protest um.
And the chorus to the song says, Alabama's gotten me
sotapes that Tennessee made me lose my rest, and everybody
(25:16):
knows about Mississippi Goddamn. And if you listen to her
and watch her playing this song, I mean she even
starts off saying how the name of this tune is
Mississippi Goddamn, and I mean every word of it well,
because in addition to that chorus, she also um imitates
(25:37):
white people in the community telling black people and black
activists to take it slowly, go slow, and her backup
singers say too slow, um, which is a refrain that
you hear today in terms of any type of civil
rights organizing. There's always somebody in power saying, well, let's
slow down a little, let's let's not take this so fast.
(25:58):
And so it wasn't It definitely wasn't just the name
of the song. It was the whole idea, the ideology
contained within it that just put a lot of people off,
to say the least yeah, I mean. And so after
this song comes out, she plays Carnegie Hall for a
second time, and she sings Mississippi God Damn. And when
she gets to the part saying, oh, but this country
(26:22):
is full of lies and you're all going to die
and die like flies, she slows it down and looks
out into the predominantly white audience sitting there, And I mean,
she she like she said, she means what she is singing. Um.
And we should note too that she had long supported
(26:44):
the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Race Equality,
and the n double a c p UM. But this
is when she really throws herself even more publicly and
visibly into the civil rights movements. She's marching, she's playing
benefit concerts, she's really using the stage as her platform
(27:06):
to speak truth to power and express her lack of
faith in that, like you said, that gradual push for
civil rights. Yeah. And during the march from selma Um,
she she performs Mississippi Goddamn on a stage that's propped
up by coffins. And so that in itself is a
(27:26):
huge deal and a great turning point. But she meets
Martin Luther King and sticks out her hand and says,
I am not nonviolent, and every account of the event
says that he gentally was like that's okay, that's that's fine,
that's totally cool. And it wasn't until then that she
relaxed and was like, well, you know, it's amazing to
meet you. But she just had to make sure that
(27:48):
he knew because he was he was more than just
a face of the movement, I mean to white people.
He was people were so happy about the whole non
violent thing, as you would understand, and and so she
was just making it clear to this guy who's the
face of everything, uh, that that wasn't her jam no no,
I mean. And she certainly wasn't the only black musician
(28:13):
or black entertainer who was using their notoriety to help,
you know, promote the civil rights movement. But she had
such a harder time simultaneously supporting a commercial career and
her activism, um compared to say Aretha Franklin or Harry Belafonte,
(28:35):
who were were still able to continue selling records. But
Nina Simone just with this hit a wall with a
lot of it and her prominent activism, though contrast the
overwhelming male leadership of the civil rights movement. This is
something that we touched on a little bit, I think
(28:56):
in our um a couple of podcasts on women in
the civil rights movement, and also in our podcast on
women abolitionists. UM. But we found a paper by Ruth
Feldstein called I Don't Trust You Anymore Nina Simone, Culture
and Black activism in the nineteen sixties, and Feldstein writes, quote,
in the late nineteen sixties, assertions of black male pride
(29:19):
remained at the center of calls for black power that
were implicitly and explicitly gendered male. And here you have
Nina Simone who is sort of just not paying any
attention to that structure whatsoever, and you know, doing her Yeah,
that's right. For instance, in nineteen sixty eight, in front
(29:40):
of an audience in Harlem, she read a poem by
David Nelson asking her audience, are you ready to do
what is necessary? And the poem and of course Nina
Simone encouraged the audience to break and burn white things,
build black things, kill if necessary. And so you can
just imagine that these are things that not a lot
(30:02):
of other people in the mainstream are saying out loud well,
and even just if you look at Mississippi Goddamn, which
had come out a few years prior to that. UM.
A comedian Dick Gregory was talking about this in the
Netflix documentary What Happened in Miss Simone UM, And he said,
if you look at all the suffering black folks went through,
(30:24):
not one black man would dare say Mississippi Goddamn. We
all wanted to say it, but she said it. And
so then by a lot of disillusionment had set in
and quote the days when revolution really had seemed possible,
We're gone forever, especially when you consider that a lot
(30:44):
of people around her, and a lot of people important
to the movement, people like Martin Luther King and Handsbury
and Malcolm X and so many other integral figures were gone. Yeah,
they were either dead or imprisoned, and a lot of
public attention and protests. You by this point had shifted
away from civil rights and toward Vietnam, and Simone was
(31:08):
really devastated. I mean, obviously, at this point we have
a lot of domestic abuse that's been going on in
the background for a while, and uh, mental illness that
has been left untreated for a long time, which only
compounds this. But I mean she she really felt like
(31:28):
the cause was dead. Yeah, And so in ninety four
she leaves for Liberia, where she she writes a lot
about how free she finally feels how amazing it is
to be there, um because for her, yeah, everything, everything
had been lost. And so her marriage has broken down
at this point, um, and she's no longer performing. Yeah,
(31:53):
and she, uh, she ends up just like saying screw
it to the US. She's not paying taxes. I mean,
she kind of goes off the red and her daughter
Lisa comes to live with her for I think it's
two years in Liberia. But that was an incredibly tumultuous time.
Nina Simon was not healthy, um in a lot of
(32:14):
ways when she was living there. And this is when
we get to talking about Nina Simone the person behind
the persona because uh, you know, mental illness and domestic
violence were just major factors going on in the background
of her career ascent and then decent. Yeah, so during
(32:36):
this time, during this in the background, she's likely suffering
from bipolar disorder or possibly borderline personality disorder. She did
try psychoanalysis for a while, which her husband made her quit.
She also tried hypnosis, relied on drugs and sex and
drinking for a while, but she turned a lot to writing.
(32:57):
She has extensive diaries which are a fascinating look into
the inner workings, everything that's going on behind the scenes
during this time and a lot of what's going behind
the scenes in her nine year marriage with Andrew Stroud,
who you know, it has also taken over her career
in a lot of ways, um, and whom she blames
for her depression because she's constantly touring and constantly performing
(33:21):
to what she says, Well, you want to be rich,
you want to live in big houses, here you go,
You've got to work, um. But they had an incredibly
violent relationship. I mean he began beating her very soon
into I don't know if it had started before they
were married, but certainly once they were married, Um, it
(33:41):
quickly turned violent. And that was something that their daughter
witnessed as well. I mean, it was a hallmark of
their relationship. Yeah. And so you know, we talked about
how she left the United States for Liberia and during
those couple of years that her daughter was with her, Uh,
Simone went from being the abused to the abuser and
(34:05):
beating her daughter and berating her for being light skin
and of course Lisa point pointed out to her mother,
well you picked my father. I didn't. Yeah, and Andrew
Stroud is a light skinned black man. Um. So, after
Liberia though, she moved to Switzerland and then Paris, and
she is almost penniless by this point. She hasn't been touring,
(34:27):
hasn't been paying taxes, and friends finally intervened to get
her mental help. Um And it's it's at this point
too in the documentary where you see to this physical
transformation of Nina Simone, because I mean the mental health
influence that can impact your you know, your outside appearance too.
(34:51):
And she just hadn't been taking care of herself for
so long. Well, she hadn't been taking care of herself.
But also once she did receive a diagnosis for bipolar
disorder thanks to the friends who stepped in and we're like,
you can't live like this. You're living in filth, you're
not taking care of yourself. We're going to take you
to the doctor. She got on medication, but the whole
thing with the medication was that it's going to interfere
(35:14):
with her motor skills, with the way that she looks
in the way that she carries herself, but more specifically
the way that she sings and plays the piano. The
doctor said, well, this is eventually going to take her
skills away from her, and it's there's an interesting moment
in the documentary when her daughter Lisa is talking about
this and she's she's talking about it in sort of
(35:37):
a detached manner in terms of like, here's what happened,
but she frames it in terms of like those guys
in France, UM basically took away her. They interfered with her,
her craft, her skill, her gift. And that's I think
an interesting perspective coming from a child of abuse. Yeah,
(35:58):
I mean, but at that point it was a life
or death situation. Her friends were like, Okay, you will
have to perform so that you can live, or you're
you have to remain untreated and you're going to die.
And she chose to perform and live. And so she
her career slowly starts picking up a little bit. I mean,
(36:21):
she starts playing jazz festivals and things like that. She
rarely returns to the United States um, and actually she
has a mini comeback when Chanel picked up My Baby
just cares for me for their international TV campaign, so
she gets some additional touring out of that. But um,
(36:44):
I mean it just her life kind of winds down
after that in a really tragic kind of way, which
seems largely the product of mental illness left unchecked. And
then in two thousand two she was diagnosed with breast
answer and she died the following year. Yeah, so this
amazing talent, this amazing activist, this amazing voice gets snuffed out.
(37:09):
But she left behind an incredible legacy for anyone willing
to look into it. And that's why I mean this
documentary was so fascinating to It was such a fascinating
entry into learning more about her well and also helping
revive her profile because for a long time she was
(37:29):
largely written out of jazz history. I mean, she has
in more recent years, as biographies have been published, um
and her catalogs revived. Um, she has gotten her do
more for really establishing that sound of modern jazz. And
it did also help when President Obama cited Sinnerman as
(37:53):
one of his songs always on his iPod playlist. That
ushered her into the twenty century mainstream. But I think
that these nuances of her biography and who Nina Simone
really was as a fixture in the nineteen seventies in
the midst of not so much the development of jazz,
(38:14):
but more just the development of the United States and
race relations. Um. I think a lot of people have been,
at least myself, had been unaware of the role that
she played. Yeah, and and so it's fascinating to learn
about that. But not everybody was super pleased with the
documentary or the way that her life was framed, because
(38:35):
you know, like you said at the top of the podcast, Kristen,
there are plenty of male artists throughout history of various
types of art who have been considered geniuses. But they
were they were like mad geniuses, but that madness was attractive.
It was something that was positive in their life as
a force. But um, when you talk about women, the
(39:00):
conversation is a little bit different. And so Tanya Steele
at Indie Wire basically says, can we not just accept
and love and respect her as an artist full stop?
Do we have to qualify her genius by talking about
the fact that she had this mental illness and this
abusive background. Yeah. Well, and she also took a huge
(39:22):
issue with um. Liz Garba's the documentarian, allowing interviews with
Andrew Stroud, her horrendously abusive ex husband, to be included
in the documentary as though he is helping shape her narrative, um,
and saying that that's you know, that's just an injustice
(39:45):
to her. Yeah, basically that she had such extensive diary
entries and we have her daughter there, Um, can we
not let Nina speak for herself? Um, which I mean
she certainly does in the documentary, but U deal definitely
takes interest with Andrew Straud's presence. Yeah, because it's not
only as as as Steel writes about, it's it's not
(40:07):
just how are we interpreting female genius, but it's black
female genius. And she sees it as almost perpetuating stereotypes
of the angry black woman or the mad black woman
and says that it it's sort of delegitimizes her role
in culture more broadly and jazz history more specifically. But
(40:31):
I mean, I would I would hope, as and I
mean as a casual Netflix viewer sitting on my couch,
that a documentary that I watch about a public figure
would include an explanation of their life and how they
lived in and part of that sometimes is mental illness
or is a background that is frightening to other people. Yeah,
(40:52):
I mean it's that question of whether knowing someone's demons
diminishes their legacy as a genius, because I think a
lot of times too, it's it's so heartbreaking to find
out that someone that you idolize has has faults, you know,
(41:15):
to say the least. And but I think it's still
possible to appreciate her and acknowledge her role and her
you know, being a child brodigy all the way up
to you know, the role that she played in the
Civil rights movement as um as controversial as it was,
(41:35):
you know, calling for white people to be killed and
white things to be burned down, um and then fleeing
the country. Uh So, I'm really curious though, to hear
from listeners on this. What are your thoughts on Nina Simone?
Do you have a favorite song? Does her biography influence
(41:56):
how you listen to her music at all? We're really
curious to hear all of your thoughts. Mom Stuff at
how Stuffwork dot com is our email address. You can
also tweet us at mom Stuff podcast or messages on Facebook.
And we've got a couple of messages to share with
you right now, so I gotta let her here from
(42:19):
Olivia about our interview with Hilary Frank, host of the
podcast you need to listen to if you aren't already
The Longest Shortest Time Um, She writes, I wanted to
thank you for sharing such an amazing podcast and community.
I had no clue it was out there. I just
had my son four months ago and have never in
my life felt so deceived by women. Well I'm not
(42:41):
the typical mom. I did have a super average pregnancy
and a very easy delivery, but my postpartum experience was horrible.
And she goes on to say how when she found
out she was pregnant, she was thrilled. She had always
wanted kids, but you can't prepare yourself for something you
don't know is coming. When my son came, I was
(43:03):
ready for the mack truck of love, but instead I
was hit with a mack truck of panic and anxiety.
I spent lots of time trying to nurse or bent
over the changing table bawling my eyes out. I felt
a shame for not loving my son the moment he
was born. On top of that, I felt so alone
and isolated because of this high anxiety level. My blood
(43:23):
pressure skyrocketed and my milk didn't come in, so my
son cried constantly, which only fed into my feelings of
inadequacy as a mom. I felt like I had to
keep all of these struggles quiet, because you can't say
you feel anything but love for your child out loud.
I reached out to my O B g U I
N who delivered my son, and his answer was, you're
not depressed, and that was the end of the story.
(43:45):
I was determined to fight my way out of this,
so I changed my diet, started exercising, and went outside
every day. A few weeks before I was about to
go back to work, I was in such a dark place.
I started to push my boyfriend away, and I was
sure our relationship was coming to an end. I was
preparing myself mentally to be a single parent when he
said to me, I've been with you when your mother
was diagnosed with cancer, when your grandmother was diagnosed with cancer,
(44:08):
and through your parents divorced. I have never seen you
like this. I just want you to feel better. That's
when I took my help into my own hands. I
visited my primary care doctor who prescribed me medication, and
I found a therapist. Now I've been back at work
for a month and I'm feeling more like myself. I
feel like a confident mom. Other than the struggle I
have with not being able to breastpeed my child, I
(44:30):
love him more than anything. That mactruck of love hit me. Finally,
I wish more women talked about this stuff. Even when
I reached out to my mom, she didn't know what
to do. She knew I wasn't depressed, but she had
no suggestions for me. I think as women were doing
a disservice to each other not sharing these stories. Those
first few months for me were such a struggle, and
(44:52):
I wasn't prepared for that at all. I wish someone
would have told me. So I tell everyone I love
your podcast, and so does my son. We listen to
them on the way to daycare in the morning. So
thank you so much, Olivia for sharing that story that
I know is going to resonate with a lot of
our listeners as well. Well. I have a letter here
(45:12):
from a listener who wishes to remain anonymous, in response
to our episode on science fiction. She says, I'm someone
who attends World Con every year and has worked on
World con Convention committees. I was totally not expecting to
hear you guys talking about this community that I'm so
intimately involved in. The current situation with the Hugos and
the puppies is so massively frustrating. The central argument from
(45:36):
the puppies is that there's this social justice warrior cabal
that has been manipulating the hugos and ensuring that women
and people of color and queer people when Hugos or
people who write about those groups, that this doesn't reflect
the will and interest of quote real sci fi fans, who,
so far as I can tell, are straight white men
who read real science fiction, which is basically fifties pulled
(45:58):
with ray guns and spaceships and anything help quote message fiction.
What they're basically saying is women and people of color
and queer people aren't capable of writing well enough to
win awards on their own, and they seem to think
the only reason the author would write about, say, people
of color, is because they want to make some sort
of political statement in order to cater to this group
(46:18):
of s jws, not because you know there are people
of color in the world, and so writing should reflect
that writing about a world solely inhabited by white people
isn't much more of a political statement than writing about
a diverse world that reflects the one we live in.
What we're seeing with the puppies is so similar to
what happening gamer Gate. A bunch of straight white men
assumed for a long time that science fiction is solely
(46:39):
about them and for them, and when women and people
of color and queer people speak up and say no,
this is actually for us too, and we've always been here,
they freak out and decide that it's a personal attack
on them that they must defend against. The good news
is the reason it's happening is because we're being loud
and refusing to put up with them anymore. So that's
optimistic and optimus. You have to end on. So thank
(47:01):
you for sending us that letter, and thanks to everyone
who's written into us. Mom stuff at how stuff works
dot com as our email address, and for links to
all of our social media as well as all of
our blogs, videos and podcasts, including this one with links
to learn more about Nina Simone and want shutt Netflix
dot community. If you are so inclined, head on over
to stuff Mom Never told you dot com for more
(47:27):
on this and thousands of other topics. Isn't how stuff
works dot com
Welcome to stuff Mom Never told you. From house Supports
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline, and today we're talking about the late
great Nina Simone and Caroline. What would be the podcast
version of a biopic? A biopod? Oh? Yeah, which which
(00:26):
is a biocast? A biocast which sounds like some kind
of medical equipment. Yeah, probably is. Actually it probably already is.
We're probably getting sued right now. So many trademark violations
happening already. Um. Yeah, so we're talking about Nina Simone
and Caroline. I gotta confess to you that I did
not grow up listening to Nina Simone. I mean I
(00:48):
would hear her songs every now and then, but I
wasn't a hardcore Nina Simone fan, although like probably everyone
who was born in the midnight between eighties can attest um,
the first time I heard her name was in Lauren
Hill rapping with the Fuji's on Ready or Not, where
(01:10):
she was like ebbi a capone and I'll be Nina
Simone and defecating on your microphone because I was like
homeschoold and white and like rapping in Suburbia. Yeah, I
think we were doing that at the same time. Probably
I was in I was in Marietta doing that, which
now I'm picturing like one of those American Tale moments,
you know, where they're both looking at the moon from
(01:31):
and a little Christen and little Caroline, where we're singing
and dancing along with the fujis listening to our discman,
our disc women at the same time. Right, um, But recently, Caroline,
my eyes have been opened, or my ears, I guess
I should say, have been opened to the genius of
Nina Simone. Because for a long time, you know, I
(01:53):
knew who she was, and I knew that she's saying
all these standards and was this iconic figure in jazz history,
but I really didn't know that much about the breadth
of her catalog and her genius and also her role
as a civil rights activist. And I learned a lot
of this on the Netflix documentary What Happened Miss Simone,
(02:17):
directed by Liz Garbas Yeah, what Happened Miss Simone? Which
is a line from a piece by Maya Angelou about her,
which was really fascinating to read because my Angelo was
obviously a great writer. But the way that she profiles
Nina Simone is is also very fascinating, and but it's
also very warm. She obviously loves the person that she's
(02:38):
talking about. Yeah, and it's interesting to characterize it as
a as a warm piece, because Nina Simone wouldn't be
called warm by everyone in her life. She was. Um.
Liz Garbas was actually talking to NPR about Nina Simone
and the documentary and she was saying, how, Um, she
could easily be characterized as a difficult woman, but how
(03:01):
a lot of times, Um, that is often a sexist
portrayal because there were plenty of men in music who
were geniuses and we're also very difficult men, but they
were just geniuses. Yeah, it's tough, full stop, stopped there. Um. Yeah,
I I watched the documentary just on the edge of
(03:23):
my seat. I thought it was fascinating and like you,
I mean, I had a general awareness of Nina Simone
and um, and a lot of controversy was stirred up
a couple of years ago, not too long ago, when
news first hit that they were going to make that
biopick about her, and it was sort of up in
the air for a while. Who would portray her. I mean,
there's a million great actresses out there who uh, you know,
(03:44):
could potentially look like Nina Simone, which is actually a
big deal that we'll talk about in a little bit, um,
But they went with Zoe Saldana, who's cast and created
so much controversy. And so I had been more and
more aware for the last couple of years, and then
watching this documentary was just fast sinating. Yeah, and her
bio touches on so many things too that we've talked
(04:05):
about in the podcast before. And um, we also want
to note that there is some tragically relevant timing for
the release of that Netflix documentary. Um that attracted a
ton of press just on its own, um, but it
came out on Netflix the same day President Obama delivered
the eulogy for slain South Carolina Senator Clementa C. Pinckney,
(04:29):
who was murdered, um, along with those seven others at
Charleston's Emmanuel Methodist Episcopal Church. And it would be a
similar church horror and an act of racist murder that
would alter the trajectory of Nina Simone's life and career. Yeah, exactly.
(04:50):
But speaking of that trajectory, we have to talk about
how she even came to music in the first place.
She was born in nine thirty three as Eunice Wayman
in try On, North Carolina, and she was the sixth
of eight kids. Her mom was a Methodist preacher and
her dad was an entertainer and handyman. And here it
(05:11):
comes little Eunice, who's basically a musical prodigy. I mean
she took to the organ at two and a half
years old and started playing at her mother's church services. Yeah,
so here we go, touching on our episode a while
back on child prodigies. Um, she absolutely was one of them.
And in addition to her mom being a Methodist preacher,
(05:33):
she's also a housekeeper and um, a white woman. Her
mother cleaned houses for notice little Unie's talent and offered
to pay for lessons with a local British piano teacher
named Muriel Mazan Novik a k a. Ms Mazzi, whom
Nina Stamon would later describe as my white mama. And
(05:54):
she started playing you know, like you said, at her
mother's church services and really developed a reputation in Tryon,
which is a tiny, tiny down um which you can
almost miss if you blink. Um. So she developed this
reputation for being like the town prodigy, and so she
started taking these lessons and would have regular recitals because
(06:15):
people would want to come see her play. And she
later cited a recital when she was eleven, although I've
also seen twelve m but regardless, and when she was young,
this recital was her first time experiencing real anger at
racial discrimination because her parents were asked to move from
the front row to the back so that a white
(06:38):
couple could take their place, and at eleven or twelve
years old, she stopped her recital and refused to play
until her parents were allowed to resume their seats in
the front row. Yeah, and she talks about in the
documentary how she's not even sure that she was aware
of the time that it was what what that meant,
(06:59):
and sincearily she just knew that it was wrong and
that she wanted her parents back in the front row.
But that was definitely sort of a critical moment for
her in her development um And she went on to
study at Juilliard for a summer, with her sights set
on getting into the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia,
which ended up declining her application, and she was convinced
(07:21):
at the time that it was based on her race.
It was not until later that she found out that
other African American students had been accepted. But again, this
was another turning point. She had been offered a scholarship
at Oberlin, but she turned it down she thought it
was beneath her. But all along, this desire to become
a classical musician, to be taken seriously, for her music
(07:43):
to really perform, to get to Carnegie Hall, it really
haunted her. Yeah, I mean, she talks about how she
fell in love with Bach and that was her primary obsession.
And it was worth noting too that she had so
much of a stake in getting into her artists because
it would have offered her free tuition. And before she
(08:04):
had been ultimately rejected from the school, her family had
even moved to Philadelphia, and her even being able to
study at Juilliard had been partially funded by townspeople in
try And who raised money for her to go. So
this is like old school kickstarter essentially, and that money
(08:25):
had run out and all of a sudden, her families
in Philadelphia and she's not accepted into Curtis and what
is she going to do? She has to do something.
She has to make some money somehow, and she has
this incredible gift as a pianist. So in n she
starts playing at a cocktail piano bar in Atlantic City
(08:46):
and makes her stage name Nina Simone so that her
mom wouldn't find out, because keep in mind, this woman
is a Methodist preacher. She has no nonsense. They grew
up in the Bible Belt, and you know that hang
out in cocktail bars and playing standards is probably not
acceptable behavior. So after a couple of years of playing
in these cocktail bars, uh, and she's been asked to sing,
(09:10):
and so she's been singing and playing and honing her craft.
She arrives in New York City in n gets her
first top first and only Top forty hit with I
Loves You Porgy and briefly Mary's white beatnik Don Ross. Yeah,
and there was that point in the documentary where they
show her um performing I Loves You Porgy Um in
(09:35):
the what was it the Playboy Show? Like play by
Penthouse the Playboy Penthouse Show. So there's like old school
black and white Hugh Hefner introducing this new sensation Nina
Simone and she's you know, playing at this piano surrounded
by these you know, wealthy white men with attractive white
(09:55):
women draped across them. Um, which was just such a
such a snapshot of that time. And and you can
see from the beginning to how I mean, even though
her voice becomes so iconic, she was kind of a
reluctant singer. I mean it was something that she kind
of had to do, almost singing for her supper. Otherwise
(10:16):
she wouldn't have been able to perform starting out at
those earlier piano bars. But and like you said, she
finds success. She's in New York, her career is really
taking off, and she she has a singular drive for success,
but really more financial stability. I mean, Nina Sman wants
to become rich and she has since you know, divorced
(10:41):
Don Ross. They were married I think maybe less than
a year in nineteen sixty one, she ends up marrying
Andrew Stroud, who is a former New York City police
officer who ends up becoming her manager. Yeah, because as
much as Ninasman wanted to make money herself and become rich,
Drought definitely saw dollar signs in his eyes. I take
(11:02):
it when he looked at her because obviously she's like
overwhelmingly talented, she's so good at what she does, and
so he sees this as an opportunity to take her
her wild creativity and her amazing skill with the piano
and her amazing vocal skills and sort of point them
(11:24):
in the direction. And that direction is becoming basically what
we have the way we think of Aretha Franklin today.
That's what he sort of wanted for his wife to be,
that cash cow who was on top forty radio making
so much money. Yeah, I mean because also by this time,
Nina Simone had developed a reputation for being a very
(11:45):
difficult performer. There were a number of clubs that did
not care to book her because, as we'll talk about more, um,
if you were not there to see Nina Simone do
Nina Simone, then she was not going to have it.
So Stroud steps in and is like, Okay, we're gonna
put together a plan. And the thing that he promises
(12:07):
her is Carnegie Hall, where all of those childhood dreams
of back and being respected as a classical musician would
finally come to fruition. And in fact, on April twelfth,
ninety three, she plays Carnegie Hall. Yeah, and and Stratt,
I think how to put up it was his entire
(12:28):
police pension right to sort of pay for the promotion,
to even draw attention to the fact that here's this
amazing performer at Carnegie Hall comes here. But in the
same way that so many events in her life with
sort of parallel things going on in the civil rights movement.
