Nina Simone

Nina Simone was not only renowned for her powerful, groundbreaking music; she also became an icon of the civil rights movement at a crucial point in its evolution. And while she lived with the spotlight of fame trained firmly upon her, she struggled to keep her tempestuous personal life out of the public eye. How did she use her bountiful talent to become a champion of political causes? Why did she ultimately spend so much of her life in self-imposed exile? And how much did private struggle impact her role as a public figure and her personal search for happiness? This is a Short History Of Nina Simone. A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins. With thanks to Alan Light, a music journalist and author of the biography What Happened, Miss Simone? Written by Dan Smith | Produced by Kate Simants | Production Assistant: Chris McDonald | Exec produced by Katrina Hughes | Sound supervisor: Matt Peaty | Sound design by Oliver Sanders | Assembly edit by Dorry Macaulay | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Cody Reynolds-Shaw | Fact check: Sean Coleman Unlock the next two episodes of Short History Of… right now by subscribing to Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening and early access to shows across the Noiser podcast network, including Real Survival Stories and Sherlock Holmes Short Stories. Just click the subscription banner at the top of the feed, or head to www.noiser.com/subscriptions to get started. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:56Speaker 02

  It is a Sunday in the spring of 1943.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  At the library in Tryon, a tiny town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, around 200 locals are filing in to take their seats, ready for an extraordinary piano recital.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  Against a backdrop of light chatter and the clearing of throats, 10-year-old Eunice Wayman, wearing a new white dress, nervously fingers the curtain at the edge of the stage.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  Peering out into the crowd, she sees her mother and father sat on the front row and smiles as they spot her and wave.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  But now, one of the attendants bends down to whisper something to her parents.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  Looking confounded, her mother gathers her possessions, and then, after a sigh, her father does the same.

• 1:50Speaker 02

  Their lead seats further back, and two new arrivals are ushered to the spaces they have just vacated. Eunice frowns. Have her black parents really been told to make way for two white audience members?

• 2:08Speaker 02

  There and then, she makes a decision. She ushers over her piano teacher, asking her to tell the library staff that she will not perform unless her parents are restored to their front-row position.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  Still, the auditorium fills up, but Eunice is serious about following through on her threat. Reluctantly, someone in charge gives way. There is the scraping of chairs as Mr. and Mrs. Wayman are returned to their seats, and the two white spectators are moved elsewhere.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Satisfied, Eunice makes the short walk to the piano. She sits down and arranges her music, taking time so as to let the audience quieten, just as her teacher has taught her. She stretches her fingers, and then, when there is respectful silence, begins to play.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  Her audience enraptured, she is transported to a world where her race is meaningless. The only thing that matters is the magic that pours from her hands.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  This afternoon is the first time that this little girl has used her artistry as a weapon against prejudice.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  It will not, however, be the last.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Eunice goes on to become famous around the world as Nina Simone, the so-called "High Priestess of Soul", whose intense performances blended elements of classical, jazz, blues, and folk. But as well as being renowned for her powerful, groundbreaking music, she became an icon of the civil rights movement at a crucial point in its evolution.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  And while she lived with the spotlight of fame trained firmly upon her, she struggled to keep her tempestuous personal life out of the public eye.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  But how did she use her bountiful talent to become a champion of political causes? Why did she ultimately spend so much of her life in self-imposed exile from her homeland? And how much did private struggle impact her role as a public figure and her personal search for happiness?

• 4:34Speaker 02

  I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is A Short History of Nina Simone.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  It is 1936, and in a small clapboard house in Tryon, 3-year-old Eunice Wayman sits on a stool at the family's upright piano, her feet dangling high above the ground as her tiny hands jump across the keys.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Her mother, Mary Kate, a Methodist preacher, stops what she is doing to listen. Surely, it can't be. But despite never having had a formal lesson, her daughter is playing a fully-formed tune, a hymn they sing at church. And she is playing it beautifully.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  It dawns on Mary Kate that Eunice has a rare gift.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  Eunice Kathleen Wayman, the sixth of eight children, is a happy child. But life is hard for the family, and money is short.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  Though their hometown is more liberal than many other parts of the American South, this is a hard time to be black. Alongside lynchings by white supremacists, the so-called "Jim Crow" laws segregate the population, denying African-Americans the right to vote and reinforcing often extreme economic hardship along racial lines.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Struggling in the grip of the Great Depression, Mary Kate is the breadwinner, bringing an income through cleaning and domestic work alongside her preaching. Her husband, John, tries his hand at a number of jobs, including working as a handyman, barber, entertainer, as well as being the family joker.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  Alan Light is a music journalist and author of the biography, What Happened, Miss Simone?

• 6:42Speaker 03

  Her mother, I think she sort of idolized, but felt was at a certain distance. Her father, she was much closer to, certainly much more physical proximity with, but knew that he was a flawed individual who couldn't really keep a regular job.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Though their homes are a series of properties that sometimes lack even an outhouse, theirs is a cheerful, musical household. Encouraged by her parents, Eunice learns to play the piano completely by ear. Then, in 1939, when she is six, she accompanies a community choir at a concert in town. In the audience are two white women, Mrs. Miller, who employs Mary Kate as a cleaner, and Muriel Mazanovic, a local piano teacher. They convince Mary Kate that Eunice needs formal lessons.

• 7:32Speaker 03

  Here is somebody who can break out of and escape and has this talent that's gonna take her beyond the limitations of being in a small town, the limitations of being black at that time and in that location in America, that she had this superpower that if it could be supported, if it could be encouraged, and if it could be genuinely given an outlet, really represented the chance to ascend in a way that others were not able to do.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Each Saturday, Eunice walks three miles for an hour-long lesson with Mrs. Mazanovic, who rewards her good playing with candies. Literally crossing the railroad to attend her lessons, she's getting a taste of what life has to offer to those born on the other side of the tracks.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  She becomes familiar with all the classical greats, but it is Bach whom she most adores, finding an almost mathematical beauty in his music. After four years, she is about to start high school when Mazanovic establishes a community fund so that Eunice can continue her musical education. The fateful concert at the library, when Eunice threatens not to play, is in fact a reward for the donors.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  She is sent to a boarding school with this sense of, "You're gonna go off and be our shining star and carry all the hopes and dreams of this community with you." And the intention is that she's gonna go on to conservatory, and she's going to become the first great black American female classical piano player.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  Her life at the school is highly regimented, starting with piano practice in the early hours of the morning. By her late teens, her commitment to her musical dream contributes to the collapse of a relationship with a boy from Tryon. The breakup scars her badly, but her love for the piano leaves little room for anyone else.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  In the summer of 1950, she is accepted at New York's prestigious Juilliard School of Music, where she plans to study ahead of the entrance assessment for the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. She sits the exam in August, and though she is pleased with her performance, she is devastated when she receives a rejection.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  And she is convinced that it is because she is black and because she is a woman that she is not offered that spot. Now, going back and looking at the records of the school, there had been black students. It's not like there was zero precedent. It's not like that had not happened. But it almost doesn't matter. What matters is that that is what she perceived as the thing that happened.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Believing her music career is over before it has begun, she takes a job as a photographer's assistant in Philadelphia to help support the family, who have moved to the city to be close to her. But she continues to have piano lessons and works as an accompanist at a vocal studio and later as a music teacher. But when she hears about paid opportunities for musicians on the New Jersey coast, an idea begins to formulate.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Now, aged 21, in June 1954, she secures a gig at the Down at Heel Midtown Bar and Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  But she's fearful of what her mother will say if she finds out she's performing in a place like this, where jazz and the blues, the devil's music, is preferred to the classics.

• 11:09Speaker 03

  She is sufficiently ashamed that she makes up a new name. She doesn't want anybody to happen to see that Eunice Wayman is playing at this club. It would be seen as beneath her.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  She chooses Nina, a nod to a nickname given to her by an old boyfriend, Nina, meaning little girl, and for a surname, Simone, in honor of the French actress Simone Signeray.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Simone turns up at the venue in a ball gown. It's her first time inside a bar like this. She orders a glass of milk, then gets to work, playing some classical scores, then a few spirituals and other improvised pieces.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  It's certainly not the usual fare around here. The crowd, at least those sober enough to actually listen, barely know what to make of it. When she finishes, the manager comes over, puffing on a fat cigar, and asks when she's going to start singing. After she explains that's not her thing, he looks her up and down, then gives her an ultimatum: play and sing, or he'll find someone else.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  She racks her brain for a few songs she knows well enough, and the crowd warms up.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  There is something about her voice. She is a contralto, the deepest of the female voice types, but alongside the rich, warm tone, there is an emotional rawness, too, almost a conversational intimacy. Combined with her extraordinary skill at the piano, it's a kind of alchemy. Tonight, Nina Simone is born.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  Over the coming months, her audience finds her, a mix of informed music lovers and hip college kids. The Midtown becomes the place to go. Simone is slated to play nine till four on her nights, with a 15-minute break each hour. Such a marathon should be grueling, but she fills the time easily, playfully improvising and exploring songs as she thinks about the music in entirely new ways.

• 13:24Speaker 03

  And that is where the foundation for who she becomes, what she sounds like, what kind of songs she selects, and who she is as a singer, all start to crystallize, sort of out of necessity.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Now firmly established on the Atlantic City scene, she lays down a few demo tracks that reach the ears of staff at Bethlehem Records, a minor New York label.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  In 1957, they invite her to come and record, and she gathers an album's worth of tracks. But with the label in financial disarray, these sessions go unreleased for now.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  Although she is playing increasingly prestigious venues in Atlantic City, she suffers from loneliness, and the sense she is drifting. That is, until one evening in 1958, when one of the regulars at the Midtown sweeps in, a white, self-styled beatnik by the name of Donald Ross.

• 14:27Speaker 02

  By day, he is a salesman, touting trinkets for the fun fair market, but by night, he presents as something rather cooler, the sort of figure you might find hanging out with Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg, or at least Nina thinks so. Others are less convinced, considering him a chancer and a no-hoper. Nonetheless, before the year is out, the pair marry at the county clerk's office. There are no guests.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  But as others before them who wed in haste, they soon start to repent at leisure and divorce after just a few months. For Simone, it's a chance to reset, and she moves to New York.

• 15:09Speaker 03

  The natural next move is to head to New York, into the thriving jazz community, all of the jazz clubs that are there, the jazz labels that are there, and try to take that step from being a nightclub entertainer into being a recording artist and somebody who plays at the more prestigious and more respected clubs, particularly around Greenwich Village at that time.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  That album that Bethlehem Records have been holding back, Little Girl Blue, is at last released. It doesn't worry the charts, but then something strange happens. In May 1959, Simone's rendition of "I Loves You Porgy," from George and Ira Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess," starts to get radio play. It is released as a single and becomes her first hit.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  But while word spreads of her virtuoso talent, so too do tales of her prickliness. She is notorious for turning up late to concerts and for taking her audience to task.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  This was not about just being difficult for difficult's sake or being a diva, but out of having this sense of herself again. She came from a classical background. To her, you go to see her symphony orchestra play, you're not talking, you're not ordering drinks, you're there to listen, and that was what she expected of her audience, regardless of the room or the context that it was in. Was that a fair thing to expect? We can argue that, but that is absolutely, for her, where that was coming from.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  On one occasion, she arrives at Harlem's famous Apollo Theater, but refuses to go on until she's paid. The manager tells her the money is in an envelope sitting on top of the piano. She goes onstage and proceeds to count the cash in front of them before playing a note.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  At the end of her performance, she takes a tumble over the piano stool and responds to a ripple of laughter in the stalls by giving her audience a stern talking to.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  But it's her talent that gets her the real attention. There are TV appearances on programs like The Ed Sullivan Show, which commands an audience of millions, as well as a slot at the legendary Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island.

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• 20:14Speaker 02

  With the live album of the Newport concert making the Billboard charts, by now Simone is a fixture in Manhattan's thriving cultural scene, and especially in Greenwich Village.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  This is a time where Miles Davis is playing, Thelma Monk is playing, John Coltrane is playing. We're now in the late 50s into the early 60s. There's this explosion of incredible music that's being made and of this generation of black intellectuals who are sort of bouncing between Harlem and the Village and pushing each other in a lot of ways. Writing poetry, Lorraine Hansberry becomes the first black woman to have a play on Broadway. All of the things that are happening, all of the experiments that are happening in music, but also bouncing off of music and into all these other creative figures. She finds herself in the middle of this hotbed of creativity and intellect and activism in New York City, is just drinking it all in, doing the readings, listening to the

• 21:11Speaker 03

  debates, having the debates, and trying to find the spot for her within all of the things that are going.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  New York is not subject to the same Jim Crow laws of the South, but the sense of dissatisfaction among the city's black population is more intensely expressed here than Simone has ever experienced before. Even if not enshrined in law, life is still intrinsically stacked against people of color. And it's within the city's extraordinary cultural environment that the growing frustration finds an outlet.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  It does not take long for her to be accepted into this new world. Alongside Hansberry, others in her circle include the pioneer of jazz poetry Langston Hughes and James Baldwin, the celebrated author, playwright, and essayist whose works explore themes of race, class, and sexuality. Simone also becomes close to Stokely Carmichael, a leading light of the Black Power movement that emerges from mainstream civil rights activism, opposing its nonviolent methods and calling for a more dynamic form of black self-determination.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  She may not be much of a campaigner herself yet, but the influence of those around her is starting to rub off on her.

