“Alabama’s gotten me so upset, Tennessee has made me lose my rest, and everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam.” Those were the words the legendary singer Nina Simone wrote five decades ago in the wake of the assassination of Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four black children. “Mississippi Goddam” would become an anthem of the civil rights movement.
Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam.” Well, 50 years later, Nina Simone’s message remains as relevant as ever, as the Black Lives Matter movement grows across the country and the nation mourns the deaths of the nine worshipers killed last week at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.
Liz Garbus talking:
What Happened, Miss Simone? derives from an article that Maya Angelou wrote in 1970 for Redbook. Nina had been—you know, was the patron saint of the rebellion, and she was a leader in the movement. And then, after the murders of so many of her colleagues and compatriots and fellow travelers, she had had enough. She had had enough with America, and she left. And the article, and the question in the article, “What happened, Miss Simone?” was asking, you know, where is she? Where are these voices? What happened to Nina? And so the film kind of uses that as a frame to unravel, you know, how we understand Nina Simone’s career, her art, her commitments.
Nina Simone was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, right up there with Miles Davis, James Brown, Bob Dylan, and, possibly because of race and gender, was not—and the combination of the two, in her case, you know, had not been regarded that way, and especially here in the U.S., where I think she had been overlooked and forgotten and certainly misunderstood, as her song intimates. And so, we were able to, with the permission of the estate, get—do a really, really deep dive into Nina Simone, not just the concerts and the performances, which of course make up the heart of the film, but also private tapes of Nina talking about her life, you know, 30, 40 hours of that, diaries, letters, notes, and interviews with some of her most intimate friends and family members.
She was born Eunice Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, the daughter of two very religious parents. Her mother was a minister in a church. And from a very young age, people noticed in church that Nina was incredibly talented at the piano. When she was about six years old, some white folks in that community thought, “Oh, maybe we have a prodigy on our hands here,” and they took up a collection to get Nina—Eunice Waymon, get her a classical music education. So, from that age, she started crossing the railroad tracks to the home of Ms. Massinovitch, who, again—who gave her—you know, schooled her in Bach and the classics. Nina was extraordinarily talented. They raised money, enough to get her to Juilliard here in New York. And her dream was to become the first black classical pianist in Carnegie Hall. After one year at Juilliard, she applied to the Curtis Institute, and then the money—and she did not get in. And the money ran out.
This was when Eunice Waymon became Nina Simone. She started—her parents, her family, had moved up north to be around her. She started playing in bars and clubs, and singing what her family considered to be the devil’s music. So she changed her name to Nina Simone so it would go underneath her mother’s radar. One night in a bar, they said to her, “You know, if you want to make some money, you better sing.” And that’s when Nina Simone began singing. So this was never the intended path for her career. Throughout her life—you know, she lived to age 70—she lamented that she didn’t get to explore that classical path to its fullest. But, of course, she also found great joy and triumph in her involvement with the civil rights movement, which of course then also led to her deepest disappointments.
she didn’t pursue the classical music, she went to Juilliard, but then tried to get into Curtis music—school of music in Philadelphia. And she did not gain acceptance. And that was one of the finest schools, and it would be paid for. And once that was taken away from her, she couldn’t continue that education. Her view was that she—it was because of race. And Curtis Institute denied that. But, of course, there were very, very few black students who had ever been accepted to Curtis. You know, it was—it was the ’50s, you know, so, certainly, we imagine that it played a role.
Al Schackman talking:
I met Nina in 1957 in the art community, village of New Hope, Pennsylvania. I was playing there with my trio in a restaurant, and Nina was playing at the Bucks County Playhouse Inn. And some friends of hers had visited with her from Philadelphia and were having dinner and heard me play and thought it might be a good idea for the two of us to get together. And they asked her, and she agreed. And on a night off, I went down with my guitar and amp, and set up. And she was on a break. And I just was ready to play with her, and she came on stage and never looked at me or told me what she was going to play. And we both had perfect pitch. And she started the introduction to her song “Little Girl Blue,” which was a Bach piece, and it was a fugue. And I came in with a third part. And she started singing “Little Girl Blue,” and then she looked up at me, and we were off and running from there.
Liz Garbus talking:
Nina was pursuing a career that was—you know, after “I Loves You, Porgy” was a smash hit, she was pursuing a career and, you know, sort of filling a role that people handed to her, which was of the jazz singer. Now, this was not what Nina Simone wanted to be. This was not how she saw herself. In 1963, after the church bombing, in Birmingham—Nina changed course. She wrote “Mississippi Goddam.” And, you know, her career would never be the same from then on. She talked about, you know, when she was growing up, nobody talked about race. But, of course, her entire being was infused, growing up in the Jim Crow South and existing in America, a segregated, racist America. And she changed course in her career, and she said, you know, right now her mission and her passion was to make music that would help her people. And so she continued to make some of the great anthems of the civil rights movement—”Young, Gifted and Black,” “Backlash Blues,” “Old Jim Crow.” You know, she continued, of course, “Mississippi Goddam.” And she collaborated with the great intellectuals of the day. Lorraine Hansberry wrote “Young, Gifted and Black” for her. Langston Hughes wrote “Backlash Blues.” She hung out with James Baldwin, Miriam Makeba, Stokely Carmichael, ultimately lived next door to the Shabazz, Malcolm X family. So she was part of the circle of activist black intellectuals, and she had quite a political awakening. She and Al went to the Selma march together. And he, of course, can talk about that, yeah.