Her performance was the same day that Martin Luther King
was locked up in Birmingham. Yeah, and so you start
(12:49):
to see, like you said, like this, these parallel things happening,
and it sort of pits Nina Simone against herself. On
the one hand, Um, as she once told Rogue Magazine,
all my life, I felt the terrible pressure of having
to survive. So she has this almost primal need to
amass as much wealth as possible, and she is starting
(13:13):
to do that through Stroud's management. But too, you have
this civil rights movement picking up, and her personal passion
for that also really coming to life. Um And before
we get more into her as a civil rights activists,
let's talk a little bit about her voice and music,
(13:34):
because in a lot of ways it's undefinable. People call
her the high process of soul, and she defies genres
in a lot of ways. NPR music writer David brent
Johnson notes how she incorporated jazz, blues, folk, pop, show tunes, gospel,
and R and B into these performances and albums. Yeah,
(13:56):
it's sort of amazing to see the product of her
creating out of necessity because here's this amazingly classically trained musician.
She's so good at what she does. She's a prodigy.
She's so just like it's just intuitive when she sits
down at the piano, but performing early on in her
career at those piano bars in those cocktail clubs and
(14:18):
having to, like you said, sing for her supper. You know,
people don't want to hear Bach at the bar and
so speak yourself, Caroline, I'm speaking for those jerks in
New York or Atlantic City or wherever. Um. Yeah, you know,
they didn't want to hear just like classical music played
for an entire set, Which that was another thing that
(14:40):
Nina Simon said that she had to get used to
the idea of a set. She's like, well, all right,
you want me to play play for forty five minutes,
that's fine. I've been playing for eight hours a day
for basically my whole life. So that's cool, um, But
being sort of in that position of being an entertainer
having to do this out of necessity to make money
and live and get by to try to she her dreams,
(15:01):
it meant she had to incorporate a lot of popular
stuff at the time, and so what came out of
that was some really amazing and interesting music. Yeah, so
you have recognizable tunes like I Put a Spell on
You that she reinvented and made so growlly and intense.
But then also you have this children's song that she
(15:23):
wrote in the wake of Lorraine Handsbury's death, called Young,
Gifted and Black, that she wanted to have this song
so that black children everywhere could feel proud of themselves.
And then of course she ended up writing protests songs
like Mississippi Goddamn, which we're going to talk about more
in just a minute. And then for instance, President Obama's
(15:45):
favorite Nina Simon song Centerman, which I was listening to
Caroline before we came into this podcast, and it is
going on loop in the back of my head, so
that I'm talking to Nina saman tune you cannot hear it,
and sting, it's got it's very up tempo. I'm glad
you're having a good time. You know I'm having a
great time too. Excellent. Um. But yeah, but the song
(16:07):
is a traditional spiritual about a sinner trying to hide
on judgment Day. So there we see, we've got great
examples of how she incorporates all of these different musical
traditions to really create her own place in music. And
she even did the song Don't let Me Be Misunderstood,
which was covered by the Animals, which I had to
(16:27):
have a misconception in my head corrected, Oh, did you
think it was slip flop? I thought it was the
other way around. I thought Nina s mom and got ignorant.
Caroline Irven, the podcaster, Uh, totally thought that that was
the animal song. But no, she performed this wonderful song
and the animals covered it. But it's interesting to read
(16:47):
too about her relationship with um people doing rock and
roll music, specifically in England and abroad. UM. She was
sort of fascinated by them, and she wrote her brother
basically saying, like all of these young white kids in
England and France and stuff are doing dances that you
and I used to do when we were kids, and
(17:09):
they're doing this black music in their own way, and
it's so fascinating. And she was so enthralled not only
by that idea and found it very interesting, but also
by the idea that she was just really loved people.
When she went abroad, people just really loved her, and
she didn't feel the same sort of edges of that
racial confinement that she's so often butted up against in America. Yeah,
(17:33):
she was definitely more comfortable abroad than in what she
would later call the United Snakes of America. And I
mean her her blackness was very much a part of
her art as well. Um in nineteen sixty six column
in the Philadelphia Tribune, m her singing was described as
(17:53):
being quote to be brought into a brace of contact
with the black heart and to feel the power and
beauty which for centuries have beat there. And at the
same time that that depth and expression of her voice
was sometimes criticized for being too masculine, because she does
(18:13):
have such a low register depending on what she's singing.
And then on top of that, as we mentioned earlier,
she demanded the full attention of her audience. I mean,
that's what she needed in order to perform, because she
wasn't just sitting there like playing little songs and ditties.
I mean it was You can tell if you watch
(18:35):
her perform that it is a full mind, body, emotional
performance for her. And so she was known to heckle
people or even leave the stage. If someone was talking,
she would stop and she would point. I mean, hope, oh,
Nina Simone. Thank goodness that she was not performing in
the era of cell phones and text messaging. I don't
(18:55):
think she would get through a single concert. Yeah. The
closest thing to that I've seen is going to a
Nico Case concert and seeing her stop everything for somebody
who has a cell phone out. Um. But yeah, you
can imagine that. Well, I would have loved it, like, yeah,
you tell them to shut up. Um. Not everybody, including promoters,
was as big a fan of that, and so that
(19:18):
was another kind of stumbling block to maintaining a mainstream status.
You know, her husband at this point, as we get
deeper and deeper into the sixties, her husband is getting
concerned with her interest in the civil rights movement, that
she's focusing too much on that rather than creating pop music.
He's concerned that she's too you know, moody and abrasive
(19:41):
to the people around her in her career. Um, but
she does not let that stop her. She dove head
first into the civil rights movement. And we're going to
talk about Nina Simone civil rights activists. And when we
come right back from a quick break, So, as a
(20:06):
dark skinned black woman raised in the Jim Crow South,
Nina Simone continually experienced racism from the get go. I
mean we mentioned that incident with the recital when she
was eleven or twelve years old, but she was constantly
told that her skin was too dark and her nose
was too broad, essentially that she looked too African. And
(20:29):
she even once commented on how she never made the
cover of Jet or any magazines because they preferred wider
looking cover stars like Diana Ross. So her appearance it
was something that was often at the forefront of her
mind as she thought about her place not only in
(20:50):
the music industry, but also in American society more broadly
at this time of so much racial unrest. But I
mean that brings us back to when we talked earlier
about the biopic that's been made with with Zoe Saldana
and how if you're not aware of this backstory about
(21:12):
how there was so much focus from outside and from
within on her appearance, you might not understand why people
were up in arms about the casting choice, since Nina
Simone herself said, they're picking people who look like darker
skinned white people to appear on magazines rather than people
who look like me. Yeah. At one point, she writes
(21:33):
in her diary, I can't be white, and I'm the
kind of colored girl who looks like everything white people
despise or have been taught to despise. If I were
a boy, it wouldn't matter so much. But I'm a
girl and in front of the public all the time,
wide open for them to jeer and approve of or
disapprove of. So she gets it. I mean, she's been
(21:54):
she's been exposed to basically appearance shaming of every kind
her in entire life, and understands that women have it
way worse than guys do. Yeah. And and it's also
too in the early nineties sixties that she becomes more radicalized.
