Simone

Nina Simone, High Priestess of Soul and Civil Rights Fighter, Dies Aged 70

Nina Simone, one of the most original and influential African-American singers of the past 50 years, has died at her home in the south of France. She was 70.

The general audience knows her best for her version of a Broadway pop tune, My Baby Just Cares for Me, which became a worldwide hit in 1987 after it was used in a television advertisement for Chanel No 5 perfume.

She took little pleasure from the immediate cause of her new-found celebrity with a younger audience. Thirty years earlier she had signed away the rights to that recording, and others, for $3,000 (£1,900). The memory of that piece of Tin Pan Alley exploitation fuelled her resentment against the music business for the rest of her life.

She was a favourite of the British beat groups of the early 1960s, including the Animals, who borrowed her arrangement of Don’t Let Me be Misunderstood for one of their early hits. But her true significance lay in her influence on subsequent generations of women singers. Erykah Badu, Cassandra Wilson and Alicia Keys are among the many who benefited from the example of Simone’s pioneering fusion of blues, soul, jazz, folk and pop, and from her uncompromising stance against racism, sexism and other discrimination.

Her involvement with the civil rights movement provided the material for such songs as Mississippi Goddam, Backlash Blues, Four Women, and To be Young, Gifted and Black, which became an anthem of the movement. Her friends included the Black Muslim leader, Louis Farrakhan, the singer, Miriam Makeba, the Black Panther activist, Stokely Carmichael, and the writer, James Baldwin.

Born Eunice Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, in 1933, one of eight children, she sang in church from infancy and began playing the piano at the age of two. “Everything that happened to me as a child involved music,” she wrote in her autobiography. Studies at the Juilliard Conservatory in New York were intended to preface a career as a concert pianist, but the need to earn a living diverted her into work as a night-club accompanist. Before long, she was an attraction in her own right. A concert at New York’s town hall in 1959 turned her into a star.

Listening to her was never easy. Club and concert audiences were often exposed to the sharp edge of her tongue. At her best, however, she was a peerlessly commanding performer. Her show-stoppers ranged from I Loves You, Porgy (her first million-seller), through I Put a Spell on You, Black is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair, Here Comes the Sun and Baltimore. As her friend, Duke Ellington, would have said, she was “beyond category”.

Tags: Aged, Civil, Dies, Fighter, High, Nina, Priestess, Rights, Simone, Soul

Thursday, July 1st, 2010 Grants No Comments

Nina Simone, High Priestess of Soul and Civil Rights Fighter, Dies Aged 70

Nina Simone, one of the most original and influential African-American singers of the past 50 years, has died at her home in the south of France. She was 70.

Tags: Aged, Civil, Dies, Fighter, High, Nina, Priestess, Rights, Simone, Soul