• 22:30Speaker 03

  Because she is doing something that is so different and so uniquely her own, and the people who embrace that, particularly these figures, Lorraine Hansberry, the writer and playwright, becomes really a mentor for Nina and makes her start thinking more about social issues, about political issues, about the role of an artist within the society, within the culture.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  1961 proves a pivotal year for Simone, professionally and personally. In March, she is playing at a Midtown supper club when she meets Detective Andrew Stroud of the New York Police Department. There is instant chemistry, and within a few months, he proposes to her.

• 23:16Speaker 03

  In a complicated life, there are a lot of complicated pieces, and one of those is her second marriage to a man named Andrew Stroud, who was a cop, who was a detective in Manhattan, in the Harlem area, sort of a washbuckling sort of a figure, somebody who was known to jump in and bust heads when need be and flashy in his way, sort of a superstar neighborhood cop who also operated around the fringes of the entertainment industry, had relationships there, had a sense of himself as a part of that.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  Now married, she joins a trip to Nigeria, organized by the American Society of African Culture. Her first trip to the continent, it influences her enormously. The culture is later reflected in her fashion choices and hairstyles and the adoption of more African themes and rhythms in her music. Back in the US, she and Stroud find their dream home in the New York suburb of Mount Vernon, fast becoming a hub for upwardly mobile African Americans. In 1962, a daughter, Lisa, arrives. Now Simone has the career, the family, the home, and yet contentment continues to elude her, not least because her marriage is already losing its luster.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  With Stroud stepping away from his career in the police, he adopts the role of both husband and manager.

• 24:40Speaker 03

  It is easy to understand in some ways why she would want somebody representing her who could be an intimidating figure, right? Who could go in and be commanding, be demanding, and go get her good deals and go fight for her to get TV bookings and get listened to because he had that kind of voice, he had that kind of personality.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  As he pushes to develop her career, their relationship becomes increasingly fraught, hallmark by domestic abuse. Simone reports many instances of serious violence, some acknowledged by Stroud himself.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  There were doors that were opened because Andrew Stroud was working with her, there were doors that were closed because Andrew Stroud was working with her. And those things start to spill back into their relationship as well, that he wants things to go the way he wants them to go. She gets frustrated with him. These are explosive personalities. And certainly from her accounts, this becomes an abusive relationship. There are frightening stories that she tells of the physical abuse that he subjected her to.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  Nonetheless, on April 12, 1963, she ticks off another of her dreams, to play solo at Carnegie Hall, New York's legendary concert venue since the 1890s. Though she's appeared here before, supporting other artists, notably the South African superstar Myriam Mckayba, this time, it's all about her, an affirmation of both her brilliant talent and her explosion in popularity. Yet, there is a tinge of regret, too. In a letter to her parents, she writes, "I'm finally in Carnegie Hall, but I'm not playing Bach."

• 26:26Speaker 02

  It's just the first of what becomes a series of appearances here, spawning live albums that help secure her legend. However, events far beyond her control are about to set her on a new and extraordinary artistic path.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  1963 is the year the civil rights movement reaches a new intensity. A thousand miles away from Carnegie Hall, down in Birmingham, Alabama, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. is spearheading a series of nonviolent protests that lead to tense standoffs with the authorities.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  In the White House, John F. Kennedy addresses the nation in June to introduce new legislation designed to end segregation in public spaces and guaranteeing black voting rights. Just hours later, Medgar Evers, a leading figure in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is gunned down on his own driveway in Jackson, Mississippi.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  And there is more to come.

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  September 15, 1963, is a bright and clear Sunday morning in Birmingham, Alabama.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  12-year-old Sarah Collins is with two of her sisters, Addie May and Janie. They're taking their time, walking along the traffic-strewn roads, in no particular rush to get to Sunday School. They throw Janie's purse between themselves in a game of catch until their destination rears into view.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  The 16th Street Baptist Church is an impressive red brick edifice with domed towers and a cupola. The girls skip up the wide staircase that leads to the main entrance as worshippers spill into the main sanctuary area, abuzz with chatter.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a regular preacher here, although not today. It is just three weeks since he gave his "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington in front of a quarter of a million marchers, adding wind to the sails of the activists within the local community.