She's powering around with leading black activists and scholars of
(22:16):
the day, including James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Stokely Carmichael and others.
And we mentioned Lorraine Handsbury earlier, who inspired the song
young Gifted in Black and Um. She was a playwright
who wrote A Raisin in the Sun, who was incredibly successful,
brilliant and became extremely close friends with Nina Simone and
(22:40):
really provided her not just an education in black identity,
but also Black womanhood and feminism. Yeah, there's a great
quote where Simone says, it was always Marks Linen and
Revolution real girls talk, and I just love that that
she's finally getting this real relationship with someone who is
(23:02):
believing in her own her being Nina sam believing in
her own independence and intelligence and giving her the credit
to be able to talk about the stuff and understand
this stuff, whereas it seems like she had just been
surrounded by people, particularly her overbearing husband, who were just like,
I don't care, just stay on this career track, and
overbearing not only overbearing but also outright abusive, which we'll
(23:26):
talk about more in a little bit. Um. But in
terms of her relationship with Handsbury, she wrote in her
memoir much later on uh quote, I started to think
about myself as a black person in a country run
by white people, and a woman in a world run
by men. And I mean that relationship with Handsbury was
(23:48):
so so formative for her and unfortunately ended so quickly
because Handsbury died of cancer in nine which was a
tragic moment for Nina Simone. And so what really ended
up radicalizing Nina Simone in terms of the civil rights
movement was a couple of events that happened really close together.
(24:12):
One was the murder of civil rights organizer Medgar Evers.
The other was the bombing of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church,
which killed four young black girls who were leaving Bible class.
And so at this point Nina Simone is like, listen,
I cannot just sit here and just play music. I
I have to do something. Yeah, And the first thing
(24:34):
she tried to do was make a gun. I mean,
she wanted she wanted to kill. She was enraged by it,
and um, she tried to make a gun and was
quickly like, I can't make a gun. And I think
also her husband Andrew was like, oh, Nina, please don't
try to make a gun. This is not the answer.
And so she ends up writing in an afternoon this
(24:55):
protest song Mississippi Goddamn and not to Risingly. Because of
the title, the song was banned on some radio stations,
and crates of records were sent back broken in protest um.
And the chorus to the song says, Alabama's gotten me
sotapes that Tennessee made me lose my rest, and everybody
(25:16):
knows about Mississippi Goddamn. And if you listen to her
and watch her playing this song, I mean she even
starts off saying how the name of this tune is
Mississippi Goddamn, and I mean every word of it well,
because in addition to that chorus, she also um imitates
(25:37):
white people in the community telling black people and black
activists to take it slowly, go slow, and her backup
singers say too slow, um, which is a refrain that
you hear today in terms of any type of civil
rights organizing. There's always somebody in power saying, well, let's
slow down a little, let's let's not take this so fast.
(25:58):
And so it wasn't It definitely wasn't just the name
of the song. It was the whole idea, the ideology
contained within it that just put a lot of people off,
to say the least yeah, I mean. And so after
this song comes out, she plays Carnegie Hall for a
second time, and she sings Mississippi God Damn. And when
she gets to the part saying, oh, but this country
(26:22):
is full of lies and you're all going to die
and die like flies, she slows it down and looks
out into the predominantly white audience sitting there, And I mean,
she she like she said, she means what she is singing. Um.
And we should note too that she had long supported
(26:44):
the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Race Equality,
and the n double a c p UM. But this
is when she really throws herself even more publicly and
visibly into the civil rights movements. She's marching, she's playing
benefit concerts, she's really using the stage as her platform
(27:06):
to speak truth to power and express her lack of
faith in that, like you said, that gradual push for
civil rights. Yeah. And during the march from selma Um,
she she performs Mississippi Goddamn on a stage that's propped
up by coffins. And so that in itself is a
(27:26):
huge deal and a great turning point. But she meets
Martin Luther King and sticks out her hand and says,
I am not nonviolent, and every account of the event
says that he gentally was like that's okay, that's that's fine,
that's totally cool. And it wasn't until then that she
relaxed and was like, well, you know, it's amazing to
meet you. But she just had to make sure that
(27:48):
he knew because he was he was more than just
a face of the movement, I mean to white people.
He was people were so happy about the whole non
violent thing, as you would understand, and and so she
was just making it clear to this guy who's the
face of everything, uh, that that wasn't her jam no no,
I mean. And she certainly wasn't the only black musician
(28:13):
or black entertainer who was using their notoriety to help,
you know, promote the civil rights movement. But she had
such a harder time simultaneously supporting a commercial career and
her activism, um compared to say Aretha Franklin or Harry Belafonte,
(28:35):
who were were still able to continue selling records. But
Nina Simone just with this hit a wall with a
lot of it and her prominent activism, though contrast the
overwhelming male leadership of the civil rights movement. This is
something that we touched on a little bit, I think
(28:56):
in our um a couple of podcasts on women in
the civil rights movement, and also in our podcast on
women abolitionists. UM. But we found a paper by Ruth
Feldstein called I Don't Trust You Anymore Nina Simone, Culture
and Black activism in the nineteen sixties, and Feldstein writes, quote,
in the late nineteen sixties, assertions of black male pride
(29:19):
remained at the center of calls for black power that
were implicitly and explicitly gendered male. And here you have
Nina Simone who is sort of just not paying any
attention to that structure whatsoever, and you know, doing her Yeah,
that's right. For instance, in nineteen sixty eight, in front
(29:40):
of an audience in Harlem, she read a poem by
David Nelson asking her audience, are you ready to do
what is necessary? And the poem and of course Nina
Simone encouraged the audience to break and burn white things,
build black things, kill if necessary. And so you can
just imagine that these are things that not a lot
(30:02):
of other people in the mainstream are saying out loud well,
and even just if you look at Mississippi Goddamn, which
had come out a few years prior to that. UM.