Al Schackman talking:
Nina was not performing regularly, and I had the opportunity to go on with Harry Belafonte on fundraising tours with Martin Luther King. And we would fly to different cities, and we actually were in Europe with him, as well. And it was a great opportunity to be able to get next to Martin and really feel the spirit of where he was coming from. And that is what America came to see, as well.
we were at a fundraiser, and we approached Martin Luther King, and he put his hand out. And before anything else could happen, she just, in a very strong voice, looked at him and said, “I’m not nonviolent.” And he said, “Oh, that’s OK, Sister. You don’t have to be.” And he put his hand out, and they shook hands. And it was a very warm meeting after that.
We were playing at The Village Gate in New York, and we flew down with Nina’s husband, Andy Stroud, and were going to land in Montgomery. And we couldn’t land, and we flew over the runway, and it was filled with trash trucks, garbage trucks, all kinds of equipment. And the governor of Alabama had had that put out so that we couldn’t land. We eventually landed in Jackson, Mississippi, and chartered a single-engine, little single-engine plane. And we were kind of heavy, and the nose gear went up in the air like that, and the pilot said, “Well, we can’t take off like that.” And we switched seats. Andy was moved up forward with my amplifier, and the plane settled down.
And we took off and landed on a small runway in Montgomery and had to go through Alabama National Guard to get to the stage at the soccer field of the seminary. And it was a big platform. The stage had a little scrim around it, a little curtain. And I lifted up the curtain to see if I could plug my amp in somewhere, and saw that the stage was built on coffins, that were supplied by the black mortuaries in Montgomery. And it was pretty chilling to see that.
Liz Garbus talking:
Nina Simone was deeply affected by Dr. King’s death. she espoused probably a slightly different political doctrine than he, yet—and then, when you listen to her song, “The King of Love is Dead,” you can see how much—how much it broke her. You know, her colleague Stokely Carmichael said, when black—when white America killed Dr. King, they killed the best chance for peace and for healing. And, you know, certainly, after the massacre in Charleston and what’s been—you know, we see that perhaps that was true.
then, in the ’70s, she goes into self-imposed exile, goes to Africa and Europe. they’re her nomadic years. I mean, she definitely—after leaving the States, she led more of a nomadic life. She goes to the Caribbean for a while, then to Liberia, where she said, you know, “This was a country formed by freed slaves, and this is where I should be.” But no money came in. She couldn’t—she didn’t want to sing. She wanted to be out of the business for a while. But she also then realized she had to eat, and she went back to Switzerland.
And in Switzerland, she goes to the Montreux Jazz Festival and gives quite an infamous performance, where she’s clearly in a great deal of turmoil, doesn’t want to be in a jazz festival, but must be there. The piano draws her. She loves the piano, but also it became quite a burden for her, as well. She ultimately settles in France and in Holland, you know, amongst friends, and seeks—ultimately, with the help of her friend Al and other friends, gets mental health treatment, because she was, as we see in her diaries and as her friends reported, suffering from, you know, pretty severe depression.
She married a former police officer—she married a man who was a police officer, who then retired from the police force to manage Nina Simone. The husband-manager thing has never really worked out too well for artists over time; I think it’s something that we can settle. But yeah, indeed, for them, it was quite fraught with both violence, pressure, you know, different goals. When Nina became involved in the civil rights movement, the commercial side of her career suffered. That became an issue between them, another antagonist between them in their marriage. But their marriage was—you know, it was complicated. As Lisa, Nina’s daughter, said, it was a little bit like inviting the bull with a red cape into your kitchen—you know, let’s see what you can do. Nina wrote in her diaries, “I love physical violence.” There was part of her that clearly engaged in this with her husband. So it was quite a complex relationship that we didn’t want to oversimplify, because we do see Nina’s perspective on it.
Al Schackman talking:
her songs were threatening at the time, and the popular powers that be in the music industry were afraid to bring her on to any projects or record deals after a while. But the political undertones were always there. In “Mississippi Goddam,” I mean, even today, the black community in this country doesn’t necessarily want you to be their next-door neighbor. But as the song says in “Mississippi Goddam,” you don’t have to live next to me, just give us our equality. And Nina was very strong about that. She—that and women’s rights, as well. She was really a pioneer, and her political views really forced her out of the United States at the time.
We kind of had a telepathic communication, as we did in the music. And she was fun-loving and very gentle. Our best times were alone. And actually, our best times musically were when it was just she and I, and we had nothing in the way of this pure musical interaction. But one time when we were alone in Holland, she said, “Let’s go for a drive.” And I said, “Where?” She said, “I’ll show you.” We drove miles out into the countryside, and now we’re on a dirt road. And she says, “Turn right.” And we see some Quonset huts, and we come up to the Quonset huts, and it was an airfield. And I said, “What are we doing, Nina?” And it was a glider field. And she said, “We’re going up.” And she knew everybody there, and she loved to go up in gliders and do sail planing. And up we went. And we’re circling around, and she’s below me in another glider, and she waves up with a big smile, and I wave back at her, and she was at peace. It was really amazing.
Liz Garbus talking:
I think Nina is a model of how an entertainer inspires and engages politically. And I think today she’s a voice we need sorely. And I think that, you know, for other artists and celebrities today kind of looking to get involved in the movement, Nina Simone did it, and she inspired people, and she never compromised.
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Liz Garbus, director of What Happened, Miss Simone? which opens today in theaters in New York and Los Angeles, and releases on Netflix on Friday. Her 1998 documentary, The Farm: Angola, USA was nominated for an Academy Award.
Al Schackman, Nina Simone’s guitarist and music director for over 40 years.
— source democracynow.org