Nina Simone on Shock

The Interview Backstory

Lilian Terry had heard Nina didn’t enjoy speaking with white people. Thankfully Lilian had a confidant in Max Roach, the legendary jazz drummer, who introduced Lilian to Nina at the Newport Festival in 1968.

“Lilian Terry comes from Egypt, ” Roach said. That was true; Lilian was born in Cairo to a father from Malta  and a mother from Italy.

With that simple introduction, Nina waved Lilian over. Soon they were talking about Nefertiti and the pharaohs.

Nina even told Lilian she thought she’d been in Egypt in a previous life.

A few days later Lilian went to Nina’s house in Mt. Vernon, New York. They sat by the pool, the tape recorder was turned on, and the conversation continued.

Friends and Allies

Lorraine Hansberry

Playwright Lorraine Hansberry and Nina shared a close relationship and Hansberry’s political activism influenced Nina to become more outspoken with her own messages. Hansberry died of cancer at the age of 34 in 1965, and Nina later wrote the song “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black” for her friend.

Watch Nina perform the song and talk about Lorraine Hansberry at Morehouse College in 1969

Langston Hughes recognized Nina’s talent and potential in the early days of her career. Writing in 1962 after the release of her first album, Hughes said,

“She is a club member, a colored girl, an Afro-American, a homey from Down Home. She has hit the Big Town, the big towns, the LP discs and the TV shows–and she is still from down home. She did it mostly all by herself. Her name is Nina Simone.”

Hughes became a mentor-figure to Nina after she moved to NYC at the end of the 1950’s, where she became a central figure in a community of black intellectual and cultural leaders. Nina’s song “Backlash Blues” was written for her by Hughes.

Like Nina, James Baldwin served as a mentor to Nina and helped shape and influence her social and political awareness while championing her career.

Nina didn’t dream of becoming a popstar

Growing up in North Carolina, Simone wasn’t interested in pursuing a career in popular music – her ambition was to become a classical musician. Her technical gifts as a pianist were recognized early on and after high school she went to New York to study piano at Juilliard.

However, her dreams of becoming a concert pianist were dashed when she was rejected from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Throughout her life she expressed her regret that she hadn’t “made it” as a classical pianist, like in this French interview from 1991.

Nina becomes a civil rights force

“Nightclubs were dirty, making records was dirty, popular music was dirty and to mix all that with politics seemed senseless and demeaning. And until songs like ‘Mississippi Goddam’ just burst out of me, I had musical problems as well. How can you take the memory of a man like [Civil Rights activist] Medgar Evers and reduce all that he was to three and a half minutes and a simple tune? That was the musical side of it I shied away from; I didn’t like ‘protest music’ because a lot of it was so simple and unimaginative it stripped the dignity away from the people it was trying to celebrate. But the Alabama church bombing and the murder of Medgar Evers stopped that argument and with ‘Mississippi Goddam,’ I realized there was no turning back.” – from Simone’s autobiography, I Put a Spell On You

My Job

“My job is to make them [young black people] curious enough, to persuade them by hook or crook, to get more aware of themselves and where they came from and what is already there, and to bring it out. It’s what compels me to compel them. And I will do it by any means necessary.”

The 1970’s and 80’s: the lost years?

By 1970, Simone claimed to have become disillusioned by the civil rights movement and the music industry. Her performances, always volatile, became angrier and she stopped writing, largely turning to recording cover songs.

Her personal life was also troubled – her marriage to Andrew Stroud, who was also her manager, fell apart and the mental health problems that plagued her became more severe. In 1974, she left the United States for good, taking her daughter first to Liberia, then to Switzerland, and eventually settling in France.

When she did perform, her concerts often fell apart and she often became confrontational towards audience members. Her finances were in ruins – near the end of the 70’s she had to return to the United States to stand trial for tax evasion.

It was also during this time that Simone’s daughter Lisa says the singer started to physically abuse her. In the recent Netflix documentary of Simone, Lisa says that her mother – who had herself been abused by ex-husband Stroud – “went from being my comfort to the monster in my life. Now she was the person that was doing the beating, and she was beating me.”

Nina’s Renaissance

The 1990’s were kinder to Ms. Simone. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the late 80’s, and she returned to touring throughout the 90’s. The CD market revitalized interest in her work, and she sold over a million CDs in the last decade of her life. She died at her home in France in 2003.