• 30:38Speaker 02

  When Janie goes off to her class, Sarah sticks with Addie, two years her senior. They don't much like their Sunday School teacher who has a habit of embarrassing them for their family's poverty.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  The pair sneak downstairs to the washrooms. Sarah turns on the taps of the sink while Addie sits on a couch underneath a window. It is just after 20 past 10.

• 31:03Speaker 02

  Soon, the door creaks open and three more girls join them, two 14-year-olds, Carol and Cynthia, and 11-year-old Denise. They are chatting happily, Denise helping Addie to retie the sash on her dress when suddenly, the room shudders, the windows implode.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  When Sarah opens her eyes, it is as if she's been transported to a war zone. A seven-foot hole has been blasted into the external wall.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  Bewildered and breathless with shock, the 12-year-old looks for the others. Somehow, she is still on her feet, but glass shards rain down on her, cutting her face and eyes. She hears a man outside shouting that the church has been bombed and then is vaguely aware of being lifted up and out into the fresh air. An ambulance arrives on the scene and rushes her to hospital, its sirens blaring.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  As she is about to be taken to theater for an operation on her eyes, she hears her sister, Janie, who tells her that Addie has injured her back but will come to visit just as soon as she can. Sarah wants to believe her, but there is no mistaking the choke of tears in her big sister's voice.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  When Sarah returns from surgery, efforts to save her right eye having failed, she learns the truth. She is the only one of the five girls to survive the blast. A bomb consisting of a box of perhaps nineteen sticks of dynamite had been set behind the wall of the washrooms. Just the latest in a series of bombings the city has suffered at the hands of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan. Along with the four dead girls, there are a further twenty casualties from among the congregation upstairs. In New York, Simone switches on the radio and hears the news. Furious, she initially wants revenge, but will later explain that her husband suggests a different approach to channeling her anger.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  Nina, Andrew says to her, "You can't kill anyone. You are a musician. Do what you do."

• 33:20Speaker 03

  Nina heard this story and says she sat down and she wrote the song "Mississippi Goddamn" in twenty minutes, having never written a song before. Obviously, she knew how songs worked. She had been singing them, lots of different ones, and was inside of them. But the spark that that tragedy provided, that she responded to instantly, first draft, sat down and wrote this song. That was a landmark protest song that just, that came up in her and she could not, could not resist, could not refuse.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Pulling no punches, the song rages about the agonizing sluggishness of change and includes lines such as "This whole country is full of lies." No longer simply a brilliant interpreter of the words and music of others, she is becoming a vital voice in her own right.

• 34:12Speaker 03

  "Mississippi Goddamn" is very different from the protest songs that Dylan was writing. And he was writing, you know, these sort of metaphorical, poetic kinds of songs, and they had the impact that they did. She wrote down and named names and places with a title and a chorus that, you know, nobody would play on the radio. Nobody was gonna, you know, circulate a song with "Goddamn" in the title. But she said, "I don't care about that. This is what I feel like and what I have to say. It's absolutely unfiltered. It's absolutely direct."

• 34:44Speaker 02

  The song is banned in several states, but to those who agree with her, that only adds to its appeal. From out of nowhere, she has produced what many regard as perhaps the first great civil rights anthem.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  After "Mississippi Goddamn," more extraordinary songs pour from her, like "Four Women," which uses archetypes of African-American womanhood to explore sex, race, class, and oppression. Her music becomes an unofficial soundtrack to the civil rights movement.

• 35:14Speaker 03

  Andrew Young is one of the central figures, went on to become the United States Ambassador to the United Nations. Later in his life, you know, important figure, he said, "We would go door to door, trying to find people to sign petitions, or come on marches, or donate money." And you heard Nina Simone records playing behind every one of the doors that we knocked on. She was always there. Her music was always there.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  She plays benefit concerts for organizations, including the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Then, on the evening of Wednesday, March 24, 1965, Simone is at the City of St. Jude Campus in Montgomery, Alabama.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  On a makeshift stage, constructed from empty coffin crates from a local funeral home, she performs a breathtaking rendition of "Mississippi Goddamn" as part of a concert marking the landmark civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  The following day, tens of thousands complete the march, a demonstration of nonviolent mass action.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  But it's only been a month since the assassination of prominent black nationalist and former Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X. And just like he was, Simone is skeptical about how far nonviolence will take the cause.

