Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone

Sam Falk/The New York Times - Little Girl Blue: Nina Simone at the Village Gate in 1965.


In 1960, one year after Nina Simone’s first album, “Little Girl Blue,” was released, the poet Langston Hughes struggled to put the appeal of Simone’s music and presence — that dusky voice, that unblinking gaze — into words. “She is strange,” Hughes wrote in The Chicago Daily Defender. “So are the plays of Brendan Behan, Jean Genet and Bertolt Brecht. She is far out, and at the same time common. So are raw eggs in Worcestershire.”

Hughes was just getting warmed up. “She is different. So was Billie Holiday, St. Francis and John Donne. So is Mort Sahl, so is Ernie Banks.” He continued: “You either like her or you don’t. If you don’t, you won’t. If you do — wheee-ouuueu! You do!”

Simone soon befriended Hughes, and through him she dove into the beating heart of that era’s young black intelligentsia, becoming close to both James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, who would become godmother to Simone’s daughter. That Simone was absurdly talented was already clear. But her new friends helped crystallize her inchoate political thinking.

One result was a stunning song, “Mississippi Goddam,” written by Simone in the wake of the 1963 Birmingham church bombings and the killing of the civil rights advocate Medgar Evers. In many respects it represented the pinnacle of what would become a long and tangled career. “Alabama’s got me so upset,” Simone sang. “Tennessee made me lose my rest./But everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam.”

It was a song that inserted her into the forefront, at least musically, of the civil rights movement. Its recording is a moment that Nadine Cohodas’s fascinating if turgid new biography of Simone, “Princess Noire,” builds toward and then falls away from. In the case of her career, that falling away was a long, slow and painful one into mental illness, megalomania and increasingly strange behavior.

From the start audiences and critics had trouble pinning Simone down. She was a classically trained pianist, but her work also drew upon jazz, gospel, the blues, folk and European art songs. When the jazz writer Ralph J. Gleason described her as “some exotic queen of some secret ritual,” he was commenting on her comportment as much as her sound.

Simon was a remote and formidable presence onstage, not afraid to stop a song midchord in order to chew out a talky audience member. While playing at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1961, she snapped, “For the very first time in your lives, act like ladies and gentlemen at the Apollo.”

Her anger spilled over offstage too. After the Animals had a hit in 1965 with “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” a song that was written for Simone, she confronted the band’s lead singer, Eric Burdon. “So you’re the honky,” she said, “who stole my song and got a hit out of it?”

Simone wrote an autobiography, “I Put a Spell on You,” that was published in 1991, but Ms. Cohodas is convincing on the subject of that book’s factual deficiencies. Ms. Cohodas has clearly done her research, but “Princess Noire” remains a strangely distanced and brittle biography.

Hardball

Looking for Chris Mathews's book, Hardball, I came across a film by the same title. The book I read in a few days, and found interesting. Matthews is fascinating, even if his penchant for interrupting guests in his teevee show, Hardball with Chris Matthews, is maddening. The film was okay.







Keanu Reeves plays a compulsive gambler who smokes (didn't inhale once during the film, though he did hold the smoke in his mouth) and drinks to excess. His life is a mess, a series of spasms aimed at making money, but which invariably put him on the edge of having lost too much. A major problem is that he owes money to people who take great exception to his owing them large sums, and who will go to any length to collect. Bad people. People who use bats and fists to enforce their rules.

Conor O'Neill owes $12,000 and sees no recourse – except to go to his yuppie friend, Jimmy Fleming, and ask for a loan. In short, Jimmy gives him a job coaching a bunch of housing-project smart-ass black kids, at $500 a week. The movie drags in spots, but there is continuity to the story. The pretty woman teacher is introduced, played by Diane Lane; the character is pointless and two-dimensional, and Lane delivers her usual performance: wooden, uninspired, relying on being female and a smile to pass the time.

In the end the story is fun, even inspiring, yet predictable. It does work; being predictable does not have to hamper a story. But what is wrong with the film is its reliance on stereotypes: the white guy figures out a way to make the dreams and hopes of the black kids work, he gets the girl, and everyone is grateful.

Unafraid of the dark

McNatt, Rosemary Bray.
Title	Unafraid of the dark : a memoir / Rosemary Bray.
Publication Info.	New York : Random House, 1998.

Amid the current heated debate on welfare reform, Bray offers a compassionate and, more important, informed and knowledgeable voice. As a child growing up in Chicago, Bray's family received welfare to supplement the father's erratic income, a situation that embittered an already troubled man and worsened a volatile marriage. She laments the culture of the welfare program, the misguided policies that have marginalized the role of fathers in too many low-income families, particularly black families. She speaks out in the face of welfare reform tinged by mean-spiritedness, aimed at punishing adults who make ill-advised decisions even if it means harming children as well. Bray's memoir is also a coming-of-age story of a black woman growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. She recalls stifling poverty that had her envying rich classmates enough to steal from them to replicate the easy leisure of buying snack food and cosmetics, even as the costlier luxuries of well-appointed homes remained beyond her reach. Bray's self-discovery continues through her college years: falling in love, questioning career goals, struggling for a political place in a turbulent period of growing race and feminist consciousness. Some years after college, a lucky break lands her at Essence magazine, where she finds the nurturing support needed even by a Yale-educated black woman. A voracious reader, Bray eventually lands the ultimate book-lover's job: an editor for the New York Times Book Review. Bray's is an eloquent voice, advocating on behalf of all the children and families that continue to need help to make the transition out of poverty. ((Reviewed January 1 & 15, 1998)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews