The darker side of Nina Simone's music

Nina Simone may be a dinner party staple, but there is also a deep and darker side to the singer, says Ed Power

THERE are two Nina Simones. The easy-listening, dinner party staple crooning her way through ‘I Put A Spell On You’ and ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’. And the maverick outsider — the damaged woman who played a prominent part in the American civil rights movement and once told Martin Luther King she was not opposed to violence for political ends.

In her new portrait of the singer, What Happened, Miss Simone?, documentary maker Liz Garbus seeks to join the dots between these often contradictory ideas of Simone — the easy listening icon and the dangerous firebrand. The Simone that emerges is an engrossing contradiction: a shy woman who relished confrontation, an esoteric talent who bullied her family. The portrayal is some way short of flattering but is constantly fascinating.

“For a lot of white people, the dinner party Nina Simone is somebody we all recognise,” says Garbus. “But the African-American, or African, or Black European listener, will have known about her politics and her civil rights campaigning. The time had come to reclaim her, in all her dimensions.”

Damaged genius is a recurring theme for Garbus, whose previous documentaries have chronicled such inscrutable figures as Marilyn Monroe and eccentric chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer. Simone, however, was an especially personal subject.

“Listening to her music, you have to know that there is a darkness,” says Garbus, a life-long fan. “She was radical. Things you can do today — talk to an audience, demand love, respect and attention — nobody was doing that. Certainly not a woman. And it made people very uncomfortable. Along the way, it created a myth that paid short shrift to the extraordinary work she was producing.”

Simone, whose real name was Eunice Wayman, was born on the wrong side of the tracks in the wrong part of America. She grew up in Tyron, South Carolina, a backwater of 1,400 where one in five families today live below the poverty line. The sixth of eight children, her talent was obvious early on —– at age three she was playing piano, by five she was performing in church.

Even as a child, Simone was clearly a firebrand: in one of her early performances, her parents were required to sit at the back of the room in order to make space up the front for whites. She refused to sing until they were returned to the front row.

After high school, she applied to join the Curtis Institute, a renowned musical college in Philadelphia but was rejected — on the grounds of race, she believed. She instead enrolled at the even more prestigious Juilliard School in New York. To pay her way through college, she performed in clubs around Atlantic City and Greenwich Village. Worried that word might reach her god-fearing family that she was singing “the devil’s music” she took a stage name, and became “Nina Simone”.

In late ’50s America, being poor and black put her at an enormous disadvantage. However, her genius would not be denied. In 1958 she released her debut album, Little Girl Blue. It included her soon-to-be-definitive cover of ‘I Love You Porgy’, from George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’. A legend was born.

By 1960, she had taken up with her future husband Andy Stroud. A New York detective, he quit his job to manage Simone. Theirs was a contradictory relationship. He would beat Simone and bully her psychologically. Yet he had a flair for the machinations of the music business and was instrumental in her professional ascent.

“It is very complicated,” says Garbus of the challenge of unravelling Simone’s marriage. “She wrote in one of her diaries ‘I love physical violence’. It was certainly not a simple victim-abuser relationship.”

Garbus’s movie is no hagiography. Simone could be demanding, aloof and temperamental. She was also an extraordinarily progressive force in music, a natural born outsider who tore down boundaries — both artistic and racial — long before it was acceptable for artists to do so.

“For some people she was a feminist activist —– to others a civil rights figure. She created those smooth sounds that people put on at dinner parties. There is this idea she was crazy or difficult — that judgement is laden with a certain sexism. She spoke the truth in her performance.”

In particular, Garbus believes Simone’s role in the emancipation of African-Americans is overlooked. Simone put her career on the line for the cause of black equality, famously recording the protest song Mississippi Goddam in response to the 1963 bombing of a black church in Alabama in which four young girls died. She suffered a bruising backlash from the music industry, with radio stations across the south sending the recordings back to her label, broken in half. Simone also resisted the label of “jazz singer”, believing it was a catch-all imposed by white audiences on black artists.

“We are familiar with the tragic stories of those who gave their lives for civil rights,” says Garbus. “What about those who gave themselves to the civil rights movement and survived? That was Nina Simone. She didn’t pay with her life. She paid in lots of other ways. In her career for example.”

“As a fan I didn’t know about her classical music background,” she continues. “I didn’t know about the toll the civil rights struggle took on her family — and on her sanity. I understood she was a singer who was important and channelled her emotions in a way that was deep and moving. All of that other stuff — that was all a revelation to me.”

The documentary originated with Simone’s estate. They understood that for Garbus’s film to have any credibility it would have to explore the darker side of the singer — and, in particular, her difficult, often abusive relationship with her daughter Lisa (“My mother could be a monster,” Lisa said in 2014. “I was not a happy child when I was alone with her”).

“The family appreciated we could not do a sugar-coated version of her life. Nobody would believe it. Lisa was courageous in what she shared. She never said ‘can you not mention this?’ She was open and vulnerable, which is very brave.”

Are there parallels between Simone and Marilyn Monroe, whom Garbus profiled in 2012’s Love, Marilyn?

“Marilyn Monroe has similar issues — the way she spoke, the raw truth of what she did. And there are similarities with Bobby Fischer — through childhood he and Simone were treated as prodigies and put in a “glass box”. You have this strange, rarefied existence in which you become “otherworldly” almost. That can be difficult — especially as you factor in the pressures and expectations of celebrity.”

What Happened, Miss Simone? is available on Netflix.