A comedian Dick Gregory was talking about this in the
Netflix documentary What Happened in Miss Simone UM, And he said,
if you look at all the suffering black folks went through,
(30:24):
not one black man would dare say Mississippi Goddamn. We
all wanted to say it, but she said it. And
so then by a lot of disillusionment had set in
and quote the days when revolution really had seemed possible,
We're gone forever, especially when you consider that a lot
(30:44):
of people around her, and a lot of people important
to the movement, people like Martin Luther King and Handsbury
and Malcolm X and so many other integral figures were gone. Yeah,
they were either dead or imprisoned, and a lot of
public attention and protests. You by this point had shifted
away from civil rights and toward Vietnam, and Simone was
(31:08):
really devastated. I mean, obviously, at this point we have
a lot of domestic abuse that's been going on in
the background for a while, and uh, mental illness that
has been left untreated for a long time, which only
compounds this. But I mean she she really felt like
(31:28):
the cause was dead. Yeah, And so in ninety four
she leaves for Liberia, where she she writes a lot
about how free she finally feels how amazing it is
to be there, um because for her, yeah, everything, everything
had been lost. And so her marriage has broken down
at this point, um, and she's no longer performing. Yeah,
(31:53):
and she, uh, she ends up just like saying screw
it to the US. She's not paying taxes. I mean,
she kind of goes off the red and her daughter
Lisa comes to live with her for I think it's
two years in Liberia. But that was an incredibly tumultuous time.
Nina Simon was not healthy, um in a lot of
(32:14):
ways when she was living there. And this is when
we get to talking about Nina Simone the person behind
the persona because uh, you know, mental illness and domestic
violence were just major factors going on in the background
of her career ascent and then decent. Yeah, so during
(32:36):
this time, during this in the background, she's likely suffering
from bipolar disorder or possibly borderline personality disorder. She did
try psychoanalysis for a while, which her husband made her quit.
She also tried hypnosis, relied on drugs and sex and
drinking for a while, but she turned a lot to writing.
(32:57):
She has extensive diaries which are a fascinating look into
the inner workings, everything that's going on behind the scenes
during this time and a lot of what's going behind
the scenes in her nine year marriage with Andrew Stroud,
who you know, it has also taken over her career
in a lot of ways, um, and whom she blames
for her depression because she's constantly touring and constantly performing
(33:21):
to what she says, Well, you want to be rich,
you want to live in big houses, here you go,
You've got to work, um. But they had an incredibly
violent relationship. I mean he began beating her very soon
into I don't know if it had started before they
were married, but certainly once they were married, Um, it
(33:41):
quickly turned violent. And that was something that their daughter
witnessed as well. I mean, it was a hallmark of
their relationship. Yeah. And so you know, we talked about
how she left the United States for Liberia and during
those couple of years that her daughter was with her, Uh,
Simone went from being the abused to the abuser and
(34:05):
beating her daughter and berating her for being light skin
and of course Lisa point pointed out to her mother,
well you picked my father. I didn't. Yeah, and Andrew
Stroud is a light skinned black man. Um. So, after
Liberia though, she moved to Switzerland and then Paris, and
she is almost penniless by this point. She hasn't been touring,
(34:27):
hasn't been paying taxes, and friends finally intervened to get
her mental help. Um And it's it's at this point
too in the documentary where you see to this physical
transformation of Nina Simone, because I mean the mental health
influence that can impact your you know, your outside appearance too.
(34:51):
And she just hadn't been taking care of herself for
so long. Well, she hadn't been taking care of herself.
But also once she did receive a diagnosis for bipolar
disorder thanks to the friends who stepped in and we're like,
you can't live like this. You're living in filth, you're
not taking care of yourself. We're going to take you
to the doctor. She got on medication, but the whole
thing with the medication was that it's going to interfere
(35:14):
with her motor skills, with the way that she looks
in the way that she carries herself, but more specifically
the way that she sings and plays the piano. The
doctor said, well, this is eventually going to take her
skills away from her, and it's there's an interesting moment
in the documentary when her daughter Lisa is talking about
this and she's she's talking about it in sort of
(35:37):
a detached manner in terms of like, here's what happened,
but she frames it in terms of like those guys
in France, UM basically took away her. They interfered with her,
her craft, her skill, her gift. And that's I think
an interesting perspective coming from a child of abuse. Yeah,
(35:58):
I mean, but at that point it was a life
or death situation. Her friends were like, Okay, you will
have to perform so that you can live, or you're
you have to remain untreated and you're going to die.
And she chose to perform and live. And so she
her career slowly starts picking up a little bit. I mean,
(36:21):
she starts playing jazz festivals and things like that. She
rarely returns to the United States um, and actually she
has a mini comeback when Chanel picked up My Baby
just cares for me for their international TV campaign, so
she gets some additional touring out of that. But um,
(36:44):
I mean it just her life kind of winds down
after that in a really tragic kind of way, which
seems largely the product of mental illness left unchecked. And
then in two thousand two she was diagnosed with breast
answer and she died the following year. Yeah, so this
amazing talent, this amazing activist, this amazing voice gets snuffed out.
(37:09):
But she left behind an incredible legacy for anyone willing
to look into it. And that's why I mean this
documentary was so fascinating to It was such a fascinating
entry into learning more about her well and also helping
revive her profile because for a long time she was
(37:29):
largely written out of jazz history. I mean, she has
in more recent years, as biographies have been published, um
and her catalogs revived. Um, she has gotten her do
more for really establishing that sound of modern jazz. And
it did also help when President Obama cited Sinnerman as
(37:53):
one of his songs always on his iPod playlist. That
ushered her into the twenty century mainstream. But I think
that these nuances of her biography and who Nina Simone
really was as a fixture in the nineteen seventies in
the midst of not so much the development of jazz,
(38:14):
but more just the development of the United States and
race relations. Um. I think a lot of people have been,
at least myself, had been unaware of the role that
she played. Yeah, and and so it's fascinating to learn
about that. But not everybody was super pleased with the
documentary or the way that her life was framed, because
(38:35):
you know, like you said at the top of the podcast, Kristen,
there are plenty of male artists throughout history of various
types of art who have been considered geniuses. But they
were they were like mad geniuses, but that madness was attractive.
It was something that was positive in their life as
a force. But um, when you talk about women, the
(39:00):
conversation is a little bit different. And so Tanya Steele
at Indie Wire basically says, can we not just accept
and love and respect her as an artist full stop?