• 36:33Speaker 03

  As she tells the story, or as he tells the story, she meets Martin Luther King and says to him, "Dr. King, it's an honor to meet you, but I just want you to know, I am not nonviolent." She, from the beginning, presents herself with a sensibility that is different from the philosophy that Dr. King is advocating.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  Then, on the Fourth of April, 1968, the world learns that King has been assassinated as he stood on a hotel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  Three days later, at New York's Westbury Music Fair, she debuts a new song, "Why the King of Love is Dead." As well as a tribute to King, it serves as a characteristic challenge to consider what needs to be done next. I choose to reflect the times and the situations in which I find myself. That, to me, is my duty. And at this crucial time in our lives, when everything is so desperate, when every day is a matter of survival, I don't think you can help but be involved.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  The tragedy of King's death increases her sense that the forward march of the civil rights movement is dwindling. Others in her close New York circle are also gone. Lorraine Hansberry dead from cancer at just thirty-four, and Langston Hughes from medical complications while in surgery.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  Simone co-writes "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black" in tribute to Hansberry, the title referencing one of her old friend's own plays. It becomes another of the keynote songs for those immersed in the civil rights fight.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  Yet, for all her importance to America's black society, mainstream success is still elusive. Several of her songs are refused airplay, while TV bookers often run scared of this political figure with a reputation for being difficult to handle. There are stories, too, of her abuse of alcohol and narcotics, although where truth and exaggeration lie in this regard is often hard to reckon. More certain is that she is, often deliberately, an uncomfortable act for audiences and venue owners alike. Her shows gain a reputation for being sometimes unbearably raw and chaotic, notable for long improvisations and sporadic rants.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  The truth is, her mood changes from day to day and moment to moment, and no one ever knows quite what to expect from her. Her refusal to fit herself neatly into artistic pigeonholes can also work against her.

• 39:11Speaker 03

  What Nina Simone was doing really was unclassifiable. She was playing folk songs. She was playing children's songs. She was playing blues. She was playing, eventually, songs by pop writers. She was playing Leonard Cohen songs and Bob Dylan and Beatles songs. And then she would turn around and do Southern children's ring game song. And then she would do something from Broadway, a musical theater. And it was never clear what you would call the music that Nina Simone made. And that's a real challenge in the music industry.

• 39:47Speaker 02

  With her commercial success stagnating, strains in her marriage come to the fore. By the autumn of 1969, she is ready for a change of scene. She flies to Barbados, leaving her wedding ring on the kitchen table. And when she returns a few weeks later, she finds the home deserted. Stroud has left her and taken Lisa with him. Their marriage is over, and so too their professional relationship.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  The following year, she returns to Barbados, this time for a longer stint, embarking on a series of short-term romantic dalliances, including one with Errol Barrow, the country's married prime minister. But she cannot outrun her problems back home. For several years, she has withheld tax payments as a protest against continued American involvement in the Vietnam War, and now the IRS are after her. With her finances in disarray, she is forced to sell her home in Mount Vernon. Reunited with Lisa, she takes a rented apartment in Manhattan. But when a warrant is issued for her arrest, she flees once more to the Caribbean.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  Her friend, Miriam McCabe, helps her formulate a new plan. Effectively, a political exile from her native South Africa, McCabe has taken to spending prolonged spells in Liberia in West Africa. Now she persuades Nina to come and visit. It offers her the chance of a fresh start.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  When she arrives in the country, she quickly feels at home. Monrovia, the capital, is going through something of a golden age, and she hits its nightlife hard. She has only been in town a few days when she ends up in a small, private nightclub, Maze, on the city's main party drag.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  Around fifty members of Monrovia's elite are crammed inside, beautiful people sharply dressed, shimmering under the lights of a disco ball. It's around midnight when Nina makes her entrance, fizzing like the champagne she has been knocking back. The dance floor is alive with the sound of Motown and soul grooves. The music takes her over, and with her head thrown back, she undoes the buttons on her dress and proceeds to dance the night away, semi-naked. Whether it's a demonstration of the liberation she feels out here, or indicative of someone struggling to keep herself under control, is up for debate. When she wakes the following day, it is to the news that word of her antics has made it to the president himself.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  She is nervous of the repercussions, but she doesn't need to be. He turns up at the club himself the following night to join in the fun. And she will immortalize her dance at Maze in a song, "Librarian Calypso."

• 42:43Speaker 02

  For a while, she lives the dream, mixing with the social elite and living in a house on the beach, listening to the lapping of the sea and watching the sunsets. She has a cook, a driver, a gardener, and a place for Lisa in the local American school. It's enough to make her consider staying forever, finding that sense of belonging she has craved for so long.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  But as the months roll into years, old frustrations emerge.

• 43:13Speaker 03

  She goes to Africa and has this sort of epiphany of being in a country on a continent that is so visibly black and would theoretically allow her the freedom to do the things that she wants. And she's given this residency in a nightclub, a place to be able to perform. And, you know, it seems idyllic. It seems perfect for her. But of course, she sort of rapidly grows bored and frustrated in Africa as well. Because she's used to New York. She's surrounded by this vital community. She's surrounded by the political community, by the activist community. It's a difficult and a frustrating place, but she has a place. She feels so isolated when she is in Africa. She's still working. She still makes some records,

• 43:58Speaker 03

  but there's really not a lot of ways to promote those.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  Her relationship with her daughter reaches breaking point, too. Now a teenager, Lisa reports being the victim of physical abuse and emotional neglect at the hands of her mother, and eventually returns to the US to live with her father. For the next few years, she and Simone are effectively estranged. And by 1977, the musician is ready to leave Liberia, too.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  This time, it is Europe that calls. Simone lives variously in the UK, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and France. But it is a time of ongoing instability, of short-term relationships to match short-term record deals, and a creative output that is a mix of hit and miss more than ever before.

• 44:48Speaker 03

  She is restless. She is confused. She is disappointed by ultimately the hands that the world has dealt her. And things get very, very difficult and very dark. She was so driven by artistic purpose, creative purpose through the 60s and into the 70s that even if she couldn't be the classical artist that she had dreamed of, there was still a sense of mission and a sense of experimentation and exploration in her music.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Merely to keep herself on the rails, she is reliant on the kindness of a small circle of friends who endeavor to keep her housed, fed, working, and out of trouble as much as possible. She finds supportive audiences in a string of jazz clubs across the continent, perhaps most notably at London's Ronnie Scott's Club.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  Many of her shows are dynamic, but there are times when her performances falter and she is plagued by bouts of stage fright, interspersed with tense showdowns with those who have paid to watch her. Any given night might either be a delight or a letdown, such as her capriciousness. The days of taking Carnegie Hall by storm seem a long way off.

• 45:58Speaker 03

  By this time, her emotional state, her mental state, again, not diagnosed, but what we certainly in retrospect think of as her bipolar condition. It's a ticking time bomb. There were sort of limited treatments that people tried, such as the state of the psychological pharmaceutical research was at the time, but nowhere near where we are now in terms of understanding these things. And so sooner or later, something was going to go wrong. Something was going to go bad.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  In 1985, her increasingly erratic behavior reaches a crescendo when angered over unpaid royalties, she pursues a record label boss into a Swiss restaurant where she pulls out a gun and shoots at him. Though fortunately failing to hit him and thus managing to avoid any legal consequences, it seems to encapsulate her spiraling decline. Then, in 1987, she enjoys an unexpected renaissance, in Europe at least. Chanel launches a high-profile advertising campaign in the region with Simone's "My Baby Just Cares For Me" as its theme tune.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  Thirty years after she recorded it, the track reaches number five in the UK charts and is a top-10 hit across the continent. Though it brings limited financial reward as she signed away her rights to the recording decades ago, it introduces her to a new generation. The following year, she moves to the Netherlands, where she at last receives a formal diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  In 1992, she appears at Carnegie Hall for the first time since 1971. It's a triumph that rolls back the years and results in a major new record deal. An album, her last, follows in 1993, when she settles in France.

• 47:59Speaker 02

  Yet if life has taken an upturn as she hits her 60s, it is not without its moments of high drama still.

• 48:08Speaker 00

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• 49:06Speaker 02

  In July 1995, Nina Simone is sitting in the garden of her unkempt home in the town of Bouc-Bellair, the song of magpies and jackdaws in the air.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  Situated to the north of Marseille, it can feel remote out here. Not the sort of picture-postcard place people imagine when they think of the south of France. The electricity and water have both been cut off because Nina hasn't been paying the bills, and she regularly skips the medication meant to keep her mood stable. Today, she sits at a table outside, chatting away on the telephone.

• 49:44Speaker 02

  The teenage son of the family next door also happens to be out, along with a friend, noisy and high-spirited as they splash around in their family swimming pool.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  Nina talks animatedly on the phone, her characteristically deep tones carrying on the summer breeze.

• 50:03Speaker 02

  As she listens to the person on the other end of the line, she becomes increasingly aware of another voice in earshot, a baritone that sounds strained. She tenses. It is coming from over the fence, one of the boys mocking her own voice.

• 50:22Speaker 02

  She has not struggled to this stage of life to sit back and let a 15-year-old ridicule her. She lifts the receiver away from her ear and bellows towards the neighbor to cut it out. But her demand is met not with respectful silence, but a renewed round of mimicry.

• 50:42Speaker 02

  She gets up from her chair and goes in search of an air rifle she keeps on the property. Striding towards the fence, she raises the weapon in both hands and fires off a series of shots.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  The frivolous uproar from next door gives way to a moment of stunned silence. Nina just has time to be pleased they're no longer insulting her before both the boys begin hollering in pain.

• 51:15Speaker 02

  The youths both recover, but the incident sparks a crisis in her life. A month after the assault, she is brought before the courts, where she receives an eight-month suspended jail sentence and an order for psychiatric counselling. Only a couple of years later, in 1997, she receives a breast cancer diagnosis. But as old age looms, she seems to find a semblance of the peace that has so long eluded her. There is a degree of reconciliation with her daughter Lisa, and she is once again playing prestigious venues. In 2002, there is one last concert at Carnegie Hall, the venue that perhaps best maps the

• 51:55Speaker 02

  ups and downs of her extraordinary career, where she plays alongside Elton John to rapturous acclaim. The following year, now aged 70, she is awarded an honorary doctorate by the Curtis Institute, the Philadelphia establishment that rejected her all those years before. It feels as if a lingering injustice has at last been righted.

• 52:19Speaker 03

  So you can't really say that there's a happy ending, but I think that by the later years, there was a sense that she had certainly gotten out of the darkest places and the most desperate places of where her life had been during the years that preceded that.

• 52:40Speaker 02

  On April 21, 2003, Nina has some phone calls with old friends, then dies peacefully in her sleep at home in France. Over 70 years, she lived a life of extraordinary highs and lows, the epitome, perhaps, of the tortured genius who never followed the career path she dreamed of as a child, but who soundtrack a vital, vibrant, and troubled period of American history. She was an artist who never quite found her place in the world during her own lifetime, but whose importance has arguably become more apparent in death.

• 53:14Speaker 03

  The way that Nina was discovered, adopted, translated by more activist artists in the hip-hop world, the fact that she was the icon that Lauryn Hill would talk about, the fact that her music was featured so prominently in Kanye's work before the Kanye meltdown and everything else, when he was as important a figure in music as there was, and that she symbolized a merger of activism and music in this pure way, in this uncompromising way, in a genuinely artistic way. But she was such a paragon of that sense of independence, that sense of absolute commitment,

• 53:58Speaker 03

  that sense of not being limited by expectation, or by genre, or by race, or anything, that you know, an artist is there to create and to speak truth. And that means absolutely, that doesn't mean any other version of that. That closed a lot of doors, that capped a lot of ceilings, that ultimately led to an incredibly difficult life, but she's there as an example of what that commitment and that dedication mean.

• 54:23Speaker 02

  But it is surely right to leave the last word to the woman herself.

• 54:28Speaker 07

  My thing, what I hope to do all the time, is to be so completely myself, which that's what I hope I am, to be so much myself that my audiences and even people who meet me are confronted with what I am, inside and out, as honest as I can be. And this way, they have to see things about themselves.

• 54:49Speaker 02

  Next time on Short History of, we'll bring you a short history of 9/11.

• 55:06Speaker 06

  I don't think the United States has ever recovered from 9/11. I think it fundamentally rewrote the DNA of our country and our society. It turned the United States into a country that is much more fearful. You know, that innocence of 8:46 a.m. on Tuesday, September 11th, is, I think at this point, probably gone forever.

• 55:37Speaker 02

  That's next time. You can listen to the next two episodes of Short History of right now, without waiting and without adverts, by subscribing to Noiser Plus. Just hit the link in the episode description or head to www.noiser.com/subscriptions to unlock more episodes today.

• 55:55Speaker 00

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI: your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify. Everyone's got a hard question about AI: your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.