Do we have to qualify her genius by talking about
the fact that she had this mental illness and this
abusive background. Yeah. Well, and she also took a huge
(39:22):
issue with um. Liz Garba's the documentarian, allowing interviews with
Andrew Stroud, her horrendously abusive ex husband, to be included
in the documentary as though he is helping shape her narrative, um,
and saying that that's you know, that's just an injustice
(39:45):
to her. Yeah, basically that she had such extensive diary
entries and we have her daughter there, Um, can we
not let Nina speak for herself? Um, which I mean
she certainly does in the documentary, but U deal definitely
takes interest with Andrew Straud's presence. Yeah, because it's not
only as as as Steel writes about, it's it's not
(40:07):
just how are we interpreting female genius, but it's black
female genius. And she sees it as almost perpetuating stereotypes
of the angry black woman or the mad black woman
and says that it it's sort of delegitimizes her role
in culture more broadly and jazz history more specifically. But
(40:31):
I mean, I would I would hope, as and I
mean as a casual Netflix viewer sitting on my couch,
that a documentary that I watch about a public figure
would include an explanation of their life and how they
lived in and part of that sometimes is mental illness
or is a background that is frightening to other people. Yeah,
(40:52):
I mean it's that question of whether knowing someone's demons
diminishes their legacy as a genius, because I think a
lot of times too, it's it's so heartbreaking to find
out that someone that you idolize has has faults, you know,
(41:15):
to say the least. And but I think it's still
possible to appreciate her and acknowledge her role and her
you know, being a child brodigy all the way up
to you know, the role that she played in the
Civil rights movement as um as controversial as it was,
(41:35):
you know, calling for white people to be killed and
white things to be burned down, um and then fleeing
the country. Uh So, I'm really curious though, to hear
from listeners on this. What are your thoughts on Nina Simone?
Do you have a favorite song? Does her biography influence
(41:56):
how you listen to her music at all? We're really
curious to hear all of your thoughts. Mom Stuff at
how Stuffwork dot com is our email address. You can
also tweet us at mom Stuff podcast or messages on Facebook.
And we've got a couple of messages to share with
you right now, so I gotta let her here from
(42:19):
Olivia about our interview with Hilary Frank, host of the
podcast you need to listen to if you aren't already
The Longest Shortest Time Um, She writes, I wanted to
thank you for sharing such an amazing podcast and community.
I had no clue it was out there. I just
had my son four months ago and have never in
my life felt so deceived by women. Well I'm not
(42:41):
the typical mom. I did have a super average pregnancy
and a very easy delivery, but my postpartum experience was horrible.
And she goes on to say how when she found
out she was pregnant, she was thrilled. She had always
wanted kids, but you can't prepare yourself for something you
don't know is coming. When my son came, I was
(43:03):
ready for the mack truck of love, but instead I
was hit with a mack truck of panic and anxiety.
I spent lots of time trying to nurse or bent
over the changing table bawling my eyes out. I felt
a shame for not loving my son the moment he
was born. On top of that, I felt so alone
and isolated because of this high anxiety level. My blood
(43:23):
pressure skyrocketed and my milk didn't come in, so my
son cried constantly, which only fed into my feelings of
inadequacy as a mom. I felt like I had to
keep all of these struggles quiet, because you can't say
you feel anything but love for your child out loud.
I reached out to my O B g U I
N who delivered my son, and his answer was, you're
not depressed, and that was the end of the story.
(43:45):
I was determined to fight my way out of this,
so I changed my diet, started exercising, and went outside
every day. A few weeks before I was about to
go back to work, I was in such a dark place.
I started to push my boyfriend away, and I was
sure our relationship was coming to an end. I was
preparing myself mentally to be a single parent when he
said to me, I've been with you when your mother
was diagnosed with cancer, when your grandmother was diagnosed with cancer,
(44:08):
and through your parents divorced. I have never seen you
like this. I just want you to feel better. That's
when I took my help into my own hands. I
visited my primary care doctor who prescribed me medication, and
I found a therapist. Now I've been back at work
for a month and I'm feeling more like myself. I
feel like a confident mom. Other than the struggle I
have with not being able to breastpeed my child, I
(44:30):
love him more than anything. That mactruck of love hit me. Finally,
I wish more women talked about this stuff. Even when
I reached out to my mom, she didn't know what
to do. She knew I wasn't depressed, but she had
no suggestions for me. I think as women were doing
a disservice to each other not sharing these stories. Those
first few months for me were such a struggle, and
(44:52):
I wasn't prepared for that at all. I wish someone
would have told me. So I tell everyone I love
your podcast, and so does my son. We listen to
them on the way to daycare in the morning. So
thank you so much, Olivia for sharing that story that
I know is going to resonate with a lot of
our listeners as well. Well. I have a letter here
(45:12):
from a listener who wishes to remain anonymous, in response
to our episode on science fiction. She says, I'm someone
who attends World Con every year and has worked on
World con Convention committees. I was totally not expecting to
hear you guys talking about this community that I'm so
intimately involved in. The current situation with the Hugos and
the puppies is so massively frustrating. The central argument from
(45:36):
the puppies is that there's this social justice warrior cabal
that has been manipulating the hugos and ensuring that women
and people of color and queer people when Hugos or
people who write about those groups, that this doesn't reflect
the will and interest of quote real sci fi fans, who,
so far as I can tell, are straight white men
who read real science fiction, which is basically fifties pulled
(45:58):
with ray guns and spaceships and anything help quote message fiction.
What they're basically saying is women and people of color
and queer people aren't capable of writing well enough to
win awards on their own, and they seem to think
the only reason the author would write about, say, people
of color, is because they want to make some sort
of political statement in order to cater to this group
(46:18):
of s jws, not because you know there are people
of color in the world, and so writing should reflect
that writing about a world solely inhabited by white people
isn't much more of a political statement than writing about
a diverse world that reflects the one we live in.
What we're seeing with the puppies is so similar to
what happening gamer Gate. A bunch of straight white men
assumed for a long time that science fiction is solely
(46:39):
about them and for them, and when women and people
of color and queer people speak up and say no,
this is actually for us too, and we've always been here,
they freak out and decide that it's a personal attack
on them that they must defend against. The good news
is the reason it's happening is because we're being loud
and refusing to put up with them anymore. So that's
optimistic and optimus. You have to end on. So thank
(47:01):
you for sending us that letter, and thanks to everyone
who's written into us. Mom stuff at how stuff works
dot com as our email address, and for links to
all of our social media as well as all of
our blogs, videos and podcasts, including this one with links
to learn more about Nina Simone and want shutt Netflix
dot community. If you are so inclined, head on over
to stuff Mom Never told you dot com for more
(47:27):
on this and thousands of other topics. Isn't how stuff
works dot com
Stuff Mom Never Told You News
Hosts And Creators
Anney Reese
Samantha McVey
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.